The National Archives are today releasing official records dating back 30 years. Winnie Agbonlahor looks at how civil service reform has evolved over the years - and finds much that is familiar
An urgent need for civil service reform; a drive to concentrate more power in the centre; efficiency savings; reduction in civil service staff numbers; and an appeal to ‘put things right in the civil service’ once and for all. These are all examples of the current government’s aims and aspirations. They were also, however, the objectives of Margaret Thatcher's government some 30 years ago.
Francis Maude, Cabinet Office minister (pictured above left), said in a speech earlier this year that he was “struck by déjà vu” when reading about Tony Blair’s intentions for the civil service, set out in 2004. His sensation may be heightened if he reads the relevant letters, minutes and notes from 1983. And from today he will be able to do exactly this, as the National Archives are releasing official records going back three decades.
In a letter to Thatcher in November 1982, Baroness Young, the then-Privy Seal (pictured above right in 1981), put forward some proposals to improve civil service efficiency. These included scrutiny of departments' efficiency in areas such as policymaking and decision-making processes; multi-departmental reviews of areas such as procurement and administration, and further effectiveness reviews of specific functions such as stocktaking. She wrote that the efficiency programme, scheduled for the following year, would demonstrate how serious the government was about “action to put things right in the civil service”.
The reviews and scrutinies would be overseen by Marks and Spencer’s managing director, Derek Rayner, who was brought in within days of the May 1979 general election to spearhead the administration’s drive against waste and inefficiency.
Today’s civil service reform champion, Maude, calls for the institution to be “smaller, flatter, leaner and more efficient”; and to build support for his approach, he brought in another retail baron - Top Shop's Sir Philip Green - to conduct his own efficiency review. Since then the reduction in staff numbers has saved some £2.2bns, but further headcount cuts lie ahead.
Equally, in May 1983, chancellor Geoffrey Howe wrote in a letter to Thatcher that the government had reduced the number of civil servants by 83,600 (or 11.4%) since it came to office. He described the workforce as “the smallest civil service for 20 years”, and added that the party was “on course” for achieving its target of cutting numbers by a further 18,700.
The financial management initiative, which formed part of the 1983 efficiency programme - chief secretary to the Treasury Leon Brittan wrote in May 1983 - was a “major part of the government’s policy for good management throughout the civil service”. Brittan wrote to the prime minister to update her on proposals put forward by 32 departments for financial management reform. His verdict: “So far, so good” - but, he added: “We are still only at the beginning of a long haul. It will be crucial to maintain the momentum.”
Brittan was right: it has indeed been a long haul. Today's Finance Transformation Programme, designed to improve all departments’ financial management and ensure that they can make informed spending decisions, continues to improve the civil service's accounting skills, processes and data - but nobody would argue that the journey is nearly at an end.
Staff cuts have, today as well as 30 years ago, sparked fierce opposition from trade unions. Having staged several strikes in protest against manpower cuts, today’s unions will recognise some of the points made in a letter, dated May 1983, written by the Council of Civil Service Unions in response to the government’s efficiency programme. The letter states: “The present drive for ‘efficiency’ within government operations, motivated largely by government objectives of reducing public spending, will be allowed to proceed with no real attempt to measure the results of spending and manpower cuts in terms of quality and equity of service.”
It further says that the “arbitrary cuts in public expenditure, and in civil service manpower”, coupled with an increasing drive towards privatisation and the “public abuse of the service”, meant that it had become “increasingly difficult for civil servants to have pride in their profession”. This, the letter continues, was the result of “persistent, unfair denigration over a number of years, which seems to question the social value of what civil servants do”.
Public attacks on the civil service do not, unfortunately, seem to be a thing of the past. The troubled relationship between officials and ministers has recently made for many a news headline, with Maude repeatedly expressing his frustration with the workforce’s “bias to inertia, against innovation” - an institutional resistance to change that he presents as a core reason for reform.
Equally, Kate Jenkins, a member of Thatcher’s Efficiency Unit and later its chief of staff, wrote in her book ‘Politicians and Public Services’, published in 2008, that the efficiency programme of the 1980s had been “designed to deal with institutional inertia”.
As the PM wrote in a note circulated to all secretaries of state back in 1983, ministers would have to ensure that “the impetus is kept up” on civil service reform. Perhaps, though, that impetus did ultimately fade away, because the challenges facing today's Tory-led government after more than three years in office closely mirror those of its predecessor 30 years ago.
Civil service reformers shouldn't be too disheartened by this - today's civil service is certainly much more skilled and efficient than it was in 1983 - but let's not pretend that the current efficiency programme was born in 2010. The government may be making progress on its reform agenda, but it would be a brave commentator who predicts that these issues will be consigned to history when the journalists of 2043 dig through a new batch of freshly-released National Archives files.