Set departmental targets to reduce UK civil service staff turnover, says thinktank
“Ministers have inherited a civil service in urgent need of reform,” says the Institute for Government (IfG) – and last week the thinktank set out ‘20 ways to improve the civil service’ without needing to change legislation or structures.
The IfG’s new report focuses on workforce management, arguing that “long-standing problems have been allowed to impede the civil service’s day-to-day effectiveness”.
Government, the report says, must “manage its workforce more effectively, including by tackling damaging levels of staff turnover. It must face up to the intensifying competition for high performers it faces from other sectors, for which reform to pay structures and recruitment processes will be needed. And it needs to better access and use expertise outside of government.”
Here we pick out seven of these 20 recommendations, covering the report’s four topic areas – staff management; skills and expertise; performance management; and linkages outside government – and focusing on the most interesting, the most promising, and the most likely to fall on fertile ground.
Set departmental staff turnover targets and hold permanent secretaries to account for meeting them
High levels of churn in civil service jobs have been a major headache for years: leaders have long acknowledged, for example, that rapid turnover among project managers undermines delivery, and that underperforming staff are often shunted into new positions rather than managed out of the civil service. In a system where the best route to the top involves a tour of roles, topics and departments, there are powerful incentives for the most talented individuals to flit between jobs every couple of years.
“The head of the civil service should set individual permanent secretaries clear, public targets for reducing the levels of turnover in their departments,” says the report.
Such an approach has in the past proved highly effective on diversity issues. Under former cabinet secretary Lord Gus O’Donnell, the 2008 Civil Service Diversity Strategy required departments to publish data on the representation of women, ethnic minorities and other underrepresented groups in their workforce. “That transparency meant that people asked the questions: ‘Why is department A so far behind department B?’,” O’Donnell told GGF in 2016. “If you treasure it, measure it!”
A similar approach could prove effective in reducing staff turnover. The challenge would lie in doing so without hampering the career development of talented people.
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Introduce an expert pay review body for civil servants below the Senior Civil Service
As the IfG points out, senior civil servants have a pay review body providing “expert input into appropriate pay deals. Others (the vast majority) do not.” These bodies typically provide guidance on the rates of remuneration necessary to recruit, retain and motivate staff with the capabilities required to realise public sector goals.
Though their advice is often tempered by a duty to stay within departmental spending envelopes, a pay review body could prove helpful in making clear the levels of investment required to attract skilled staff – particularly in fields where the civil service must compete with private businesses.
Allow civil servants to choose remuneration packages with different balances between pay and pensions
Allowing departments “greater scope to design their own remuneration packages to suit their circumstances and the sectors with which they compete for candidates” would, the IfG believes, help them “to tackle the challenge of falling real-terms pay”.
In practice, this would mean the civil service could offer higher pay in return for less generous employer pension contributions.
This reform would address a complaint often voiced by Lord O’Donnell, who tweeted in April that “I will continue to argue that we desperately need a switch towards more pay less pension in the public sector. You can’t get a mortgage based on your future pension.”
In O’Donnell’s view, an old-fashioned civil service offer based on the job-for-life model has lost salience in an era when people expect to change employers and even careers several times during their lives, and when the desire to get on the housing ladder is a stronger motivating factor than the pursuit of a comfortable retirement.
Give hiring managers access to the previous performance appraisals of internal candidates
Tell a private sector manager that their civil service counterparts can’t access the previous performance appraisals of serving civil servants who’ve applied for a job, and they’ll stare in bemusement: why would an organisation deny itself this crucial information when making appointments? The answers lie in the separate legal status of civil service bodies and concerns around privacy, but the report makes the case for providing recruiters with as much relevant data as possible before they make decisions.
As the IfG points out, the civil service is currently developing a platform to hold data on the skills and experience of all its staff. The report says this should offer hiring managers access to applicants’ appraisals, alongside information on how long they’ve spent in previous roles.
