As a humanities graduate with an interest in politics, the ‘generalist’ page on the Civil Service Fast Stream website featured heavily in my rotation of browser windows during the final year of my undergraduate degree (alongside YouTube, and the page showing the opening times for an ice cream parlour called Jack’s Gelato).
The route appealed to me mainly because of its apparent openness. On the precipice of entering the world of work, I was quickly realising that my degree had not equipped me with a particularly practical skillset. I could write a bit. I could pull together an essay about how the bubonic plague had changed government in early modern Italy. But, unlike my friends studying mathematics or natural sciences, I didn’t have the luxury of studying a ‘hard’ subject, acquiring a set of skills which pertained to a specific job. The ‘generalist’ role was, therefore, the obvious choice.
Fast forward to last year, and much of my free time seemed to be spent either in select committee hearings, or events held at the Institute for Government, though not as a generalist within the Civil Service. I spent hours in the company of permanent secretaries, senior civil servants and officials in charge of quangos. The thing that struck me, leaving a meeting room in Portcullis House behind Chris Wormald, the then Permanent Secretary at the Department of Health, is that all the civil servants I had heard speaking over the last few months were shockingly similar to one another. There was a uniformity to their sentences, to the way they answered and thought about questions. The titles were different, but even between the various departments, it occurred to me that the professional demeanour of pretty much everyone I had encountered was homogenous.
Borrowing an academic term from studies of organisational behaviour, the Civil Service is a ‘strong culture’. This was attested by the Fulton Committee as far back as 1968, and then re-attested in 2023 by The Rt Hon Lord Maude of Horsham in his Independent Review of Governance and Accountability in the Civil Service.
This means, in practice, that the organisation has a clearly defined, widely shared, and deeply embedded set of values, beliefs, and norms that strongly influence how employees behave and make decisions. One obvious example of this to the outside ear is the ubiquitous ‘Civil Service speak’, to which anyone who has even the briefest of touches with Whitehall can attest. This sort of culture has benefits. For one thing, it makes internal movement easy; cross the road from the MoD to the Foreign or Cabinet offices, and very similar terms, ideas and ‘systems’ will be mentioned. However, this sort of culture can only work when it continually improves and changes. Once it gets stuck, this strength becomes a weakness.
It’s one many civil servants are, themselves, aware of within the Civil Service’s culture. A Civil Service World survey recently indicated that 71% of civil servants perceived internal culture as a major barrier to adopting new, efficiency-making technologies. This resistance was attributed to a preference for established processes over results, leading to an embedding of inefficiencies and a hindering of modernisation efforts.
The Civil Service knows, then, that bad habits too-often become embedded.
In combatting this, an outside prospective is required, but it has to be an informed one. Reflecting on my time as an undergraduate and prospective fast-streamer, I wonder now if the generalists could go some way to helping?
Last year, the generalist programme of the Civil Service fast stream as it once was, was split in two to better align with the existing structure of the Civil Service. The generalists are now either deployed in “Government policy” or “Operational delivery”, which together received over 28,000 applications in 2024. 357 recommendations were made for appointment, reflecting the competitiveness of the fast stream more generally. These junior civil servants will circulate as before, and should have the opportunity to make a valuable contribution to the wider organisational culture of the Civil Service.
Generalists quickly develop the knowledge, networks and expertise by their time across different departments which leaves them well-placed to see and suggest change. They should be engines driving forward innovation and reform, particularly at the lower level. However, the prevailing culture and structures of the Civil Service too often prevent this.
Tamara Finkelstein, Permanent Secretary at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and Head of the UK Civil Service Policy Profession has advanced the view that generalists have become ‘disembedded’ from the structures of their departments. In practical terms, this means that generalists learn on the job, and too-quickly become the subjects of more senior civil servants who are, themselves, evangelists of all that is good and bad in the existing culture of a department. The opportunity for generalists to contribute their observations and ideas to their colleagues (much less their superiors) is highly limited. Internal departmental cultures stagnate.
When we disembed or prevent generalists from meaningfully challenging their departments in this way, we do three things. The first is that we prevent them from gaining the real independent systems knowledge they need to allow them to challenge prevailing cultures which are no longer fit for purpose. Second, we limit the quality of the relationship which senior civil servants and their more junior generalist colleagues can broker with one another. And third, we prevent generalists from gaining enough objective insight into new departments to allow them to make the case for broader cultural change across the Civil Service.
Instead of becoming agents for change, then, generalists as they rise through the Civil Service are trained to become officers who enforce prevailing norms across departments and uphold the Civil Service’s strong culture. Rather than acting to challenge inefficiencies and suggest improvements, they are fostered too-briefly and distantly to become subject experts within a department and instead can only learn to repeat the dictums of more senior (usually generalist) colleagues. The problem repeats and reinforces itself.
This comes to manifest in different ways. On procurement, a core function of several government departments, John Kingman, a former Second Permanent Secretary at HM Treasury, has lamented that “[Departments were] staffed (we thought) with, to put it bluntly, too many of the wrong people: too many junior process administrators, usually with generalist civil service backgrounds; too few serious, experienced commercial people”.
The current education of the generalist is a contributing factor in sustaining a strong civil service culture. Too-often it prevents the flow of new ideas, empowers those who are least likely to welcome and embrace the change that is needed, and does not provide adequate agency to staff who are some of the best-placed in the organisation to identify problems and propose solutions.
A new approach to generalists (or Government policy and Operational delivery(ists) as they now are) which encourages a greater depth of domain knowledge, the capacity to challenge existing cultures and the space to develop the relationships needed to make meaningful change are much needed. We must set would-be generalists up with the tools and the agency they needed to make their ideas land. Without this, we risk continuing a system where generalists become strong culture evangelists who endanger the progress, efficiency, and purposefulness of our civil service.
Oliver Bramley.
Oliver Bramley graduated from Cambridge in 2023, and now works in the House of Lords. He formerly worked as a Senior Communications Adviser in the House of Commons. He has been published in several academic journals on elements of modern history and macroeconomics.
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