What do civil servants actually do? — Part One: nuts and bolts of policy advice
The civil service is one of the largest employers in the UK, with something like 500,000 civil servants at the moment (472,000 FTE as of September 2021) and not a single person lives their life without multiple daily interactions with the areas of life the civil service is responsible for in some way. Whether it is earning wages (HMRC), driving on roads (DfT) or going to school or college (DfE), the civil servants make a tangible difference in all of our lives.
That is why I wanted to be one when I was younger, from being a teenager. I wanted to be close to Government, close to the making of decisions, without ever having the chutzpah to be a politician. I remember my first day — 8 January 2003 — because I was terrified I was going to be out of my depth, that I was about to start working with the cream of society, the intelligentsia, the real elite of budding Sir Humphries, and that as the son of a family of upwardly-mobile working class cleaners, I was not going to fit in at all.
As it happens, I did. It took me a bit of time to get used to the culture, but that is normal for joining any established organisation. The civil service has its own ways of working, its own language. I remember finding invaluable help from Martin Stanley’s excellent work in this space (especially the deciphering of emails).
As a recent leaver after 19 years as a civil servant, I have been lucky enough to work on any number of policies, starting in higher education, moving around different aspects of schools policy, working in early years, and spending time at the then Department for International Development (DfID).
What has surprised me throughout that time is how little understanding there often is in wider society of what civil servants do. This feels particularly important at the moment as civil servants are often vilified when things go wrong, attacked in the press for failing to respond to Ministerial demands, and yet they by tradition they have no right of reply. As I write this, Downing Street is still dealing with the ‘Partygate’ row and the role of civil servants in potentially organising and taking part in parties, the link to politicians, and the role of Sue Gray in investigating the parties all places the civil service firmly in the spotlight. There are various attempts to work out how to improve the civil service (including this thought provoking work by ex-Permanent Secretary of the DfE, Jonathan Slater).
So, I thought it might be helpful to clarify just what it is civil servants do and to reflect on some of the conventions that govern how civil servants and Ministers behave and interact. After all, it is widely (and not necessarily inaccurately) represented in popular culture, most notably in Yes, Minister and more recently (and more profanely) in The Thick of It. Like a lot of excellent comedy, these programmes are rooted in the truth. But they are not the whole truth.
There is a lot to get into here, so I am going to break things up a bit over a few blogs, starting with some basics around how policy decisions are made. To be clear, this is a reflection of my time as somebody involved mainly in the development and delivery of policy. It won’t apply to civil servants who work in more direct, public facing roles (e.g. Border Force officials or those working in Job Centres) in the same way.
The nuts and bolts
It starts with an official with a job to do. Or more specifically, with an area of responsibility, a topic about which they must be expert, albeit a temporary one. It is more common for a civil servant to talk about the area they are responsible for than a specific outcome (so, for example, ‘teacher pay’ rather than ‘raising teacher starting salaries to £30k’) because the specific outcome may well change over time, even completely reverse if there is a change of Government. Yet the official often remains the same. I know of officials who have been responsible for the same policy area for years, serving different Ministers and different Governments. At times that will mean officials delivering completely contrary policies depending on who is in power.
So, the official is responsible for something and reaches a point where a Ministerial decision is required to take things forward. This point, which is not always straightforward to determine, will likely be the result of months of work. Officials will want to gather views from experts as well as those likely to be affected by any decision, will look at the evidence and engage analysts to help gather and interpret data, and will speak to other colleagues with experience that can help. No matter how thorough a process is undertaken, it is rarely the case that a simple and clear answer emerges from this work and almost invariably an official has to exercise her or his judgement in deciding what advice to offer to Ministers.
In most cases advice is given in the form of a written submission. This is simply a paper that sets out the issue being addressed, the options available, the decision recommended, and the timing. It will, if needed, consider legal, commercial, communications, delivery, and financial impacts of any policy decision. The skill of ‘drafting’ is therefore highly prized within the civil service. Officials are valued who can take complex ideas and set them out clearly and succinctly to help Ministers understand issues and reach decisions.
Before advice even gets to Ministers there will be a process of clearing amongst officials — making sure officials in other policy areas and other Government Departments (often referred to as OGDs) are sighted and can contribute if needed, keeping more senior officials engaged and taking their steers, and of course getting any input from Special Advisers (more on SpAds in a later blog). Generally speaking, the more complex an issue (complexity defined by issues such as the cost, implementation, number of people impacted, consequences for other policies, and political pressures), the more engagement is required. This process can take an age and may involve multiple meetings, drafts, and negotiations, often through formal boards.
