Today the think tank Re:State are launching the Alternative People Survey 2026 in partnership with Civil Service World and Public First. The survey is completely anonymous, and takes 5-10 minutes to complete – you can fill it out here.
This month marks four years since I hung up my GOV.UK email address and left the civil service. When I think about how the jobs I’ve done since I left compare to the seven years where I worked in Whitehall, there are lots of things I miss. But the one thing I don’t miss at all is the feeling of voicelessness.
The civil service includes hundreds of different jobs, doing everything from frontier R&D in fields like AI to engagement with the farming community in fields like, well, fields. One thing the thousands of civil servants doing those jobs have in common is that they aren’t meant to have opinions on them.
The commitment to political impartiality is the most closely observed of the four values in the Civil Service Code (and in some cases it still isn’t enforced enough).
But one consequence of requiring civil servants not to risk their relationship with ministers is that not only do they keep quiet on party political issues, but they also have to be careful when talking about government policy. And for them government policy isn’t just something they encounter in their paycheck, in public services or at the voting booth; it also sets the terms and conditions of how their jobs work.
Most workforces are going through big changes at the moment, civil servants aren’t unique in that. Job displacement from AI adoption, working out the balance of remote working and in-office presence, high staff turnover from a different kind of labour market, cutting costs because of a stagnant economy and trying to train a new generation for leadership. But civil servants are unique in that they don’t get a chance to talk about how these are going – those messages are only ever filtered through the prism of rare appearances by senior officials or the positions their unions take. Direct insights, like those you get on civil service Reddit pages or from anonymous X accounts, often chime with what we hear in the research interviews we do at Re:State, and can tell a very different story.
One rare direct route is the civil service’s annual People Survey. It’s a fixture of the Whitehall calendar – the emails from SCS encouraging you to fill it out, to the (usually inconclusive) team meetings discussing the breakdown for each department and directorate. The People Survey is a mine of great data – with twenty years of results and hundreds of thousands of respondents each year. But because the results are public the government are a bit careful about what questions they ask.
So last year we launched the Alternative People Survey, aiming to capture the voices of civil servants directly on issues which affect them in their work. 1,265 respondents gave us a rich picture of life in Whitehall and what’s on their minds. The results were in parts surprising and frustrating to read – some examples include:
- 30 per cent were using AI tools in their worked, with 78 per cent believing it helped them do their job better.
- 70 per cent agreed with the statement that “I often feel that processes get in the way of me doing my job better”
- Just 8 per cent agreed with the statement that “the civil service in general manages poor performance well”, with 79 per cent disagreeing.
Beyond the raw stats, civil servants used the opportunity to anonymously share their views on other areas of their work. One wrote:
"The key thing holding back the civil service are systems and processes broken by overengineering or excessive bureaucracy. Those broken systems across HR, procurement, finance, risk taking etc. all then manifest in poor performance, low productivity [and] poor decisions.”
The results were fascinating and this year we’re running it again, with a handful of extra questions on topics which are only becoming more important over time. How the Voluntary Exit Schemes many departments are doing have been working in practice, how civil service AI use is changing, and awareness of the civil service code (and ideas for changing it) all feature in this year’s survey.
The survey is completely anonymous, and again we will be publishing the results in full, so officials can see that they’re being heard across Westminster.
You can fill the survey out here in less than ten minutes.