UK government has a trust problem. Ministers and their special advisers have – very broadly speaking – lost trust in the institution of the civil service. Keir Starmer may have told the civil service just days after taking office that they had his confidence, support and respect, but within months that had soured into the now infamous "tepid bath" jibe. Optimistic plans for a reset in the relationship between ministers and officials inside departments followed a similar path, rapidly descending into frustration at the civil service’s perceived lack of creativity and drive.
This is not healthy. The Institute for Government’s new discussion paper, When trust is lost: making sense of the damaged relationship between ministers and civil servants, articulates what we think is going wrong in the relationship, as well as a practical framework to move the conversation beyond the usual platitudes or jibes to rebuild trust from the right foundations.
This is not a new problem
A strained relationship between ministers and civil servants is by no means unique to Starmer’s government. Tony Blair talked about the "scars on my back" from efforts to reform public services; Michael Gove coined the term "the blob" as early as the 2010 coalition; Dominic Cummings promised a "hard rain" for Whitehall; and Liz Truss and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng laid into "Treasury orthodoxy".
But in the past politicians’ trust in Whitehall has waxed and waned. The problem we appear to be facing at the moment, exemplified by Starmer’s false start on mending the relationship, is that ministerial trust in the civil service is continuing to fall even when actively trying to rebuild it.
It is heartening to see that the cabinet secretary wants to tackle this – having pinpointed trust as a core objective in the new review into the civil service. But success will rely on being able to accurately diagnose what is going wrong. We are, collectively, falling at that first hurdle. We at theIfG believe that is because the language and norms we have available to talk about trust are too broad and too generic.
The shortcuts we have to hand at the moment are to criticise "the blob" – variants include the benign, but impossibly large and slow, bureaucracy, and the less benign characterisation of unelected officials out to stymie ministerial wishes – or to espouse platitudes about needing more "respect" in the relationship.
Neither is helpful. In fact, those two heuristics – blob and platitude – are now so outdated that they are actively preventing the rebuilding of trust. These mental shortcuts prevent both ministers and civil servants from clearly exploring the real frustrations in the relationship. Without a shared, accurate, and nuanced way to talk about trust the frustration boils over, often into public attack, but the underlying problem does not get addressed.
How we start to fix this
Our research aims to fix that. We’ve spoken to ministers, special advisers, and officials from past and present administrations, about what really goes right and wrong in the relationship. We’ve mapped that onto academic models of trust, and we’ve made a new – we hope better – language to figure out what is going wrong, so it can be put right.
Our work identifies five ‘traits’ that civil servants need to be able to display to earn the trust of ministers. Below is a snapshot of these traits, and what we were told about how trust gets lost when they are not present:
- Advisory competence: ‘giving good advice’ – Trust is of course lost when advice is of poor or inaccurate, but it is more commonly lost because civil servants are seen as lacking professional curiosity and imagination – advice is formulaic, and too often addresses the surface-level question asked, not the first-order question underneath. Civil servants are also seen as failing to recognise the moment of jeopardy in advising ministers; failing to prepare for crucial interactions; remote work is exacerbating this perception.
- Outcome competence: ‘Getting things done’ – The civil service is seen as having a responsiveness problem: too slow to respond to ministerial priorities (in part because of a 'survival mode' mentality after the recent turmoil, and too quick to spin up a process (more trackers, dashboards and meetings) that is divorced from the outcome it seeks.
- Honesty and frankness: ‘Speaking plainly’ – A cultural norm of conflict avoidance within the civil service is bleeding into conversations with ministers. That is most damaging to trust when civil servants are saying yes to ministerial requests in the moment and then going off-radar, rather than surfacing the issues.
- Understanding: ‘Getting it’ – Ministers feel an overwhelming inertia in the civil service, and trust is lost when politicians feel the civil service is serving its own interests or the status quo, beyond that of the minister. There is a perception that the civil service is leaning back – waiting for direction – rather than leaning in and creatively working with ministers to deliver their objectives.
- Impartiality: ‘Being comfortable with the politics’ – There is a sense that the civil service lacks political judgment, and draws such a wider line around anything seen as ‘political’ that officials can no longer effectively advise ministers. As Baroness Stowell put it in our Ministers Reflect series, “I think some civil servants confuse impartiality with not giving a view on something”.
We at the IfG want to hear what you think – where have we captured something accurately, where are we wrong, and what is missing? How can we improve the framework, and what would make it useful? Should we be directing our efforts elsewhere? Where have you seen trust rebuilt (inside the civil service or elsewhere), and what can we do now to improve it?
Andy Burnham and Antonia Romeo have a big task ahead in rebuilding ministerial trust in the civil service. They need to start by getting the right language to talk about it.
Hannah Keenan is an associate director at the Institute for Government