There is a risk that advice then becomes convoluted and hard to follow (common traps are that advice becomes a narrative (“At first we were going to recommend x but after consulting decided to move to y.”) or just includes lots of information that doesn’t actual help Ministers reach a view but is included as a form of ‘arse covering’ for the official in case something goes awry (“You will want to be aware of an issue happening elsewhere in Government…”). Again, the official who can navigate this process, taking competing views on board, get to an agreed position, and set the key points out clearly and succinctly is prized indeed!
When ready, all written advice will always be sent to the Secretary of State (the political head of the Department) and the Permanent Secretary (the administrative head of the Department), but the decisions are often taken by junior Ministers, who have specific remits delegated to them by the Secretary of State. Or so the theory goes. In practice, other Ministers and the Secretary of State may have views that need to be considered so final decisions are often an amalgam of subtly different views. If there is an outright disagreement between Ministers, the Secretary of State has the final decision. It is worth just pausing to consider, therefore, the amount of information that is sent to Secretaries of State and Permanent Secretaries on a daily basis — literally dozens and dozens of briefings.
Much (maybe most) advice to Ministers is on topics about which they may have no strong views. Ministers are responsible for a wide area of policy, often without any previous knowledge of the detail, and know they have a limited time to make a positive difference. In my experience, most Ministers will try to focus on a few key areas that matter most to them, but that does not mean they can ignore other things within their remit.
Once advice is submitted, it goes into the Minister’s ‘Box’. This is red briefcase of overlarge dimensions into which all reading for Ministers is placed. Ministers generally take a Box home each evening and over the weekend to get through the volume of reading they have (actually it is often multiple boxes). The Box is put together by the Minister’s Private Office — a group of officials whose job is to support Ministers directly — and most times a Private Secretary (one of those officials) will place a short summary note on top of each piece of advice with key information. This might be a short summary of the advice, it might be a note to draw a link with another issue (for example, if there are multiple pieces of advice with financial implications so Ministers can consider in the round), or it could be a comment on relative priority or the views of other Ministers.
At times, the Minister may only read this summary note (which for the official who has spent months and months negotiating complex issues across Government and balanced carefully nuanced issues can be a bit *challenging* to accept). It is also generally the case that the private secretary writing the note will be relatively inexperienced — typically the role is graded at HEO-G7 and the long and unsociable hours tend to make the roles less attractive to people with, say, family committments. The relationship between a Minister and her or his Private Office evolves over time and a good Private Secretary will be adept at recognising what their Minister will be most interested in, to help prioritise. Equally, the official who wants to make sure the Minister gets the advice as they want it would be well advised to build a positive relationship with the private office.
As they open each Box, a Minister is confronted with advice to read, each piece of which will fall into one or more of the following categories:
a) a topic about which the Minister cares a great deal. Typically, this will be advice commissioned by the Minister directly;
b) a topic that the Minister is responsible for, but they do not have a strong view on personally; or
c) information about another Government decision that may impact on their policy area (for example, a proposed change in employment law that may affect workers in their policy remit). Ministers will often need to decide if they want to try to influence the decision.
Sometimes the advice will be asking for a specific policy decision (e.g. do you want to spend £x to achieve so-and-so?), sometimes asking about an event (e.g. do you want to speak at such-and-such a conference?), and sometimes it will just be sharing information (e.g. please note the following information about a report that has been published by X thinktank).
Typically Ministers will scribble comments on the side of the advice — maybe even just a tick if they agree with it, sometimes asking for more information or demanding a different approach. These Ministerial decisions are then relayed by the Private Office to the official who submitted the advice, although not always without editing (Private Secretaries tend to filter out swearing or offensive personal comments (“Is this official an idiot?”) and reframe (“The Minister was unconvinced by this point”)). This official readout of a Ministerial view or decision then gets taken forward by the official responsible. A great deal therefore hinges on the feedback from Private Office, and whether it is clear enough for action to be taken.
Particularly important decisions will invariably involve meetings as well as written submissions, which themselves will often require additional briefing, often in the form of a slides. Such a meeting may take place before a formal decision is sought (to test the Minister’s thinking before asking them to opine) or as a clarification meeting (if Ministers want more information or if officials need to be certain of a Ministerial decision). And of course these meetings, to help reach decisions, often include outside advice from key people and organisations with expertise or an interest in the outcome.
At the risk of sounding ridiculous, this is still a somewhat simplified process, which doesn’t take account of the personalities of the people involved, the history behind some decisions, or the ability of people to engage with complicated information against the backdrop of often confusing political events. The most important decisions are often the result of months of engagement and myriad smaller decisions taken earlier in the process that help to narrow down options further down the line. For example, a decision on overall spending across a Department will be made up of dozens or even hundreds of decisions about individual spending programmes, compromises between Ministers on priorities, and negotiations with the Treasury, №10, and OGDs.
In the next blog, I will consider the political impartiality of the civil service and how it impacts on the framing of advice.
