Moving the Ministry Minister? Thoughts on Rusticating the Civil Service

There has been considerable media speculation recently about the future of the Civil Service, amid claims that large parts of it will move outside of Whitehall and instead head to the regions around the UK. To some this move is long overdue, to others it could be an attempt to shackle the powers of the Civil Service and reduce its influence.

Historically London, and Whitehall has been the centre of all government power. It is the beating heart of government, with all major ministries located within a mile or so of 10 Downing Street, often occupying significant and potentially highly valuable real estate in the surrounding area.

The perception though is that the Civil Service is inextricably linked to Whitehall, and that it cannot move away from it or let go of the umbilical cord to the centre of power. Is this fair, and what is the situation really like?

For years now rustication of the Civil Service has been a key goal of governments of all flavours – remove it from the centre, send it to the regions and let it crack on with business near the people it serves.

For the MOD, the decision back in the 1990s to send what was then the Procurement Executive to Bristol led to a consolidation of a major government hub in the Abbey Wood area, which to this day is home to thousands of defence related civil service posts, and has seen a significant number of defence industry partners settle in the area too.

The Department for International Development (DfID) has long had a major part of its operations based up in Glasgow, while BEIS for many years had a significant outpost in Sheffield. Manchester too has seen an explosion in the number of civil servants based there in recent years, moving in a variety of roles to the region.

So, it is perhaps not true to think that the Civil Service is an exclusively London based body, and in fact large chunks of the workforce are based all over the UK – DEFRA for example has literally hundreds of sites, as does DWP. These are based around the country and provide a variety of important functions. Rustication has occurred en masse, primarily in the delivery space.

The challenge seems to be not the moving of the Civil Service, but the moving of the higher echelons out beyond the M25 – which is potentially more challenging. Whitehall offices tend to act as the policy engine for government, bringing together extremely bright and capable people to work to develop new policies that meet the demands of the Ministers and Government of the days agenda.

Traditionally this work has involved staff working in close proximity to Ministers in order to provide them with briefings and updates, but also to prepare them for Parliamentary Question sessions, or help support them during meetings or talks. For Ministers, the constant support of their departmental civil servants is something that they become extremely attached too – many a politician has entered Government as a junior minister, determined to do something about the feckless and lazy mandarins, only to emerge years later speaking nothing but praise about their dedication and support to them.

This has in turn led to London becoming something of a top heavy construct when it comes to civil service roles. Outside of London the Civil Service can be, at times, a rather hierarchical grade based organisation, with many sites employing people at relatively junior levels.

By contrast London sees a significant number of more senior staff, but paradoxically often in employed in less demanding positions of authority. Much like the former warship Commanding Officer posted to MOD Main Building discovers that in the new hierarchy, they have moved from being a god to a tea boy, Whitehall is full of surprisingly senior civil servants who are relatively low in the local pecking order.

Part of this challenge stems from the need to recruit staff on an affordable salary that makes them consider coming to London in the first place. Government jobs tend to pay a small inner London premium (usually £2-3k per year), but often struggle to compete to recruit talented staff when their pay cannot keep pace.

This is particularly notable at more junior levels where pay bands are often low, and make living in central London completely unaffordable. Many Whitehall departments have now all but abolished the ‘Admin Assistant’ grade (the most junior rung on the ladder), in part because it was practically impossible to recruit staff on under £18k per year who could live and commute to work.

This grade creep is perhaps particularly felt in mid-tier roles when the graduate entry level posts salaries (which often compare well to their private sector counterparts) start to lose their competitiveness. This means to recruit staff, you need to be able to offer a salary that they can live on – if you want to recruit good talented people, keen to live and work in London and deliver good policy outcomes for government, then this means putting hands in pockets and upgrading positions to try and get more credible applicants.

In turn this grade creep is also explained by changes to the pay system introduced 10 years ago. Until then, civil servants generally progressed up a pay spine system that would reward length of service in grade. For example, someone newly promoted would earn £20,000, while someone in the same grade who had been in grade for 5 years may be earning £24,000. This pay progression was a useful retention tool as staff knew that in 2,3,5 years time how much they would be earning – allowing them to plan for the future and know more money was coming.

This encouraged staff to stay in jobs and grades for longer as they had a strong financial incentive to do so. But, the scrapping of the pay progression system in 2010 meant that suddenly people were frozen in salary place, progressing only, on average 1% a year from that baseline.

This led to the situation emerging where people were being paid all manner of salaries for doing the same job, but with no means of progressing in grade. Consequently it became common in some places for people to join in a more junior grade, yet earn more than people in the grade above them due to disparity in the system.

The result was that staff realised the only way that they could get more money was by moving jobs – either jumping between departments (as there is a significant mismatch in departmental pay scales) or going for promotion. But, to get promoted required being able to demonstrate that you were a generalist capable of working across a range of job areas.

For many years the Civil Service pushed the idea of the generalist, and encouraged staff to follow a career plan that relied on them applying for jobs against set competence criteria and showing their skills in that competence.

The danger of being a deep expert was that you weren’t able to expand your skills and competences – so, for example if you were a rocket scientist, or deep defence procurement specialist, you would have a very well developed set of specialist skills applicable to your area – but this was a total anathema when applying for jobs, as you wouldn’t be able to demonstrate you had a wider competence. Consequently a system emerged when people were being forced to move jobs that they were very good at, just to get a competence tick in the box so that they could move on promotion to another role back in their original area.

Rarely has a system done so much self-inflicted harm to an organisations institutional memory and experience. By forcing staff to move roles and by removing the career management system that ensured staff could be moved centrally, instead forcing people to compete in the hope of ‘getting lucky’ a system emerged that actively deskilled much of the workforce.

