Leaving On a Jet Plane, I Don't Know When I'll be Back in Whitehall Again...

 

Over the last few days the news headlines have focused on people being on holiday. According to reports, the Permanent Secretaries of the Home Office, MOD and FCDO were all on leave and did not return to work, despite the emerging crisis in Afghanistan. Is this acceptable, or does this represent Whitehall civil servants letting the nation down at a time of crisis?

The title ‘Permanent Secretary’ is a wonderfully British phrase, implying both permanence and confidence. It oozes the history of a series of grand individuals occupying elegant wood panelled offices, surrounded by a host of Principal Private Secretaries, Private Secretaries and maybe even the odd Secretary who is responsible for making the tea. Its very title epitomises ‘Yes Minister’.

The holder of this post is the most senior Civil Servant in their Department, responsible for leading it and ensuring that their civil servants deliver the policy agenda of the government of the day (or do their utmost to frustrate it depending on who you talk to and how bad a mood they are in). The post holder speaks regularly to Ministers, taking their direction, guidance and ensuring that the machinery of state functions as required.

Does this though mean that come the crisis, they are needed in Whitehall, and should they abandon leave and return to lead the nation through this period? Frankly, no, they should not.

These roles are the heads of Department, and they are extremely important positions – it does not mean that they possess an intimate and direct knowledge of a crisis, or the best way to resolve it personally. Rather they need to rely on their team of experts, highly trained and experienced civil servants whose role is to think about how to resolve these issues and provide advice to Ministers.

Throughout this period Whitehall will have had a lot of people working, having cancelled their leave and ensured they are present to deliver support to the ongoing Kabul situation. Many of these will be extremely senior appointments, for example the FCDO has noted that it has got Directors and Director General (2 & 3* level appointments) working on this issue at their end.

Whitehall is full of policy teams and senior officials who work on these issues daily, and they have direct and intimate knowledge of the issues, and what the art of the possible is. They own the working relationships between departments and foreign governments and are able to take action as necessary to resolve problems.

The role of the Permanent Secretary is not to dive in and direct or control operations like this. It is to provide overall leadership and ensure their department delivers against a range of goals. While they will doubtless want to be informed and kept up to date on issues, there is no pressing operational need to bring them in to lead this.

Instead, the Civil Service response will be handled at working level, with an outstanding team of people of all sorts of ages and backgrounds working together to come up and deliver solutions. They will be providing the written advice, or verbally briefing the Ministers if needed.

There are excellent crisis management and operational response chains in Whitehall – it is always impressive to see how well joint working between Departments occurs in London, in marked contrast to many other Capitals around the world. There are very strong cross departmental links, and joint efforts in place to resolve crises going on, on practically a daily basis across a whole range of issues.

The fact is that the machinery of government is designed for this sort of crisis, and is easily capable of handling it, even during a summer leave period, without needing direct 4* level tactical control of the situation.

A better question to ask, rather than demanding that Perm Secs return from leave, is to work out what operational benefit would be accrued from doing so? Given the teams are stood up and reporting directly to ministers already, and there is cross Government coordination underway through the COBR process, what is the benefit of bringing a Perm Sec into this?

Some will argue that it is about visibility and leadership – but to whom? Given the stratospherically high level that these appointments work at, few Civil Servants at routine working level ever really have much exposure to them, or their offices. They will neither know, nor arguably care, if the Perm Sec is in work or not – it will not directly impact on how they deliver their work.

There is an argument that they should return and be present, to lead the Department through the crisis. To which the response is perhaps ‘if a Permanent Secretary has to break leave and return to physically lead their Department through a NEO, then that implies a fairly serious failure of planning at all levels of their department if it cannot do this without them present’.

This is not to play down the gravity or seriousness of the situation, but the fact is that these roles are not intended to be direct crisis management posts. At best returning adds officialdom and bureaucracy to the response, adding another senior in for consultation, and slowing, not speeding up the response.

Given that Senior Civil Servants are required, under their contracts, to be available for duty 24/7/365 (but no overtime is payable), then it is also certain that wherever they have been on holiday, they will have had access to work IT and spoken to their office on a regular basis.

They may not physically be in the office, but then again most of the Civil Service hasn’t physically been in the office due to COVID for much of the last 18 months – but has still delivered brilliantly. Does a senior official need to physically be present in Whitehall to monitor their teams (particularly given many of these teams are likely to be working virtually anyway), or do we trust them to exercise their role remotely, stepping in when required to do so?

What this comes back to is a question of trust and leadership by delegation. It is highly unlikely that if this crisis were happening in a few weeks time, that the governance structures for it would be any different- the same people would be doing the same work, and the Perm Secs would not be stepping in with a long handled screwdriver.

This is because there is a significant level of delegated autonomy and trust to people in the system, and a recognition that they know what they are doing. Trusting staff, relying on temporary cover through robust and resilient leave cover arrangements and ensuring that people know the extent and limits of their delegated authority is critical here. We talk a lot about empowerment, but this is a good demonstration of it in action – during a crisis the right people have been empowered to lead the response, not wait for a figurehead to return from leave before things happen.

