In January, Darren Jones launched a raft of reforms aimed at shaking up Whitehall by weeding out poor performers, promoting doers over talkers, and creating peacetime taskforces to bust through civil service inertia.
The week before, he emphasised the importance of delegation in getting things done in government. He's right, and fortunately there are several suitable candidates. The chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, the minister for intergovernmental relations, or the chief secretary to the prime minister would all be sensible choices. All are roles currently held by Mr Darren Jones, MP for Bristol West, who wears more hats than a milliner's model.
Regardless of which Darren Jones takes the lead, he'll be missing a key lieutenant: a chief people officer for the civil service. The role has been vacant since Fiona Ryland departed in November (and in true civil service fashion, two people have been assigned to share CPO responsibilities until a permanent appointment is made), making it one of the few key positions referenced in this article not currently filled by Darren Jones.
Whoever steps into the CPO role inherits one of Whitehall's most daunting to-do lists: arresting concerns over workforce performance, easing chronic skill shortages, and streamlining a distributed, unionised workforce to meet publicly stated efficiencies – all of which are particularly acute in the senior ranks.
Unfortunately, the CPO role as currently conceived lacks the authority, clarity of function and reach to solve these challenges, let alone deliver on additional measures set out in January.
Yet Jones, the cabinet secretary, and the next CPO can take steps to ensure these reforms are embedded and delivered quickly enough to matter before the next election. And, more importantly, they can give the civil service the capability to reform itself rather than relying on frustrated politicians to do it for them.
First, hand the CPO a mandate to take on Whitehall the machine and cause upset
Driving workforce reform across institutions as complex and unionised as the civil service is never easy. It becomes harder when reforms require consensus from 16 permanent secretaries, and harder still when those reforms involve slimming down their own workforces.
If Jones is serious, he must ensure the CPO properly owns the people agenda across government. This means:
- No more consensus building among a People Board staffed with permanent secretaries who have vested interests in minimising Cabinet Office interference
- Replacing voluntary exit programmes with strategic, managed redundancy programmes
- Confronting the systemic failure to manage performance head-on
In The Human Handbrake, a Demos report, we highlighted officials' reluctance to embrace risk. The incoming CPO won't have this luxury. Delivering the changes Jones expects and citizens demand requires risk-taking. The CPO should be given an explicit licence to take calculated risks, and be expected to use it.
As Lord Maude has noted in his many (many) Whitehall reform reports: if you want to reform a system, you need a system leader. Leading means taking risks and owning the consequences.
Second, centralise the people function and put institutional interests first
Despite a pathological aversion to holding poor performers accountable (just two out of 7,000 senior civil servants were dismissed for performance last year), departmental HR functions remain widely unpopular. Civil servants increasingly see them as purveyors of risk-reduction processes rather than problem solvers.
This is because people functions have evolved into compliance capabilities focused on minimising tribunal exposure rather than maximising workforce capability.
A centralised people function, akin to the commercial function or Government Legal Department, would expedite structural and personnel changes across departments. It would give the centre genuine visibility over key reform arenas, such as workforce planning, performance management, and capability gaps.
Crucially, it would enable decisions in the interests of the whole civil service. Currently, workforce exercises operate through a departmental lens, creating the perverse outcome that capable staff in high-performing departments are lost while underperformance persists elsewhere. A system-level view would allow the civil service to deploy half-million staff rationally, and in the way that best suits citizens' interests rather than simply in those ways which cause less unrest amongst its ranks.
The goal should be to remind Whitehall’s people function of what HR functions in most large organisations are there to do: act in the organisation's interests, not merely provide risk mitigation.
For the Cabinet Office and No.10 to "rewire the state," they need a people function that can remove obsolete cables, not one that ties itself in knots.
Third, abandon the independent employer fiction and recognise the civil service as a single institution
Civil service leaders should confront the increasingly implausible claim that Whitehall comprises independent employers rather than one interconnected institution.
Most civil servants sit in common grades, receive similar benefits, follow identical promotion processes, join the same unions, undergo the same training and clearance, and move between departments with minimal friction. Politically and publicly, they're treated as one workforce
Yet administratively, departments maintain the fiction of independent employment. The justification is cost: recognising the civil service as a single employer would trigger pay alignment pressures.
This supposed saving has real costs. By maintaining the fiction, the centre makes reform harder and slower. Even when No.10 mandates change, implementation must be negotiated and delivered through nominally independent organisations running separate transformation programmes.
Such a shift would be difficult and involve bruising conversations with unions, legal experts, and civil servants. But the civil service needs to relearn how to genuinely solve problems rather than make do to avoid upset.
The civil service needs a reform capability, not a reform programme
Last December, a YouGov poll revealed a crisis in confidence in the civil service: just 4% of respondents had a lot of faith in the civil service (with 26% having a fair amount), while 25% had none at all (and 28% having not very much).
These measures won't solve everything. But they would give the civil service the institutional muscle to drive reform from within rather than relying on episodic, politically driven interventions.
Darren Jones, for all his political skill, is not a HR director, management consultant, or FTSE 100 CEO. Nor were Michael Gove or Francis Maude before him. That workforce reform repeatedly falls to elected politicians isn't ministerial overreach; it's evidence of a structural – and cultural – weakness in the civil service's architecture.
The civil service must recognise that institutional reform is normal and necessary for all large organisations serving the public.
Very few civil servants will play a bigger role in reversing this confidence crisis than the incoming CPO. But they can only deliver genuine reform, not just another programme, if Darren Jones hands them the mandate to rebuild the machine, not tinker at the edges.
Joe Martin is associate director of policy at the think tank Demos