Last week it was reported that DBT has developed plans to reduce the departmental headcount by 20%, roughly 1,500 civil servants. This follows similar moves made by MHCLG, which shared plans to reduce its workforce by 400 FTE, and the Cabinet Office, which has been running a voluntary exit scheme for the last 10 months.
Considering the scale of savings departments have committed to, it is safe to assume these are the first of many similar exercises to be made by other Whitehall departments. In many ways these announcements show signs Whitehall is waking up to its workforce problems. But as civil service leaders gear up to face the challenge, they must remain focused on those levers which have a realistic chance of meeting the obligations whilst avoiding superficially attractive, but minimally effective, measures such as voluntary exit schemes – which only serve to prolong the pain.
Instead, senior leaders should accept the scale of the challenge in front of them, reject simplistic workforce reduction targets in favour of genuine workforce reform, and pursue the measures that will generate savings, whilst leaving the civil service stronger and fit to tackle the challenges of today.
Voluntary exit schemes are an ineffective lever for reducing the size of a workforce
The appeal is understandable. Ostensibly, they allow senior leaders to demonstrate progress towards admin savings without having to kick off a morale-sapping compulsory redundancy process. But VES schemes risk hollowing out Whitehall by incentivising those it can least afford to lose to exit the organisation with a pay packet for well-funded job search, while retaining poor performers who are less likely to want to look for other jobs.
History tells us they take far too long to run (the Cabinet Office has been running its current scheme for ten months) and almost always fail to deliver the necessary impact. Civil servants I speak to say that where these schemes are being run, managers are allowing high-performing specialists to access the schemes and receive a payout from organisations that cannot afford to lose them.
Senior leaders need to exercise their agency and remove those who aren’t delivering
It makes little sense to deliver initiatives intended to reshape the civil service while leaving in place individuals who, year after year, fail to deliver. Senior leaders must stop shying away from the performance problem in Whitehall. Contrary to what many people think, civil servants’ biggest gripe isn't their working from home allowance, it’s often the people they’re working next to. By failing to tackle routine poor performance, senior civil servants are giving credence to that tired trope of the civil servant as an unaccountable, disengaged bureaucrat who logs off at 3:30PM.
This is one of the few opportunities where senior leaders can deliver efficiencies while also boosting morale; two goals frequently in tension. Unfortunately, they will be working from a low base in terms of performance management infrastructure; in a recent FOI response, both the Department for Education and the Home Office admitted that neither organisation has a centralised performance management system, instead trusting line managers to gauge and act on performance alone. In a world where only 8% of civil servants believe poor performance is managed effectively in Whitehall this needs to change, urgently.
Where there are performance management systems in place, managers need to be empowered to use them – and held accountable if they don’t. HR functions must lead this change to a culture where poor performers are identified and exited from the organisation quickly. In a world where departments are reducing their workforces by 20%, shepherding poor performer through a process that takes six to nine months isn’t good enough, they need to work much more effectively.
Senior leaders need to identify those they need and actively, not passively, exit those they don’t
Ultimately, efficiencies on the scale the government are planning for won’t come only from exiting poor performers – the targets are much higher. Rather than taking volunteers for redundancy from anyone who raises their hand, departments need to understand which people they don’t need any more. Unfortunately, whilst strategic workforce planning is simple in concept, it’s hard in practise.
Departments need to take the time to understand current and expected future needs, recognising they will get some bits wrong, and then design a workforce that can deliver that. This is not about salami slicing evenly across existing teams or directorates to carve out a workforce that is slimmer but otherwise much the same. While that is the easy, straightforward and explainable approach, it’s also the wrong one. Genuine redesign is needed, with a risk tolerance that allows leaders to make bold, sometimes radical decisions.
Once departments have developed their workforce blueprints, they must shape and run compulsory exit schemes accordingly – bypassing these untargeted voluntary exit schemes, which only serve to elongate the uncertainty and never deliver the requisite savings. Leaders need to be clear and unapologetic about their plans.
Eligibility for exiting the organisation should be based entirely as to whether the individual has the skills and experience required by the organisation – if you’re a high performer tempted to dip your toe in another sector, feel free – but the taxpayer shouldn’t subsidise the job search. Equally, being on time and working hard, unfortunately, doesn’t mean you have earned the right to a public sector pay cheque. This would be a radical shift, but it needs to be. The fiscal picture facing the UK, and the civil service, is stark. Hard decisions are needed across the state, and civil servants must become comfortable taking decisions that prioritise the organisation (and taxpayer), not the current employees.
Finally, exit schemes need to be run at pace. Comparative exercises in the private sector are designed, communicated and delivered in weeks or maybe a couple of months. In the Cabinet Office, the current voluntary exit scheme – which is neither informed by strategic workforce exercises and therefore not targeted, nor large enough to avoid the need for more exit schemes, will have been running for ten months by the time it closes and the next set of options considered by departmental leadership.
Every civil servant is a cost to the state. And like every cost, there is an opportunity cost that must be considered. Be it another teacher, another nurse or, less excitingly, another contribution to reducing the national debt. Senior leaders must exercise their agency and grasp the nettle of reform, to build a productive and agile civil service that can deliver for the society it serves.
Joe Martin is a senior researcher at Re:State, working on the think tank's Re:Imagining Whitehall programme. He is a former civil servant with experience in Whitehall reform at the Cabinet Office, as well as in policy and transformation roles across DfT, HMRC, the Home Office and Education