You might be forgiven for thinking that all civil servants are the same – bland pencil-pushers who can be recognised in fiction of any time period. There is a consistency to the stories we tell about bureaucrats, from Dickens’s Circumlocution Office to Yes, Minister’s Department of Administrative Affairs to Futurama’s Central Bureaucracy. We are the Vogons from Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, writing terrible poetry and insisting that Earth had a reasonable consultation period in which to object to its destruction to make way for a hyperspace bypass.
So I was surprised by what I found when I spent a year studying for an Executive Masters in Public Administration alongside public servants from around the world. Comparing notes with others working in local, national and international government gave me a better sense of how the UK civil service’s experience compares – where we are the same, and where we are distinct.
First surprise: Civil service reforms in the UK look a lot like reforms everywhere else
The 19th century saw the birth of the first truly professional public administrations, and ever since then we have been reforming and modernising. We normally look at reforms through the lens of domestic politics, but viewed internationally, they look more like a series of trends.
Starting from the 1980s, many countries implemented reforms collectively known as New Public Management or NPM (those who study public administrations are as fond of acronyms as those who work in them). NPM can broadly be described as making the business of government more businesslike. KPIs and performance-management measures were introduced and large ministries were broken up into more specialised agencies.
However, this increasing specialisation led to people working in silos, and so the next wave of reforms – from the 2000s – focused on joined-up government. Mobility between departments was encouraged, with the merging of senior grades to form a single, government-wide executive cadre, and competency-based recruitment practices were introduced.
That focus on consistency has given way in the last decade to a focus on change and innovation, with reforms aiming to create digital government and adopt approaches such as agile from tech startups just as NPM adopted practices from corporations.
Second surprise: The UK is an innovator among public administrations
The UK tends to be among the earliest and most comprehensive adopters of each wave of reforms. I found that my classmates and often my professors saw the UK as a frontrunner in many areas, and it saddened me that this positive reputation is so little known here.
One really simple example is that today’s UK government department is a paperless office, and it has been for the decade I’ve worked here. You might consider that a small win, but I encountered people working in other highly developed countries (including G7 and EU members) where paper still moves physically from office to office, and is amended by a literal red ink pen rather than edited in a shared document. Japan last year announced that its government had successfully phased out the floppy disc. Germany still use fax machines.
Third surprise: The UK civil service is among the most neutral in the world
I was already aware that the UK is associated with a highly mobile, “generalist” model compared to more “specialist” models in other countries. I was, however, surprised to learn that the UK civil service is considered among – if not the – most neutral in the democratic world.
In many countries, civil servants are able or even encouraged to join a political party, be politically active, run for and hold political office, and then return to the civil service. In places where ministers have a say in senior promotions, an ambitious civil servant must seek political patronage to progress, and junior politicians see the civil service as a route to power.
In one country, I was told, opposition-affiliated civil servants in a department meet and discuss opposition policies and politics openly and regularly. This was a blasphemous concept to me as a UK civil servant. But my classmates were astonished at the idea that I had implemented policies regardless of my personal views, and took pride in successful implementation whether or not I agreed with the decision.
While we should always work at becoming ever more professional and more modern, there is rather a lot of baby in this bathwater. We should make sure we reflect on what we want to keep and celebrate, as well as what we want to change. It may admittedly still be Vogon poetry, but here in the UK, we apparently do it rather well.
Nicola Colson currently works for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, where she leads the department’s Expert Exchange Programme. She joined the civil service in 2015