We need to be frank about the breakdown of trust between ministers and civil servants
4 min read
I have spent a year trying to find out why political trust in Whitehall has deteriorated. The problems can be fixed – but first we need to be honest about them.
“I am concerned at what I see as a slow deterioration over time in the trust between ministers and civil servants”. So wrote David Normington, previously the top civil servant at the Home Office and, at the time, the first civil service commissioner.
That was almost a decade ago.
And yet we are still grappling – or rather failing to grapple – with the question of political trust in the civil service. Soon after Normington wrote the above in 2017, we saw a sharp deterioration in relations: see for reference anything from the antagonistic approach of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Dominic Cummings to Liz Truss’s attacks on the "Treasury orthodoxy".
Recent attempts to improve the relationship have at best managed to stabilise it.
Rishi Sunak refused to condone his colleagues’ characterisation of Whitehall as "the blob", and Keir Starmer began his premiership with a private note to civil servants assuring them, “you have my confidence, my support, and my respect." Both are welcome. But five months later, Starmer was so frustrated with that same civil service that he accused too many of them of being “too comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”. It’s a phrase that has stuck around. I am sure that is in part because it is too clunky to ignore. But also in part because it was Starmer – the civil servant’s prime minister, as a former civil servant himself – who felt compelled to make the accusation. The much-hyped Labour reset of relations with the civil service had failed.
I have spent the past year trying to find out what is going wrong – why have the resets failed, and why do ministers not trust the civil service? To understand this, we’ve spoken to ministers, civil servants and special advisers to help us build a picture of how trust in the civil service is lost.
The vague, hand-wavey language we use around this relationship has to end
It is not the prettiest of pictures.
There are problems with underlying capability – both in policy advice and delivery.
But far more salient to politicians is how that capability is applied. We heard about a culture of overwhelming inertia and status quo bias where it feels impossible to get things done. We were told about a sense that the civil service lacks the professional curiosity it needs to address first-order questions and escape the trap of formulaic answers, compounded by the stifling of junior civil servants by their seniors. We heard about conflict aversion practiced to the extent that trade-offs don’t get surfaced at all, and about a civil service that leans back rather than leaning in to working alongside politicians. And we heard about a civil service that draws the line around what is ‘political’ so widely that it lacks the political judgement and understanding to properly advise ministers.
If all of that sounds very one-sided, it is. Trust is a two-way street. But in our system of elected politicians and a permanent civil service, it is the civil service that must earn the trust of the ministers they serve – or at least show themselves to be trustworthy.
It also sounds very negative. That is – again – intentional.
The vague, hand-wavey language we use around this relationship has to end. We all (ministers, officials, and anyone who has ever used the term "the blob") need a proper way to describe what is going wrong. Otherwise we end up with either jibes about an amorphous mess of unelected bureaucrats, or meaningless platitudes about the need for ‘respect’. As we have seen, neither approach works. This mushy language means we are not pinpointing the real problems in the relationship, and so can’t do anything about them.
If you disagree with the above – great. Let me know, and let’s build a better picture together.
Hannah Keenan is an associate director at the Institute for Government
