More Tory Lies

I agree. The civil service by nature needs to have some checks on risk and can't be run like a start-up. Having worked inside Whitehall, and with Whitehall departments, and on the outside, I recognise some of the stuff Cummings talks about.

The first thing people should recognise is that amongst professionals, you get the same type of people inside the civil service as you do outside. Lawyers, scientists, economists (my profession). There is a caricature that you go in the private sector and find creative, driven hard workers and you go in the civil service and everybody is sitting round eating biscuits and browsing the internet all day, which isn't true. The single main difference I observed was more women in senior positions in the civil service, especially a lot of women who had transferred in from the private sector.

I did see some of the inefficiencies that frustrated Cummings. I found there was a body of middle to senior management that seemed to exist to generate work for others to justify its own existence. They were the people who described their job as 'its about asking the right questions', or 'its about commissioning and synthesising work from others' and 'its about keeping others on track'. Worst of all is when people make a virtue out of 'delivering through others'. All too often this meant basically seeking approval from those above them, by creating 'projects' and delegating work down to those below them, then going round senior meetings talking about all the 'outputs' their team was delivering.

I got brought in during a Spending Review, to build a value for money model about a particular spending line that was going to get submitted to the Treasury. In the private sector, this would have been just a classic research project, you have a client, a deadline, you gather evidence, build a model, get some peer review, deliver. Unfortunately inside Whitehall it was infinitely complicated by having to deal with those kind of people I described above. Before we could get started on the project, there was a whole rigmarole about writing a terms of reference, sending it round, getting comments, rewriting, getting sign off. Then we had to set up 'governance procedures', so we had to set up an internal governance board and we had to meet them every 3 weeks and for each board we had to write some papers for them to discuss. Then someone would say 'are we engaging with other government departments on this?' and so we had to set up another governance board which included other departments, with a different set of papers to be written for them. Then we had the internal 'central team' who had been set up to 'keep everyone else on track' and who had their own project meetings every few weeks, who kept asking for slidepacks to be generated showing 'findings so far'.

Now in the private sector, you'd usually keep in touch with the client with updates/questions and asking for their input as and when it was required, and would have a halfway point where you'd give them an interim findings presentation and slidepack, but this was a 6 month project that I think we could have done in 3 in the private sector, but it became really difficult to deliver in 6 months because of all the work we had to do on the side to feed these multiple internal project management processes.

What also annoyed me was that in none of these various governance reporting meetings did we actually have constructive conversations about the detail of the value for money evidence or interested in taking any of it on board to help shape policy decisions. They liked to talk about 'outputs and timescales'. Well, the whole project had a single output and a 6 month timescale, but they were desperate to get 'interim outputs' because they wanted stuff to fill on project trackers to show their own seniors that work was being delivered. We were producing papers for the purpose of having papers, just to tick a box, and when I moaned about it I always got told 'you have to play the game....thats how Whitehall works'. The moment I started trying to engage these people on the detail of the evidence or get them to discuss implications for policy they weren't interested in talking, they just saw this as something that needed to be delivered for the Treasury and didn't much care what it said. They weren't going to change any policy decisions on the back of it.

So although I said its a caricature that civil servants sit around doing nothing, I think there's a cadre of staff there on around £60-70k who have worked out how to play the system, and are on to a cushy number, just generating project management processes that they delegate down to others to service. On the other hand, I found some superb brains, often young staff including a lot of PhD analysts, underpaid, renting in crappy conditions in London, who could produce some real quality work but whose efficiency was being diminished by being diverted away to service this project management crap.

Final gripe on this - when I met project managers in the private sector, they usually had some kind of professional qualification, PRINCE2 or whatever. In the civil service there were all these bloody project managers, they had no formal qualifications for it, they didn't actually provide any leadership in to the projects, they just said to others 'draw up a gantt chart to show me your planned timescales', 'send me a slidepack showing me where you're up to', printed them all out and attended senior meetings with evidence that they had kept stuff on track. They wouldn't engage in any problem solving or talk about what members of a project team needed to do or how they should do it, they just kicked all of the grappling with the detail to those lower down the chain and saw their job as 'holding them accountable'. Nice way to earn £60k.

Now in the interests of balance, I saw a lot of crap in the private sector that I didn't see in Whitehall. In the private sector I seemed to spend a lot of my time 'selling my services', filling out bids for work, networking with clients to try and get work from them. In Whitehall work just gets thrown at you. Also there are a lot of toxic cultures in the private sector that you don't get in Whitehall....the pressure to drink and take clients out, the abuse of the company credit card for expenses, the little cheap cost-cutting tricks to fleece clients to show your bosses that you were hitting your project 'profit mark up' targets. I found a lot more toxic gossip and internal politics and people stabbing others in the back to get ahead in the private sector, in the civil service that didn't seem to happen.

Also, in private sector economic consultancy you get a cadre of seniors who spend all day tweeting, writing blogs, going to events as a 'panel speaker', acting as talking heads for Sky News as an 'expert' and literally do no work, other than sticking themselves down for 1 day work on every project bid at a £2500 a day rate and being very expensive proof readers. In the civil service the Chief Economists and whatever do a lot more meaningful and constructive work than that and get paid less. There were some very impressive people high up in the senior civil service.

So I am not arguing for the superiority of private v public sector....but I understand Cummings frustrations with the inefficiencies of the Whitehall machine and I can see what he means when he says you could cut a huge chunk of staff out and make it more efficient. What I fear from Cummings is that he will leave Whitehall in charge of making its own redundancies and 'the system' will protect itself and force out good people at the bottom. And also he might get involved in a war on 'flexi-time' to appease the tabloids that he was being tough on lazy Remainers. Of all the problems I found in Whitehall, things like job shares or staff being able to work from home was not a problem for me.