Brecon Chop or Whitehall Wave? Should The Military Join the Civil Service?
Should
serving military personnel be permitted to transfer across to the Civil Service
to ensure their skills are of value to the nation? This is the simple premise
of an idea floated by No10 ahead of next weeks defence paper. Its an
interesting idea but one that promises to be far more complex than it may first
appear.
At the moment the three armed services are essentially isolated silos, generally entered only by bottom up recruitment and where lateral entry is, regrettably, all but impossible. It is theoretically possible to change Service and is done surprisingly regularly, but once you have left regular service, you are out of the system. There is no means to cross over from the Armed Services to the Civil Service, which operates on a totally different career structure and terms of employment. The Prime Minister seems to be promoting an idea that would allow serving personnel to essentially ‘zig zag’ between the military and civil service, enabling them to pursue one career without being penalised for doing so. On paper this could work well, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The
first issue is that military personnel work in a strictly managed career path
and their roles are managed centrally. While at more senior levels it is
possible to express interest in and in some very senior roles, even be
interviewed for a military post, by and large military personnel have their
career postings managed to meet the needs of the Service. Cynics may argue that
this will vary from ‘hand picked and carefully selected throughout their career
to be the next CGS’, through to ‘name hand picked out of a wizards sorting
hat to fill an augmentation role ranked ranged OR3 – OF5, DV and pulse reqd,
pulse optional’. In other words, for every good appointment that makes
sense, there are others that make sense only to people who are very, very drunk…
As peoples careers develop an element of succession planning comes into the mixture
– the career managers plot will show the NCO and SNCO posts that need to be
filled years out and people can be posted to learn the skills and experience to
do them. This is great if everyone stays in and fills those jobs, but if they leave, it can in turn
leave a gaping hole for the career manager to fill.
If
you leave the Service to enter the Civil Service then you have created a gap in
the career plot that may or may not be filled downstream. It will potentially prove
a real headache for appointers who lose an SNCO to go to the NHS for 2 years as
a Civil Servant and whose return is uncertain – do you treat it as you would
maternity cover and wait for them to return and bear the plot gap? How do you
manage the skills they’ve acquired while away – a returning service person will
not unreasonably expect to be recognised for the experience they’ve gained while
outside, so do you raise OJARs on them and promote as a ‘shadow promotion’ or do
they come back in at the same rank, with their experience ignored? The former
is an administrative headache as it may promote people into slots they’ll never
take up (increasing resentment from those serving who weren’t picked), while
the latter will act as a brake on anyone wanting to return – why come back to a
system that won’t recognise the person you’ve become?
The
next challenge is how do you appoint people – is the assumption that applicants
will apply for Civil Service jobs alongside others and if appointed arrange to
leave? This is fine if you can be released from the military with 4 weeks
notice, but in reality the armed forces may refuse to let you go for many
months, making extraction to the new role difficult. No recruiter bearing a gap
in the Civil Service will hold a vacancy open for 12 months on the off chance a
military person can be released from service to fill the new role. But if you
leave the armed forces then join the Civil Service, are you still eligible for
the ‘zig zag’ career as you’ll be a service leaver?
Another challenge is how do you manage opportunity for existing Civil Servants who will, not unreasonably, expect to be allowed to compete for the key jobs in their department. There are two recruiting stages for the Civil Service – internal and external. The vast majority of posts are competed externally where anyone can apply for them. But others are only for existing CS – if these are opened up to the armed forces, such a move would reduce career development opportunities for the Civil Service if military personnel kept being appointed to these roles. Such a move would be detrimental to morale and generate ill-feeling among many, particularly as this would be a one way opportunity – there is no chance, for example, of a Civil Servant being able to apply for a post like CO of an Army Regiment. Why should the same apply in reverse and open the CS’s most prized roles to the armed forces when they will never allow the reverse to happen?
The
issue is that of talent and career management. One of the key complaints of
Ministers is the rapid turnover of staff in the Civil Service. Now the root of
this rapid turnover lies in two factors – firstly the decision to move to a generalist
career model where all CS need to be generalists to get promoted, so they need
to move regularly to prove their suitability for higher grades. Such a move has
generated a merry go round of staff as they scramble to fill random jobs in order
to be able to apply for promotion jobs in specialist areas. In the eyes of the
current career model, generalist good, specialist bad. The other challenge is that the pay structure
is so appallingly poor for most civil servants that they move regularly between
departments in a ‘Hunger Games’ style event to jump between areas where there
is pay disparity to top their salary up. For example the Grade 6 salary in one
major Government department is banded so that the ‘top earners’ in the band
earn less than a Grade 6 would earn on appointment in another major department.
This results in staff moving regularly to keep their salaries vaguely at a
level where they can afford the luxuries in life, like heating electricity and water
bills. After the decision in 2010 to save money by cancelling pay progression
(e.g. the longer you stay in grade the more your salary increases to reflect your
experience), staff have no incentive to stay anywhere for any length of time as
they are financially penalised in real terms. The constant eroding of salary against
inflation and the lack of meaningful payrises for well over a decade means most
Civil Servants are, in real terms, significantly underpaid. What all of this
means is that military staff entering the Civil Service would do so without meaningful
career management and would essentially ‘bed block’ a role that others would
hope to do. The result is that the junior staff member you’d like to appoint to
the role to gain experience to go on and become an expert elsewhere is suddenly
without a job and you know you’ll have a gap in 2 years time when the military
person leaves.
