In June 2016, on the day after the UK voted to leave the European Union, prominent Brexiteer and veteran select committee chair Sir Bernard Jenkin met the then-cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood. “I teased him as he bounced in with a big smile, as he always did,” Jenkin recalled several years later. “I said: ‘I expected to find you miserable and beleaguered, because we’re leaving the EU and that’s not what you wanted.’ And he chirped: ‘Well, we’ve got a new policy and we’re going to have a new prime minister. We’ve got to turn the whole thing on a sixpence – but that’s what we do.’”
In the years that followed, the civil service did indeed turn on a sixpence, despite the fact that there was, for some time, no clear political direction about how far to turn and what to do once they’d stopped spinning. A decade later, what lasting marks has Brexit – and its political fallout – left on the institution that delivered it?
Size of government
Perhaps the most obvious impact of EU exit has been the growth of the civil service, as it prepared not only to leave the trading bloc but to operate in a new geopolitical and legal framework, bringing back capabilities and recreating systems that had previously been part of the EU. Former Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs permanent secretary Dame Clare Moriarty, reflecting in 2021 for the Brexit Witness Archive project (organised by the think tank UK in a Changing Europe, or UKICE), captured the scale of the challenge, saying: “We kept thinking we’d got there and then we realised that Brexit was a size bigger than we had previously imagined.”
When Moriarty joined Defra in 2015, it was making plans to reduce headcount by 20% over the next few years. Instead, she said, “for at least two years, we were recruiting at 1,300 a year, to a department that was only 2,000 or so”. Finding people to join Defra was not hard. It had, in Moriarty’s words, “become a sexy, exciting Brexit place to be”, drawing recruits from the private and voluntary sectors and academia, alongside a cross-government effort to loan staff. The Treasury was also more willing than in recent years to provide money.
This story was reflected across government. In 2016, the civil service had been shrinking for several years under coalition-and-Cameron-era austerity plans. In every year since then, however, it has grown. Now, with some 520,000 people, it is more than a third bigger than it was just before the EU referendum. This growth was not uniform. It was concentrated in departments such as the Home Office and Defra, which were heavily affected by EU exit. Nor was all of it driven by Brexit; the biggest spike came during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the Ministry of Justice saw the largest absolute increase as it recruited prison and probation staff after 2022.
During the Brexit years, the challenge was not attracting applicants but getting them in fast enough, hence the heavy use of interdepartmental loans. In the Home Office, recruitment processes were revamped to accelerate the hiring of operational staff (see box below), and the Civil Service Commission created a specific recruitment exemption for EU exit work. Some of the growth reflected the need for new capabilities, such as trade negotiating, or to staff up new, more complex operations at the border. Other professions grew too – most notably the policy profession, which more than doubled from 17,000 at the end of 2016 to 36,000 at the end of 2025. This makes it the second fastest growing civil service profession over the last decade, after digital and data.
‘Never waste a good crisis’: Home Office border preparations
When Paul Lincoln took charge of the UK Border Force in 2017, it was an organisation facing an unprecedented transformation in the context of deep political uncertainty. But it didn’t feel like a crisis, he tells CSW. He saw instead an opportunity to transform operations at the border.
His first move was to build a deep understanding of what the existing system was and how it connected with others across government, and then to cut through the political uncertainty with careful scenario planning. Whatever Brexit looked like, certain things would always be needed. “When you do the analysis, at its simplest, it’s pretty clear you need more people, you’re going to have to do more customs work, and you have to do a whole load more communications – both internally within government as well as with the huge range of external stakeholders and customers that Border Force has.”
From this, he and his team built a deal-agnostic core plan that could proceed regardless of the political outcomes, with different branches that could be activated as the final deal became clear. This gave his team a clear sense of direction despite the political change.
Border Force needed thousands more officers and the existing hiring process was too slow. By running some processes concurrently, which would previously have been run sequentially, Lincoln’s team was able to roughly halve the time taken to recruit, while maintaining full security clearance for every new joiner. And, to ease future staffing challenges, all new recruits were dual-skilled in both immigration and customs from the outset, giving Border Force greater flexibility to redeploy people as demands shifted.
