Has The Civil Service Changed Significantly Since 1979? Is Further Radical Change Desirable?

Simon Ball The Changing Face Of The Civil Service

For most of the latter half of the twentieth century, the popular image of the British Civil Service has been the inefficient, conservative, and self-interested Whitehall Mandarin so ably satirised by the “Yes, Minister” and “Yes, Prime Minister” television programmes. Ironically, at the time these programmes were produced, the Civil Service was undergoing major changes, and actually had never had less in common with its screen image. The Civil Service has changed considerably since 1979, and the process of change is continuing into the new century.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the British civil service has dramatically increased in size, reflecting the ever-increasing range of responsibilities undertaken by government. Though numbering a relatively small 116,00 in 1901, the service quickly increased in size as the welfare state expanded, reaching a peacetime peak of 747,000 by 1975. Today, in 2002, the service stands at around 460,000 – a 40% drop in numbers. However, though the New Right often speaks of “small government”, it is not immediately obvious that there has been any significant reduction in the services that the British people expect the state to provide. How, therefore, has the Civil Service changed so as to make such a large reduction in numbers practical?

In some ways the British Civil Service remains more or less unchanged – it is still a permanent professional, hierarchical organisation, charged with the administration of government and the implementation of policy. Though the distinction between politics and administration is slightly blurred at the top, the Civil Service is also, for the most part, anonymous and non-partisan. However, these Weberian ideals are the foundation of any government bureaucracy, and therefore cannot be changed without fundamentally altering the very nature of the Civil Service. Nevertheless, the most single important characteristic of the Weberian ideal is that a bureaucracy should be efficient. It is the basic idea of increasing the efficiency of government activity that lies at the heart of all of the changes in the Civil Service since 1979.

Most observers regarded the British civil service as “the best in the world” for many years. However, by the 1960’s, there was increasing criticism of both the efficiency and effectiveness of the civil service, culminating in the 1968 Report of the Fulton Committee. The Fulton Report is often seen as a landmark in the modern history of the Civil Service. Though the report was by no means original in itself – it was not the first major official report on the service, and academic criticism of the Civil Service had been going on for decades – the depth of its attack was unprecedented, and it provided a focus for subsequent reform efforts. However, though the general thrust of the report reflected the prevailing mood among commentators at the time, and was accepted by the then Labour government, relatively little action was taken on the basis of the report for the next decade. The House of Commons Expenditure Committee concluded in 1977 that there had not been a determined effort to implement the Fulton recommendations, suggesting that the Civil Service had not taken them seriously.

The Thatcher government was elected in 1979 on a manifesto to reduce public expenditure and the role of the state. Government policy towards the public sector was to realise substantial economies by reducing waste, bureaucracy and “over-government”. Greatly expanding on the Fulton Report, Thatcher maintained that senior officials spent too much time attempting to influence policy, and too little on actually managing their departments efficiently, and were woefully lacking in managerial skills. The Thatcher government placed an almost religious emphasis on the importance of improving both efficiency and effectiveness, and initiated a series of measures aimed at creating a “slimmer and fitter civil service”.

The broad aim of increasing efficiency encompasses two basic ideas. The first is reducing the scale of the Civil Service through efficiency measures; the second is reducing the scope of the service through privatisation. Prior to 1979, an enormous number of economic activities and social services were provided directly by the state. Under this system, anybody who worked for the government was technically a civil servant, even dustmen and dockworkers! Since the Thatcher government came to power, however, the state has shifted to become a procurer of services rather than a direct provider. The scale of the Thatcher privatisation initiative was unprecedented - all of the nationalised industries were ultimately sold to the private sector, while many government services were contracted out to private firms, many of which took on staff who had previously been on the government payroll. Even within the bureaucracy itself, certain functions have been contracted out to private firms, such as computer maintenance and building security. Though much of this activity was motivated by the New Right idea that the private sector does everything better, certain reforms were undertaken on the practical grounds that providing support services is a distraction from the main task of an organisation, and is best left in the hands of specialists.

The first major change under the Thatcher efficiency drive was the Financial Management Initiative (FMI), formally launched in 1982. This programme had the major aim of installing a system to provide managers with accurate measures of the cost of their activities, the resources they utilised, and the performance of their departments, in terms of objectives met. Accurate data on inputs and outputs is a foundation requirement for assessing the performance of any system and the lack of basic statistical and financial information available to managers had hitherto represented an insurmountable obstacle to increasing efficiency. A more decentralised style of ...