Read more: UK to launch cross-government platform for civil service training and workforce planning
Establish a physical campus for the Government Skills and Curriculum Unit to strengthen the civil service’s commitment to staff training and development
In the pre-austerity era, the civil service owned a dedicated campus to provide training to senior officials: the Civil Service College – later the National School of Government – operated at Sunningdale Park in Berkshire from 1970 until 2012, when it was axed under Coalition government cuts. Its replacement, the online platform Civil Service Learning, never quite filled the gap – with the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Select Committee calling in 2019 for the establishment of a new permanent physical civil service training academy.
Nowadays, the Government Skills and Curriculum Unit (GSCU) aims to provide “a ‘one-stop shop’ for all civil service learning and training”, says the IfG – but it has “not yet become fully embedded” and lacks capabilities in key fields such as digital, data and AI.
“Signalling the importance placed on officials gaining new skills and training throughout their career, a physical campus for the GSCU should be established,” the thinktank says. Even the most digital of skills, it believes, are best developed with an element of analogue, face-to-face learning, provided within a centre of expertise and tuition.
Create more senior specialist roles in every department, which do not entail significant management responsibilities
It is an error common across the public and private sectors for managers to assume that if someone is highly effective at working within a specialist team, they will also be good at leading that team or taking on wider management responsibilities. The civil service compounds this error by providing few routes for specialists to gain greater remuneration, recognition or seniority outside the path into management.
“This can be a strong disincentive for specialists interested in joining the civil service from other fields,” notes the IfG. It also both costs specialist teams a lot of expertise and experience, and produces many ineffective or unsuitable managers.
Neither error is unavoidable: Singapore’s GovTech agency appoints ‘Smart Nation fellows’ to bring digital expertise into influential roles, its then chief executive Kok Ping Soon told GGF last year. Senior technologists are paired with experienced officials who can help address “the irritants of working in a bureaucracy”.
The UK has taken tentative steps in a similar direction, with the last government’s short-lived Minister for the Cabinet Office John Glen announcing the creation of senior specialist roles. The new administration should push forward here, says the IfG.
Read more: Smart fellows: Kok Ping Soon on leading Singapore’s digital government army
Set stringent standards for departments to follow on the timely publication of internal evidence, analysis and policy advice
Policy advice to ministers is largely exempt from publication under the UK’s Freedom of Information rules – and over recent years, that protection has been fiercely protected by ministers including Michael Gove and Jack Straw.
The IfG argues that publishing the evidence and analysis underpinning policy advice would permit a wider debate on the issues, while making clear when ministers are disregarding evidence in their decision-making – factors that may explain ministers’ opposition to reform.
Some countries do publish much more of this information. New Zealand, for example, makes public both civil servants’ advice to ministers and the minutes from Cabinet meetings – and UK experts have advocated similar changes in the UK. Former education department permanent secretary Jonathan Slater, for example, previously told GGF that publishing policy advice would strengthen civil servants’ accountability. While working in local government he saw “the benefits of a system in which advice is given more transparently: it improves the accountability of the person giving it,” he said.
For more information and to read the IfG’s 13 other recommendations, see the report ‘20 ways to improve the civil service’, available via the thinktank’s website.
About Matt Ross
Matt is Global Government Forum's Contributing Editor, providing direction and support on topics, products and audience interests across GGF’s editorial, events and research operations. He has been a journalist and editor since 1995, beginning in motoring and travel journalism – and combining the two in a 30-month, 30-country 4x4 expedition funded by magazine photo-journalism. Between 2002 and 2008 he was Features Editor of Haymarket news magazine Regeneration & Renewal, covering urban regeneration, economic growth and community development; and from 2008 to 2014 he was the Editor of UK magazine and website Civil Service World, then Editorial Director for Public Sector – both at political publishing house Dods. He has also worked as Director of Communications at think tank the Institute for Government.
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