To support this, every induction course and training programme was redesigned, with technology at its heart. For example, the organisation introduced Ocelot, a digital decision-support tool, borrowed from HMRC. This distils hundreds of pages of statutory guidance into simple, mobile-accessible decision trees. A Border Force officer encountering a complex case could work through the key questions on their phone in seconds, without needing to locate and interpret the underlying legislation. When guidance changed, the system could be updated quickly, reaching every officer in the country. “Officers loved it,” Lincoln recalls.
Technology also transformed passenger flow with a major expansion of e-gate eligibility, extending access to travellers from the United States and several other countries. This both relieved pressure on staffing and sent a deliberate signal that Britain remained open for business. And despite the focus on people and recruitment for Brexit, Lincoln is clear that Border Force could not simply recruit its way to a new solution for passenger processing. “It was physically impossible to make that amount of change by just recruiting people to process passengers at the same rate. Even if you could recruit and staff all the immigration desks, airports and ports do not have the capacity – the actual physical space required – to have enough desks in immigration halls.”
The word that comes to Lincoln’s mind when he thinks of the Brexit years is “purpose”. The strong sense of opportunity and positive change was evidently shared by many in Border Force. During that period, engagement scores rose by 14-15%, Lincoln says. “I’m super proud of what the organisation delivered. It was an incredibly big programme – one of the largest Brexit programmes in government. People absolutely stepped up and delivered brilliantly.”
Stephen Webb, a former senior civil servant who worked most recently in the Home Office and Cabinet Office and is now programme director at the think tank Fix Britain, is strongly critical of the policy profession’s growth in general, saying: “You do need yeast to make bread, but doubling the amount of yeast doesn’t make your bread taste any nicer.” He is particularly sceptical about the fact that EU exit was used as a justification for some of the growth, since the UK would now need to work up policy in areas that were previously under the EU’s competency, when in practice this produced little in the way of wide-scale policy divergence from the EU. Jill Rutter, a senior fellow at the Institute for Government and fellow of UKICE, notes however that the lack of policy divergence often reflects political choices.
Philip Rycroft, perm sec at the Department for Exiting the European Union from 2017 to 2019, tells CSW that all of this reflects a fundamental misconception about what Brexit might mean. Rather than a reduction in bureaucracy and regulation, he says, it resulted in a “re-importing” of that bureaucracy and “revealed that the British regulator can go toe-to-toe with the European regulator” in terms of quantum and impact of regulation. He recalls pre-Brexit concerns that the UK was “gold-plating” EU regulations, adding that the reason why the UK has not been “more successful” after leaving the EU is that “the problem wasn’t the EU, the problem was a non-reformed British state”.
Consequences of growth
One consequence of creating so many new roles was to exacerbate an existing challenge in the civil service: high levels of churn, caused in part by a system that incentivises people to move roles often to improve their pay. These challenges predated the referendum but a 2023 report by former civil servant Amy Gandon found that some officials felt Brexit and the pandemic had made things worse. Interviewees described recruitment protocols being relaxed, with negative effects such as inexperienced staff being promoted or critical posts being filled through contacts rather than merit.
“You’d have ministers allowing their departments to grow, to deal with the consequences of the policy they supported, and then attacking the civil service for growing” Dave Penman, FDA
The IfG has also argued that the last decade has seen strong grade inflation, with consequences for pay and effectiveness. “You just don’t know what anyone is meant to be doing at any particular grade,” says Hannah Keenan, formerly a civil servant in the Cabinet Office, now an associate director at the IfG. “A lot of the actual work gets sucked up [to higher grades]... and there’s a whole group of SCS who feel they don’t have enough people, because they’re not using the people under them.”
Dave Penman, general secretary of the FDA union, says the evidence for grade inflation is not concrete, but it is clear that the civil service grew rapidly without a clear strategy, caused by the “underlying tension” that politicians were not openly acknowledging the policy and resource implications of Brexit. “The civil service doesn’t decide its own size,” he notes, but ministers “kept asking the civil service to do all this stuff, and so it grew. You’d have ministers essentially allowing their departments to grow to deal with the consequences of the policy they supported and then, at the same time, attacking the civil service for growing.”
