Louise Casey has warned of a culture of "intransigence" and “learned helplessness” within the civil service and called for a “legion of people" to become "grippers and fixers".
Speaking at the Institute for Government’s annual conference yesterday, Baroness Casey said “the sense that you can’t get anything done seems to be the pervading culture and attitude right across the system”.
Casey, a former civil servant who is currently the government’s lead-non executive director, said the belief that change cannot happen is “absolutely not true” and “something we have to stop”.
“It is possible to get change, and the way you do it is that you grip something and you fix, and there’s a strategy,” she said.
Casey said the civil service “broadly isn’t great at change because part of its job is to stabilise things, but if you stabilise things to the point you are intransigent to change, you are in a difficult place”.
“And I think we are now at possibly intransigent to change in some quarters,” she said. “I think that’s a very difficult place to be. And I say that with kindness, respect and some humility...I think I would be a terrible permanent secretary. There’s a reason I manage small teams that go and do specific things.”
Casey characterised the “intransigence” she has observed as “the lack of fixing, the lack of gripping, the lack of doing”.
"We need a legion of people who grip and fix, grip and fix," she said. "Everybody needs to be a grip it and fix it person at the same time as they do strategy long term."
Casey's remarks followed a speech from health secretary Wes Streeting, who warned against blaming the civil service for the government's struggles to deliver.
"There's no point complaining about the wonky wheel if you’re letting the trolley have a mind of its own, instead of steering it towards the destination you’re after," Streeting said.
Noting his comments, Casey agreed that clear ministerial direction and strong political leadership is important but added that she worries that “we have a sort of learnt sense of hopelessness and helplessness in far too many corners".
Casey gave two examples of how change can get delivered in government – and what makes it stick –from her experiences of tackling rough sleeping in the late 1990s and early 2000s as head of Tony Blair's Rough Sleepers Unit and during the Covid-19 pandemic as chair of Boris Johnson's Rough Sleeping Taskforce.
"The rough sleepers initiative the first time round was a strategy," she said. "It essentially reduced rough sleeping and ended the culture of rough sleeping. I left and it stayed that way for almost a decade. So that wasn't about me, wasn't just about the civil service mixed team that I led, it was about the strategy working.
"Fast forward to Covid...we again collectively in an emergency...the civil service is very good in an emergency...got everybody off the streets because hotels were empty...but there was no strategy before, during or after to keep them off the street."
Coming back to Streeting's shopping trolley analogy, she added: "I'm phenomenally grateful to the civil servants that led that work and executed that work. But whoever was pushing the shopping trolley had decided that they weren't going to push that shopping trolley any further."
'Everybody tells me about grade drift – well fix it, grip it'
Casey said one example of the civil service failing to grip and fix an issue is the grade inflation which has resulted from civil servants needing to move up a grade to get an increase in their salary.
"Whatever point we decided the only way you could £500 more was by [moving] a grade upwards, somehow whoever thought that was a sensible idea was just wrong," she said. "Everybody tells me about grade drift…well fix it, grip it."
Casey said this grade drift has resulted in an "enormous reduction in power" over the decades. She said civil servants at grade 5 in the SCS – now known as deputy director – “used to be a really big deal" and "moving from grade 7 to grade 6 to grade 5 was a really big deal”. Now, she suggested people at grade 5 or deputy director "on a good day might be making a decision that an HEO [used to make]".