Now that the Government’s “war on Whitehall” seems to be over , a thread on this curious episode.

TL;DR Absolutely nothing has changed in the civil service, apart from the identities of a few very senior office holders (1/20) https://twitter.com/alexgathomas/status/1346944894921793537

Firstly, the ‘war’ does genuinely seem to be over. Congrats to Tom Scholar on his reappointment, kudos to the PM & Chancellor for a wise decision, and to Simon Case for whatever he’s done to bring these pointless hostilities to an end at such an important time (2/20)

But it’s worth asking: what has this latest attempt, accompanied as it has been by ferocious (if mostly anonymously briefed) rhetoric, actually involved?

The answer is, by historical standards, virtually nothing at all. There have been two discernible strands of activity (3/20)

First, there’s been the defenestration of about half a dozen very senior officials, including, most unusually, the cabinet secretary.

But the replacements have been career insiders, cut from the same cloth. Sometimes they’ve been a good bit younger, but not always. (4/20)

The second strand of activity has quite literally amounted to rearranging some of the furniture in the Cabinet Office (5/20) https://www.civilserviceworld.com/news/article/cummings-and-no10-policy-unit-to-move-to-cabinet-office

And that’s about it.

Contrast that with some of the previous overhauls of the civil service in the 40 years between the start of the Thatcher and Johnson premierships.

The early Thatcher years saw the Rayner efficiency reforms and compulsory competitive tendering (6/20)

The late Thatcher and then the Major years saw wholesale reorganisation of the civil service into executive agencies with customer service targets. These were often mocked (“cones hotline”). But they were substantive reforms & changed the shape of the administrative state (7/20)

The Blair/Brown years saw the 1999 Modernising Government White Paper, the introduction of outcome based targets, the Barber delivery unit, multi-year budgeting and much else. (8/20)

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1999/mar/30/modernising-government

Then came Francis Maude and the Coalition. Narrower in some ways than the reforms of preceding Governments, they were however surgical in two areas.

One was relentless professionalisation and commercialisation. (9/20)

The other was a series of dull but important moves on things like fixed terms for permanent secretaries and a greater role for Ministers in the internal governance of departments, intentionally shifting the balance between Ministers and officials in favour of the former (10/20)

Maude, like his predecessors, probably didn’t get as far as he’d have liked. But the changes he brought about, like those of his predecessors in the Thatcher/Major and Blair/Brown years, were way more consequential than anything that happened in 2020 (11/20)

Why? For a start, Maude, and the other reformers, had a clear, published narrative and strategy. You could support or resist it but you knew what it was. There was a set of deliverables, and a team to implement them. He had a 31 page plan and loads of sub-plans (12/20)

By contrast, the only attempt I’m aware of to put the current Government’s thinking on the civil service into a coherent basis for action is one speech by Michael Gove last summer at Ditchley (13/20) https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/the-privilege-of-public-service-given-as-the-ditchley-annual-lecture

Strip away some interesting historical references, mostly to FDR, and there is nothing new in this speech. The stuff on publishing data is all from Maude. The stuff on the role of the NAO and the PAC in fostering a culture of risk aversion dates from the early Blair years (14/20)

Moreover, there is no evidence of a programme of work to implement even these stale ideas, or of a team working on them. This is in marked contrast to the very systematic implementation of previous reforms, notably Maude’s (15/20)

So it comes down to this. In marked contrast to the previous 40 years of reforms of the civil service, this administration’s “war on Whitehall” has been entirely devoid of substance.

What has actually taken place is nothing more than turbocharged courtier politics (16/20)

The Government has been entirely within its rights to do what it’s done. It’s just that what it’s done shouldn’t be mistaken for a programme of civil service reform. Parliament and the public are entitled to ask what the point of it all was amidst the challenges of 2020 (17/20)

So, despite the ferocity of the rhetoric (“hard rain” etc) , nothing was done in 2020 that changed the way the civil service actually works, in marked contrast to the previous reforms over the decades which achieved a lot more with a lot less noise (18/20)

Of course, this could change. The Government still has four years to run. And there are good reasons, post-Covid, to have a hard look at reshaping the state.

But this needs a serious programme of work and sustained political and official effort over time (19/20)

The lesson of 2020 is that noisily forcing out a small number of permanent secretaries pour encourager les autres, some hi-tech gimmicks, and one speech with no follow up, does not constitute a serious programme of civil service reform (20/20)