While the number of officials working on Brexit was large – at least 22,000 at the peak of planning for a possible “no-deal” exit – they were still only around 5% of the civil service, according to National Audit Office figures released in 2020. This rose to some 12% in the SCS, but EU exit pulled energy and attention even from those not dealing with it directly. One senior policy professional who worked in domestic-facing departments through the Brexit years recalls how things like weekly updates in SCS meetings, while “really intense and exciting for the [EU exit] team”, could pull focus and attention from those who were not involved. “We weren’t very good at drawing lines,” they recall, creating “enormous opportunity costs — all the things that we weren’t doing because of [EU exit]”.
Although this official was reflecting on public policy changes, there was also an impact on internal-facing reforms. Before 2016, the civil service reform agenda was much as it is now: stronger project management, digital, data and commercial capability; a less London-centric and more diverse workforce; better links between policy and operations; and an overhaul of reward and recruitment. Brexit helped to drive progress on some of these changes, including building more project management capability and developing some central tools to support workforce planning. But it may have held back other areas: one civil servant who has been involved in diversity work for many years said Brexit pushed that down the agenda, stalling the momentum that had been building through the Cameron years. As well as creating a political culture that was sometimes explicitly anti-diversity, they noted, the need to recruit and move people quickly reduced concern for diversity in hiring and weakened challenge culture.
Amid all this, some positive innovations did emerge. In The Brexit Effect, Simon Case – former cabinet secretary and, during the Brexit years, a senior DExEU official – describes the XS and XO committees established to manage EU exit strategy and operations as “an important and useful innovation” in a “sea of largely unhappy Brexit bureaucracy”. Brexit also created space for technological and organisational change, such as that carried out by the Border Force (see box below) Moriarty – who went on to be DExEU perm sec after leading Defra – notes that the department developed a sophisticated database for tracking deliverables across government, but it was never fully exploited because central teams in the Cabinet Office preferred a more traditional secretariat approach. “We could have got much more out of it if Brexit had been recognised as a big, mega programme, rather than a big, mega crisis management process,” she says.
Political ramifications
The EU referendum split the two main parties and resulted in fundamental challenge for the political system, Rutter tells CSW, as it struggled to cope with the fact that the public had made a decision most MPs disagreed with. “The system does not really adapt very well to that,” she notes.
Over the next three years, against the backdrop of that systemic challenge, prime minister Theresa May was trying to deliver a Brexit that would keep her government and party together. As her strategy slowly unravelled, the conflict within government, and between government and parliament, grew more heated and complex. Cabinet government floundered, ministerial turnover soared, and parliamentary drama became par for the course. As Penman notes, when you have this level of political chaos, “there is no independent civil service that is going to solve those things. It is a massive political failing.”
“I’m pretty sure Home Office staff probably voted 52:48 or even more in favour, but the tone was so much set by the centre” Stephen Webb
The political failure had administrative consequences. There was an atmosphere of secrecy, reflecting not only the highly charged political debate and constant leaking, but the personalities of the people at the top of the process. Strategy was developed in close circles and documents were kept closely guarded. As Moriarty told UKICE: “There wasn’t a sense of people, either at secretary of state level or at permanent secretary level, really being invited to be part of the decision process around the big strategy. The big strategy just popped up and then we all tried to react to it.”
This was not a recipe for good cross-government working and the impact went beyond EU exit work. In evidence to the Covid Inquiry, former deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara wrote that by 2020, Whitehall had become used to “too much control in the centre”, with departments disempowered and the cabinet secretariat out of the habit of facilitating debate and fresh perspectives.
A counterpoint to this comes from Rycroft, who notes that departments didn’t take kindly to DExEU’s work monitoring progress around Brexit preparations because “Whitehall is a very non-compliant place, where permanent secretaries’ incentives lie in their relationship with their secretary of state”. In an atmosphere where ministers were not setting a clear, unified direction, that non-compliance was exacerbated, but it did not begin with Brexit.
The IfG’s Alex Thomas reflects on another consequence of this lack of cabinet unity and political paralysis under Theresa May. “The civil service was receiving contradictory messages rather than a coherent set of objectives from the government,” he tells CSW. In the face of this, “the learned response from the civil service was to say: ‘[we] will respond to these individual asks but, because the overall strategic objective of the government is incoherent, we can’t lean into that strategy, because we don’t know what the safe territory is. We don’t know what an impartial civil service should be doing in that instance.’”