The
wider question is that of pay and why would any military person want to join
the Civil Service given the scale of the pay cut they would be expected to take?
There is a growing disparity between military and civil service pay – the average
SCS1 grade (Civil Service 1* level) earns around £75,000 per year without any
housing, ‘x factor’, travel home allowances and so on and contributes around 8.35%
of their salary to their pension. An Army Lieutenant Colonel on appointment earns
£78,594 per year, plus allowances, very subsidised housing / service
accommodation and a non-contributory pension. Yes the two compensation packages
reflect the very different career requirements and expectations, but it also
flags the significant disparity in the system.
Why
would a good Lieutenant Colonel take a £35- £40,000 pay cut to become an SEO in
the Civil Service and also lose all their career benefits? If you look to the
wider problem of how to enable other ranks to join, an Army Sergeant earns about
£41,000 per year on appointment – the same as an SEO, but has no equivalent
level of Civil Service analogous grade due to the differences in career
structure. However you look at it, anyone from the military joining the Civil
Service will either be expected to take an enormous pay cut or generate huge
anger from Civil Servants if they retain their pay rates while being employed
as a Civil Servant as even the more ‘junior’ will still be the highest paid on most
teams. This also raises the awkward question of who is footing the paybill at
times like this – will the receiving department be expected to pay SCS wages
for an SEO when such a move would fund two ‘normal’ SEO’s?
This is where the real challenge is in implementing this idea – you cannot easily plug in the military into the civil service system without causing significant pay challenges. You also raise the problem of transient military, who will emerge into the system for two-three years and then go again – yes they’ll bring a good knowledge of the military, but will they also cause disruption as they will represent a considerable training and ‘deprogramming’ burden. Its not difficult to imagine the chaos that could be caused by a mid-career SO1 insisting their civil service team writes in JSP101 format and generates expectations of output and office culture that are at odds with how the Civil Service works. The author has seen first hand the damage inflicted when military appointees in civil service teams fail to recognise that the ‘Brecon Chop’ is not a management technique that many respond well to in Civvy Street…
There
are two final points to consider. Firstly what happens when the military person
wishes to rejoin the armed forces. Will they have been career fouled or will
there be some form of recognition about their achievements and outputs that helps
promote them? While re-entry is not technically difficult, there may be challenges
in extracting from one career stream and rejoining another. The returnee may
well face resistance if promoted and will potentially find their position
damaged as a result – particularly by those who’ve had to be crash drafted to
cover the gap generated by their departure.
The
other issue is the thorny one of why the armed forces continue to adamantly
insist that no one could possibly do their job or understand their world unless
they enter as a junior and progress, but then equally asserting that its fine
for them to parachute in as a total outsider into the Civil Service in a
relatively senior role and start out from scratch. Surely for this to work it
has to apply both ways?
If
we apply the logic that the skilled people in the military moving to the Civil
Service are filling roles because of their knowledge, then the same must be
true in reverse. Why couldn’t an NHS ambulance driver or an FCDO policy official
use their specialist skills in the armed forces in the right job and level? Why
not let Civil Servants come in and do 2 years as a regular military officer for
a specific tour and then leave – essentially you could ‘job swap’ and swap people
around to broaden their experience. What is it about the life of a military
staff officer that NEEDS the ability to have 20 years of experience behind you?
Why not post Civil Servants into the armed forces – its easy enough to do a crash
course in military life and basic skills (the Reserves do it all the time), and
let them spend time working as a Staff Officer. There would need to be some caveats
– no one is suggesting that an outsider could command a Guards Bn or warship,
but there are plenty of jobs in the armed forces that are essentially uniformed
administration roles. Why not let them be filled by Civil Servants who don’t want
to join the Reserves, but who do want to experience military life? Such a move
would raise understanding of the armed forces and inject fresh thinking and
talent into what could politely be described as a deeply insular, closed world
that is suspicious of outsiders who aren’t local enough.
It
would be a shame if something didn’t materialise in terms of a genuine two-way
street – the military could offer a great deal to the Civil Service in terms of
different thinking and innovation and exposure to different worlds. In return
the Civil Service attached to the armed forces could help them think differently
and understand how to do things differently – for example, it is unlikely that
the Civil Service would tolerate the current policy in the Royal Navy of staff having
to check their ‘app’ to see if they’ve been promoted or not rather than by
their chain of command. Instead the Civil Service usually tells people in
person the good news on one of the biggest days of their career. Perhaps they
could give the RN a lesson in people leadership and help the RN scrap the promotion
app?
Its
difficult to predict how this experiment will work. It sounds impressive on
paper but the road to hell is paved with good policy ideas that were never
implemented. Hopefully some good will come of this – if a properly managed and
integrated career path of ‘servant to the nation’ was developed then it may
help retain skills and experienced people for longer, but it is likely to be
fiendishly difficult to deliver. What is likely to happen is that it will be
announced with much fanfare and then quietly never implemented due to the sheer
complexity of doing so. The only certainty about this idea is that it has guaranteed
to run on the ‘equivalent rank’ debate for another 100 years!
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