Its been reasonably asked “why not return, get stuck in and roll up sleeves to show that they’re helping out”. That’s a very reasonable challenge – but there are good reasons why it would actually be counter-productive.

The scale of the organisations these individuals lead is huge – the MOD alone employs well over 50,000 civil servants all over the world, and the Perm Sec has responsibility for a budget of tens of billions of pounds. Their role means that they don’t have time to become deep subject matter experts in one specific issue to the depth needed to be credible on it.

Turning up and saying “how can I help” immediately makes things awkward. In a hierarchy, having your ultimate boss sitting next you wanting to be helpful leaves you wondering what work you can give them – they have none of the working relationships, networks or deep knowledge required to push things forward. This means they either need a lot of scarce time to be briefed up to the point they are credible, or they need makework that can be done in the margins. Either way you’ve suddenly got a highly paid individual doing lower level work, that could be done better by others, and making others uncomfortable.

In a hierarchical atmosphere, people will not be hugely comfortable knowing the Perm Sec is there sitting next to them – they’ll be worried about what this means, what does the impact have on them, and how does it disrupt things. The staff working these issues will almost certainly never have met, or know the Perm Sec -they are a distant and remote figure, by necessity.

Its akin to asking an Army platoon sergeant whether he’d like to have a Division Commander stagging on as part of his platoon – lovely idea, but a recipe for chaos and discomfort.

This is also ignoring the problem that very senior people have a lot of responsibilities that won’t stop. While they are doing this crisis, they aren’t doing the work they are paid to do, and potentially causing a lot more disruption – the line “sorry we can’t pass that submission on a major Defence / Foreign / Home policy issue to the Perm Sec because they’re working as a desk officer until further notice” won’t send a brilliant message.

Leadership at times like this isn’t about ‘being seen to be there’. If anything a tired workforce doesn’t want to have to host seniors, as this means preparing briefings, getting ready to host them and the ensuing admin challenges that come from hosting a very senior official or officer.

The “oh no fuss really” line is always ignored because no one wants to host their ultimate boss and look ill prepared in the process. The question then becomes “what is being sacrificed in terms of attention to detail, preparation or output in order to give a briefing to a senior who is ‘just popping in’ for a visit”?

The best outcome for seniors is to stay back a little – be accessible if needed for the big issues – advice on how to do something if required, discrete direction at other times. This can be done by phone, video call or email – you don’t need to be face to face. At an appropriate time, a thank you visit, letter or call makes far more difference when it can be enjoyed, instead of imposing on people who really don’t want you there when they are busy and stressed.

There is a curious aspect to the coverage here – on the one hand the Civil Service is routinely portrayed as a bloated machine, hide bound and full of top heavy officialdom suffocating initiative and decision taking. Yet when a crisis hits, and the teams get on and do their job brilliantly, suddenly things are going wrong because someone who doesn’t need to be there isn’t there. It perhaps confirms that no matter what the Civil Service does, its fundamentally doing it wrong in the eyes of some people.

There is a wider perspective to consider that its not actually that unreasonable to expect that during August people are taking leave. It has been an exceptionally busy period for the Civil Service, handling a wide range of operations, tasks and the COVID response, and at all levels of the system people will naturally want to rest, recover and get ready for the next operation.

Government works on termly cycles, and is tied closely to the Parliamentary recess system. Many Civil Servants take leave in August precisely because Parliament and Ministers are away on leave, and the demands for briefing, or responding to Ministerial or Parliamentary business is at a much lower level than normal.

Short of never taking leave ‘just in case’, which seems a foolhardy policy given you’d end up with an exhausted workforce and morale in the gutter, you have to accept that people take leave. Given the speed of events in Afghanistan, it is not unreasonable to ask what impact having a Permanent Secretary abandon their holiday and return to the office would have had, beyond calming the baying for blood from some quarters of the press.

What really matters here is not whether a Perm Sec is on leave or not. Instead the key issue is whether the cross government operational response is up to scratch and that the Civil Service is delivering what is expected of it. On that front the answer is a resounding yes.

Difficult policy issues, involving complex problems that are not easily fixable have been dealt with quickly and efficiently. A major international operation has been supported, both from London and by civil servants across the country, working hard to ensure the UK response is coherent and effective. Finally many Civil Servants have willingly volunteered to go into Afghanistan to help in a small way to do what they can to assist as part of the wider operation.

Calling this a good news story is a step too far -there is little good news coming out of Afghanistan. But this is a reminder that for all the cheap abuse and insults thrown at the Civil Service, the UK remains served by an incredible group of talented individuals who are doing their utmost to deliver in incredibly difficult circumstances.

We should be grateful for their help, not moaning that someone you’d never heard of, in a job you didn’t know much about, and who you didn’t know was on leave, was still on leave despite returning for reasons you can’t exactly explain. That way lies the dark genius of a Yes Minister quote, not the reality of the Civil Service today.