While the decision to lean out of strategic work was a choice, it was hard to undo, he suggests, and the Labour administration elected in 2024 would feel the impact of it. This was “a government that didn’t have the most compelling vision but did want the civil service to lean in and fill the gaps”, he notes, but the civil service, as an institution, had lost the instinct to do this. Both Keenan and Thomas stress that this instinct to “lean out” did not equate to laziness. “In the passive pose, you’re working just as hard and, in some ways, more frustratingly, with less agency and a less satisfying job,” says Thomas.
Brexit, and then Covid, also pushed workloads to new extremes, with one policy professional saying it shifted “in an unhelpfully permanent way” what politicians and senior leaders thought was reasonable to ask of civil servants. Nor did the choice to lean out reflect an intention to frustrate ministerial requests. Rather, Keenan suggests the aim was to deliver exactly as asked rather than offering options, and that was “coming from wanting to win the trust of ministers; wanting to show that you’re on their side and not trying to obstruct”.
This concern about seeming obstructive reflected a sense that ministers now viewed challenge as defiance, rather than part of the policy and delivery process. “Good ministers welcome challenge and engage with it but also set direction and know what the red lines are,” Thomas says. “The space for that conversation felt like it narrowed after Brexit.” One senior policy professional recalls that after the 2017 snap election, their team decided their briefing for incoming ministers could not sound balanced on Brexit: “It had to sound completely pro-Brexit.” Thomas also suggests the civil service lost some of the skills needed for robust conversation: “The meaningful synthesising of policy and the instinct to test stuff with external people, with stakeholders... the responsibility to give the best possible advice and to have kicked the tires on it – that has eroded.”
Devolved administrations
Before he moved to DExEU, Philip Rycroft was working in the Cabinet Office to improve the civil service’s understanding of devolved issues. The momentum to improve that understanding, he says, came from the 2014 Scottish independence referendum and was largely carried out through the newly created UK Governance Group to try and improve Whitehall’s capability when it comes to devolution issues. In those years, he could make the case to the cabinet secretary and prime minister that this mattered, and be heard. The institutional embodiment of this was a second permanent secretary post in the Cabinet Office, held by Rycroft, dedicated to constitutional and devolution issues.
Brexit, he argues, swept that momentum away. From a wider devolution perspective, he says, the political approach to EU exit “revealed a complete willingness to override Scottish and Welsh interests in the pursuit of Brexit. They crashed through all the conventions of the devolution settlements, ignoring the refusal of legislative consent motions for Brexit legislation, not giving the devolved governments really any line of sight on the negotiations.”
Northern Ireland, he says, was the most consequential example. “It revealed deep ignorance about Northern Irish politics [and] the nature of the Good Friday Belfast Agreement and a willingness to prioritise Brexit, essentially, over the United Kingdom.”
A decade on, the second perm sec role he once held has been replaced by a director-level post – a clear structural signal about the priority now accorded to devolved matters.
Rycroft adds a nuance to this narrative, noting that things changed as the political context shifted. “In my time in DExEU, we were under a lot of pressure from ministers to conform to their view of what Brexit would mean,” he says, but the division in the cabinet gave him and the team “space” to resist that. He points to two examples that became public: an impact analysis that showed negative impacts on long-term GDP of every Brexit deal, and a paper produced under Dominic Raab that set out the “unadorned” risks of no deal. He compares this to the fact that there was no impact analysis of Boris Johnson’s final Brexit deal but, instead, a “benefits of Brexit” document was released, “which was like a parody”. “I’m not blaming the civil service for that,” he adds, saying the ability “to cleave to the civil service rigour about the evidence in advice to ministers” became “really, really difficult” under the Johnson government.
Multiple people CSW spoke to described a sense that expertise was no longer welcome – if it was of the wrong sort. This began right from the start. Ivan Rogers, then the UK’s permanent representative to the EU, said to UKICE in 2016: “The sense is that UKRep people... are ‘contaminated’ by their excessive European expertise.” This would carry on right to the end of the period. One of his successors, Katrina Williams, told UKICE that when she returned to Whitehall in 2020 having overseen the final stages of EU exit from Brussels, it seemed that anybody senior “who had got [EU experience] on their CV felt a little bit suspect”. This was, Williams noted, in the “Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson era” – a nod to the fact that alongside all this, the civil service was subject to increasing, and increasingly public, attacks.
