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 other issue is the level that the military will enter at and the training risk they’ll bring. The subject of ‘equivalent grade’ has been done to death over the years and is an interminably dull subject, but on this occasion its important. If the scheme to enter the CS is centrally administered, will personnel only be able to apply at their ‘equivalent grade’ (e.g. an OF5 can apply to become a Grade 7) – such a decision would result in a rapid loss of interest when experienced military officers discover they’d be given less responsibility and a lot less money and would be ‘career fouling’ themselves to do such a move. At the same time if they are permitted to apply for any role, why would a good Major who lands a G7 role then want to move back to the Army as a Major in years to come?  If you get used to working at a certain level of responsibility and span of control, being expected to step back from that and return to the status quo isn’t easy and may be seen as a career negative move. Careful thinking will be needed to strike a balance that enables military personnel to enter the Civil Service in an appropriate role, but which doesn’t undermine the centuries old ‘equivalent rank’ system (which functions as a tool of sign off and reporting authority) and which also doesn’t damage either military or civilian careers.

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!