People were too busy moving jobs to get competence evidence, and in turn looking for a promotion to earn enough to afford to stay in London than they were to stay in post for the long haul. There was no financial incentive to remain in most posts, and to do so was actively disadvantaging your career.

When brought together this has created the perfect storm – staff need to move to promote, and they need to promote to earn more money when pay rises are not keeping up with the rate of inflation and changes to pension contribution increases. Many more junior staff actively left or moved roles because they could not afford to stay.

This makes it more difficult for Ministers, who are absolutely frustrated at the constant merry go round of new civil servants taking up posts, but who are unlikely to champion the sort of reforms and pay rise changes needed in order to encourage staff to stay put and deliver.

At the same time London has emerged as a hub for the civil service for two main reasons. Firstly, it is where policy gets made – like it or not, the proximity to power, particularly No10 and the Cabinet Office, means that the senior leadership of departments want to be close to power to ensure they are not caught unawares by developments.

If you call a multi-department meeting, and the seniors from one Department are unable to attend because they are all 200 miles away, then that makes it much harder to deliver good government. People stay in the centre to ensure that they can reflect the needs of their department and protect it when necessary.

There is a geographic reason too why it makes sense to collocate much of the Whitehall machinery in a small place – come a crisis, you want the right people close together to be able to resolve it. When COBR is called for a CT incident, or an international crisis brews, what matters is being able to bring the right people together, in the shortest amount of time, in the right facility via the right comms channels – which isn’t always going to be via Zoom.

What has changed though is COVID – which has proven that you can distribute your workforce remotely and still deliver effectively. One of the big drivers for change for the civil service now is that the communications exist to effectively do multi-departmental meetings virtually, and deliver effectively without needing to be in Whitehall to work.

This, coupled with a sense that many in London or other big cities would rather like to live in houses with a garden, means that there is a window of opportunity emerging to move departments in much bigger ways outside of London – perhaps creating a small ‘lily pad’ in the centre of London if needed, but essentially shifting operations.

The challenge for delivering this will be in the short term ensuring that civil servants are able to move, and if they wish, are able to move back or around the country. Part of the issue right now is that most departments no longer offer funding for geographical location changes – so an MOD civil servant working in Glasgow would have to self fund every part of a move to Portsmouth.

This may be fine as a one off, but if you are building a career model where you want people to move jobs and roles regularly, you need to create the means for them to do so. Very few staff can afford to move house every two years, so they are effectively locked into their local areas to work.

This means that civil service sites have become increasingly localised, with staff drawn from the local area, or gaps borne when it isn’t possible to find the right recruit. In London terms it means that staff stay put and work in London because they know that if you sell your house and move out of London, you’ll never be able to afford to get back on the London property ladder. Why move and disrupt the family life forever, particularly if you have young children, if you don’t need to?

This means that rustification will work, but thought needs to be given to how to keep the jobs market fluid – otherwise all you are doing is creating a one time move that then beds down departments in their new areas and essentially creates lots of mini London’s, and reduces staff and social mobility as a result.

The final challenge facing any move from London is perhaps the one that the Civil Service is least able to control. That is the challenge of persuading their Ministers to move from London to spend more time with their departments.

Ministers instinctively are torn between three great priorities in life – the need to lead their department, the need to work with their party in the Palace of Westminster and the need to spend time on their constituency affairs too. It is perhaps one of the great and most grounding features of the Westminster system that every MP, no matter what great office of state they hold, still acts first and foremost as a constituency MP.

But the ties to Westminster are strong – Ministers want to be close to the corridors of power and the Commons where backroom deals, political shenanigans and other murky activity goes on. If they are removed from it for too long then they are out of the loop and potentially dangerously exposed to all manner of problems.

More widely there is value in having Ministers close to the Commons – many is the potential political hot potato that can be defused by having the Minister invite an MP in for a quiet chat with officials, or maybe a few discrete words in the margins of a vote or debate – there is real value in this in helping prevent many issues become problems thanks to well timed interventions.

Ministers also play a role in both leading debates, responding to debates and voting too – they need to be close to Whitehall for this. Few Ministers want to enter the bearpit of the commons without being briefed by their civil servants, and if you are responding to an Urgent Question, then you could need to be briefed quickly in order to go to the dispatch box.

What this means though is that for all the talk of wanting the Civil Service to leave London, Ministers themselves will not want to leave Westminster. It is impractical for their role, and they will be reluctant to isolate themselves for too long away from the nerve centre of their operations.

The biggest blocker to moving the Civil Service out of London is, paradoxically, likely to be politicians. Once it is realised how difficult it will be to be a Minister in the cities of the UK and a politician in Westminster, then many are likely to seek to base themselves in Whitehall.

In turn this will lead to demands for staff to brief them, for private offices to be based near them and for the machinery of government to support them in Whitehall and not in the regions where their departments are based.

It is possible to change this behaviour, but it requires reform of Westminster and not Whitehall to deliver. For example, permitting Ministers to vote remotely, particularly when Governments have small majorities and contentious votes would make a big difference. Removing the need of a Minister to be in the Commons to vote would revolutionise the ability to do their job, as they could now be away from London and still support the Government.

Similarly, allowing the ability to use technology to take questions remotely and answer them, rather than being at the dispatch box would also change significantly how the Civil Service could work. If Ministers don’t need to be in London, then moving departments becomes much easier as the need to be near Westminster has, at a push, been removed.

We would be naïve to assume that Whitehall will not remain the centre of power, but sending the civil service out to the regions is entirely doable. But to make it a success requires a combination of both change to how the Civil Service is employed and operates, and far more critically requires Ministers and Westminster to fundamentally change their approach too. If the latter is not forthcoming then it is hard to see how the former can succeed.