Please Sir, I Want Some More (Civil Servants)...

The Times reported on Sat 11 November that the total number of MOD civil servants has grown, at a time when the regular armed forces face the risk of further manpower cuts. This has led to some MP’s demanding answers as to why the MOD seems to have its priorities so wrong.

The MOD civil service is a much maligned and poorly understood beast. In broad terms the phrase MOD ‘Civil Servant’ covers a vast range of people from storemen, dockyard workers, canteen assistants and munitions workers through to policy wonks, rocket scientists and intelligence analysts. In very broad handfuls the MOD is split into two sides – the ‘industrials’ who make up roughly 50% of the workforce and the ‘non industrials’ who make up the balance.

This temporary growth needs to be looked at over a period of long term sustained decline in the strength of the MOD civil service. In 2003 there were roughly 120,000 civil servants employed by the MOD. Today there are approximately 55,000 and by 2020 there will be barely 40,000. By any reasonable measure this is a workforce undergoing enormous change and reductions.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

The Demographic Time Bomb

The MOD is not a youthful organisation. Although demographics vary from year to year, at any one point roughly 60-70% of the MOD workforce is aged over 45.  This means that in the next 20 years the MOD is going to need to recruit, train and retain nearly 30,000 people just to keep the workforce exactly as it is.

The problem is that recruitment is usually the first target of spending cuts, an easy measure to save some money and solve in year problems. Since 2010 the MOD has been in the grip of various existential financial crises which have all but switched off external recruitment schemes, meaning the in flow of junior staff at entry level has pretty much ceased. It is ever harder to recruit at more senior levels too – if you are under pressure to reduce headcount, then deleting a gapped post that you can’t recruit for means you are essentially downsizing as there is no longer a post to fill.

In the short term this does generate some savings. But it comes at the cost of significant structural risk to the workforce. The loss of the various new entry schemes means that there is not really any ‘bright young thing’ generation coming through the department being trained to do often very specialised roles. There is no succession planning either, and due to the way the HR system is now structured, it is almost impossible to move the right person into the right job at the right time.

You have a workforce that is aging and which isn’t replenishing its ranks in the numbers required to keep it going in the medium term. This coupled with the loss of peoples accumulated knowledge as they retire means the MOD faces a significant skills gap over the next few years, with no easy means to replace it.

The wider problem is that morale in the MOD is, frankly, terrible. The civilian workforce is tired, demoralised and fed up of being treated as a whipping boy for the failings of the wider armed forces. There is a strong sense of frustration at practises such as pay not keeping up with private sector counterparts, or the utterly reviled performance management system that rewarded 10% of staff and left 70-80% feeling demotivated and undervalued.

These problems were particularly keenly felt in the DE&S over several years, where a combination of significant uncertainty over their future (would it be civil service or privatised?), a reduction in headcount leading to job losses, very poor pay in an increasingly expensive area and ‘controversial’ leadership led to an exodus of highly skilled and qualified project managements and procurement staff.

Humphrey knows a lot of people who left during this time – they went because local aerospace, engineering and other companies were desperate to bring in their skills and knowledge and offered a reasonable pay rise too. When you have a family to bring up in Bristol, which is increasingly London like in its prices, then no matter how much you like working for the MOD, the family must come first.

The wider changes to the Civil Service ‘offer’ also did not help. In the last 10 years the so-called ‘gold plated pensions’ have been scrapped, with all new entrants coming on a career average pension, which all staff below a certain age have now joined too. New rules on promotion mean that anyone getting promoted loses 1.5 days annual leave and has to work longer each week. This is designed to keep the organisation in line with industry best practise apparently, although Humphrey has yet to identify any company which rewards its staff with less leave on promotion!

The loss of skilled staff, coupled with the lack of replacements waiting to come up through the system due to the switching off of external recruitment led to a real manpower challenge. This is why there is upwards of 20-40% gapping in some areas – it is practically impossible to find and recruit civil servants who have the necessary skills and experience to do the job.

More widely you can’t easily pull in civil servants from other areas because the MOD scrapped funding relocation costs as a savings measure. In simple terms, until the early 00s, a civil servant in London could move to Bristol for a couple of years to broaden their experience and career development. The MOD would fund either a house move, or additional costs allowances – so the individual wouldn’t be out of pocket for having to commute a lot further for a year or two. At the end they could move back to London without penalty.

Today someone wanting to move gets no assistance at all, unless they are in a tiny handful of specialist cases (such as being declared surplus). Someone in London wanting to move to Bristol has to fund the entire process, or pay all the extra commuting costs. Not surprisingly this isn’t a massively appealing offer to most civil servants. The result has been the death of social mobility in the MOD civil service, as people are now constrained by their geographic area for where they can work, and only the richest few can consider changing locations.

What does this mean for Civil Service numbers?

Bring all these factors together and the MOD civil service has been hit by the perfect storm. There is an urgent need to try and plug gaps, fill the organisation with skilled staff at the right levels and try to get the organisation well placed to support the front line.

Recruitment now does not mean the MOD is trying to ignore demands to cut to 40,000. This is about filling vacancies that need to be filled to help support procurement. DE&S could decide to not fill them, but this leads to widespread gapping, reduced ability to purchase kit on time and a workforce unable to fully support Defence. That in turn means a higher reliance on external consultants brought in on  huge daily rates to deliver work that used to be done by junior civil servants.

The numbers may have grown a tiny amount in the short term, but this does not mean they will stay this way. Further reductions, resignations and retirements will quickly reduce the headcount again. Over the next few years civilian workforce planning is likely to be one of the biggest challenges facing MOD as it tries to balance the need to recruit tens of thousands of new staff, with the loss of large swathes of corporate knowledge. Look forward 10 years or more and there are real worries as to what state the Department, and its functions will be in.

So what?

Simply put, people should not panic or be outraged at this news. They should reflect on the fact that MOD civilians are as equally important to Defence as the uniformed services. They fill different roles and functions, but without them, much of what the military does would cease to happen.

It is essential that as the MOD tries to grapple with major cultural change, enormous manpower reductions and a loss of corporate knowledge, it does so in a manner which tries to keep as many civil servants as possible in the system. The focus needs to be ‘recruit and retain’ and not ‘reduce’. This is not politically easy to do, but Ministers and senior leadership need to have the courage to stand up to wider pressure to cull the civilians and not the front line, putting forward the compelling case for the fantastic work that the MOD Civil Service does and highlight the good they do in order to keep all of us safe and secure.