While politicians criticising officials was not new, the tone and scope changed from 2016 onwards. “Before, occasionally it happened, but there was a general acceptance from the party of government that this is unfair, [civil servants] cannot defend themselves, this is not a thing that ministers do,” Penman says. “That just went.”
In the years that followed the EU vote, ministers criticised officials – even from the House of Commons dispatch box – with no discernible consequence since May, as Penman notes, was too busy managing her party to defend her officials. The open season was not just on the civil service and not just from politicians. Judges and remainer MPs were branded enemies of the people, while one permanent secretary – Sir Jon Thompson – received death threats after discussing challenges around EU exit. Then there was the “hard rain” under Johnson and his top adviser Cummings, which saw the dismissal of six permanent secretaries in one year. These dismissals, Rutter says, “added a layer to the notion that civil servants were getting in the way and had to be terrorised”.
Were civil servants getting in the way?
The referendum result was undoubtedly a shock for many civil servants. Several civil service leaders, reflecting on the days immediately after the referendum, have spoken of the need to support staff reeling emotionally or dealing with the uncertainty of the situation. But they have also emphasised that many ambitious civil servants were keen to work on EU exit right through this period – seeing it as the key policy area of the day. In her UKICE interview, Moriarty noted that her staff were thinking of the opportunities ahead even as they processed the implications of the vote. “Right from the start, there was a yoking together of an emotional reaction, an intuitive understanding... of the scale of change that was going to be involved in unpicking 40 years’ worth of accumulated legislation and history, and a sense of, ‘Yes, but maybe we could do this a bit differently’.”
Nevertheless, some former civil servants have reflected that there was, through these years, a general and cultural aversion to EU exit in the civil service. Stephen Webb recalls “complete tumbleweed” in a top leadership meeting after he challenged a colleague who said “everyone” present thought Brexit was nonsense. “That said something about the culture of the place, as it felt to those who’d actually supported [Brexit]. It was particularly weird, because I was at the Home Office at the time. I’m pretty sure Home Office staff probably voted 52:48 or even more in favour, but the tone was so much set by the centre.”
Paul Lincoln, who was director general of the UK Border Force in this period, agrees that if you looked across the civil service overall, you’d see a split similar to that across the country. But he says that right across the board, there was “no lack of drive – irrespective of people’s personal opinions, people just wanted to serve the government and deliver what had to be delivered”.
“Good ministers welcome challenge and engage with it. The space for that conversation felt like it narrowed after Brexit” Alex Thomas, IfG
Webb argues that this delivery, however, was not done willingly. “Generally, the civil service ultimately did what it was asked to do, but only after having sort of sulked and set out the adverse consequences as luridly as it possibly could.” He acknowledges some of this reflected civil servants responding to the bidding of their remain-supporting ministers, but says he has “no doubt” that “the civil service, to the extent that we had any weight at all, very much put it on one side of the scale”. This, he suggests, “has caused a lasting trust deficit”, particularly among Conservative and Reform politicians.
Thomas suggests that the distrust politicians feel towards officials reflects the different cultures in the two professions, and that it is the political turmoil – rather than civil service obstructiveness – that has potentially damaged relations in government. “The political brain thinks: ‘well, how can these people really not care which government they’re working for, and how can they really be as enthusiastic for this government and my policy as the previous one?” he says. It takes time, he suggests, for ministers to trust not just individual civil servants but the broader notion of civil service impartiality and the benefits of working with people who really know how to make the system of government work. “If you have a succession of rapid governments or rapid prime ministers, all the reshuffles, there’s never time to reach that new equilibrium,” he adds. “The speed of ministerial turnover may have broken something fundamental.”
The institution that Heywood promised could turn on a sixpence has not had much credit for the scale and complexity of the turn it executed. “Because politicians had expected it to be a walk in the park, and because half the public hate the fact that it happened, it’s not something that the civil service can say with pride: look, we delivered all this,” Penman says.
Despite the political context, Rycroft is clear that the civil service should remain proud. “I personally have been disparaged by one N. Farage as a blocker of Brexit. Not much annoys me [but] that annoys me, not so much for my own part, but for all the folks in my team, and across Whitehall, who knocked their pan in to make sure we could respect the democratic decision from the British public, and leave in good order.”