Civil servants in the Home Office, HM Treasury and Department for Culture, Media and Sport “really want to be there”, while those in the housing and business departments are “less passionate”, Sir Sajid Javid has claimed.
Javid was the senior minister in six departments from 2014 to 2020 – first as culture secretary, then as business secretary, followed by housing secretary, home secretary, health secretary and chancellor.
In a newly-published interview with the Institute for Government for its Ministers Reflects series, Javid was asked to compare the six government departments he led.
Javid said DCMS “turned out to be a great department to begin a cabinet career” because it was “a nice balance between being a quite small, therefore relatively more manageable department, but having some impact as well” and because “most of the people in that department wanted to be there”.
“They want to work on sport, they want to work on culture, they want to work with theatre or whatever it is,” he said.
“Why do I say that?” he added. “It's because in some other departments that I ran, take BIS [the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills] for example, or even DCLG [the Department for Communities and Local Government] after that, I felt that certainly in those two departments there was quite a lot of civil servants that were generalists.
“Those felt to me like two departments that you can just put people in because they're in the civil service. I felt there was probably a disproportionate number of people in those departments that weren't very passionate about it, and, like anything, I think that reflects in the quality of work. Generally speaking, I think there’s a rule that the more passionate you are about it, the more you want to be doing the job and probably the better you are at it.”
On the contrary, Javid said the Home Office and the Treasury were two departments where “in general, most of the people really wanted to be there”.
“There's a big part of the Home Office, especially in security and intelligence, where people are very passionate about their job,” he said. “That's the only job they really want to be doing. They'd be loathe to be moved out of it or be asked to move.
"Similar with the Treasury. The Treasury in terms of the number of civil servants is one of the smaller departments but has a disproportionate amount of influence. It's the only department that raises money. Everyone else spends it. You can't do much without the money and everyone in the Treasury knows that. I felt that in the Treasury, you had a lot of civil servants that really wanted to be there. As a result, they're just more likely to be really, really good and passionate about their job.”
System rarely allows you to take ‘sensible risks’
Before becoming a politician, Javid had a career in banking. Speaking on the difference between the two worlds, Javid said: "Westminster is very risk averse.”
“Now obviously all businesses take risk,” he said. “You could go that way, you could go this way, you could borrow more or not – you make a decision. It's a calculated risk and that's how you should take risk decisions. But the whole Westminster system is structured in a way – not deliberately but this just happens to be the structure – that is very risk averse and therefore at every level, the pressure is on not to take any risk.”
Javid said the result of this is that “when it comes to policy making and delivery, the system won’t allow you quite often – although there will be exceptions – just to take a calculated sensible risk”.
“Everyone will just be thinking ‘What if it doesn't work out?’, I saw that every single time at every single job,” Javid said. “Whether it's pressure from other ministers, pressure from the prime minister or pressure from civil servants. No one wants to take a risk.”
Javid said he believes one reason for this is that “if you get something right and it really works out, you're never going to get any credit for it”. On the other hand, “if you get it wrong, you will absolutely never hear the end of it”.
“So it's always risk asymmetric,” he said. “In Westminster, people always perceive there's a huge downside to everything and very limited upside.”
Relatedly, Javid says that ministers “often think it’s better not to make a decision…but the problem with that – which I thought is obvious, but I don't think everyone agreed with me – is that not making a decision is a decision”.
Having a good diary secretary ‘makes a huge difference’
Javid also spoke about the value of the diary secretary role.
“I cannot overstate the importance of a good diary secretary,” he said. “I had really good diary secretaries. I had crap diary secretaries. It makes a huge difference in performance on the basis that everything requires time.
“Whether you're reading something, having a meeting, even thinking time, even going to the toilet, or having lunch – it all requires time. It's one thing that you can't create more of and it's limited every day. I'm stating obvious stuff, but it wasn't very obvious to a lot of civil servant diary secretaries in private office.”
Javid said he had to make it very clear to civil servants when he joined a new department that he had several jobs as “most civil servants didn't really understand” that a minister also has parliamentary and constituency responsibilities as well as a personal life.
He said civil servants think “you are a machine… they don't understand that you need to eat, and that you need to go the toilet, and that you might need to have 10 minutes with your wife or your daughter on the phone”.
Javid said he would finish a meeting in a department at 11am and then have another meeting starting at the same time over in parliament. “They haven't worked out that you actually need to move physically,” he said. “It used to happen so often until you point it out.”
The other one issue he found was being able to have lunch. “When I say lunch, I’m talking about 15 minutes – that’s fine,” he said. “Even half an hour just to have a bit of thinking time where you have a sandwich with a spad at your desk. But there wasn’t that.
“You would have a whole trip visiting hospitals or visiting police stations but there would be no provision at all. I don't even mind if they got me a sandwich from a shop and gave it to me in the car when I'm driving to a meeting. But the point was, no one had thought about that. Then suddenly I would say ‘Can I get something to eat?’ and they would say ‘Oh, we haven’t got that on schedule’. These were really practical things which they didn’t understand. A well-nourished minister is probably a better performing minister. These are small things in a way, but they actually have a huge difference on performance.”
Javid said he learned a few methods to win time, including putting in place a rule that no meeting could be longer than half an hour without his authorisation, doing meetings standing up as “you can do in ten minutes standing up what will have taken you an hour sitting down”, and asking for half an hour to be blocked out for thinking time.
“I was really a stickler for time because I could only fit so many meetings in my diary,” he added. “Even then and despite all of that, my whole day, from eight in the morning to seven or eight at night if we were voting late, would just be meeting after meeting after meeting.”