The headline findings of our survey of civil servants’ views on the 2010-13 head count reductions don’t look great – but this is, after all, the battered survivors’ verdicts on one of the most difficult periods in the civil service’s history. In these circumstances, the fact that a quarter of respondents think the redundancies were managed “to an acceptable standard” is itself a victory for managers and HR departments, let alone the fact that a further quarter said they were handled well.
However, half believe the job losses were badly managed; and their specific concerns contain important lessons for the future cuts rendered inevitable by the 2015-16 spending round: officials believe their employers missed the chance to ditch under-performing staff, and lost too many talented and skilled people. The lack of a published Capabilities Plan during the job cuts won’t have helped here, and many departments had to skew redundancies towards experienced staff to take advantage of time-limited funding packages; but the quest to complete job losses quickly may also have undermined programmes’ planning and targeting.
As departments plan future job losses, they must use their longer timescales and the Capabilities Plan to build redundancy programmes that preserve the skills and talent required for future challenges, whilst whittling away at management layers, excessive secretarial support, weaker performers, and roles where reforms are improving efficiency. Where employers can’t avoid losing high-value staff, better ways must be found to redeploy them between departments rather than losing them altogether. And leaders must pursue reforms that reduce costs without badly weakening capability, even where that means losing autonomy and control: the pooling of functions such as legal services is an obvious example.
This will all require careful planning, of course, and the guts to take tough decisions before the Treasury rings last orders. In this context, from a private sector perspective the current vista of a civil service slowed to a crawl by the long, overlapping holidays of key decision-makers does look like a missed opportunity to get ahead. But few could begrudge civil servants a break after the painful period portrayed in our survey; what’s more crucial is that when they return, the endless rush of politics doesn’t forestall the planning of savings programmes that leave staff more content with decision-making and implementation in this incredibly difficult field.
Matt Ross, Editor. matt.ross@dods.co.uk
See also: Poll: Redundancy programmes let too many good staff leave