Are civil service leaders competent?

Are the Civil Service's top mandarins competent?  Two strong pieces of evidence suggest that they have a reputation for incompetence among those who deal most closely with them.  Another suggests that this reputation is deserved.  Re-visiting Lord Fulton's seminal 1968 report on civil service competence suggests why.

The UK Commons Public Accounts Committee reports on the civil service.  At its last review, the Committee concluded: "The confidence reported by staff in departments’ boards and senior leadership has been improving but is still low."  Those who know the mandrins best have little confidence in their leaders.

Coalition ministers clearly arrived thinking mandarins lack management skills.  Despite resistance from senior civil servants, one of the coalition's first acts was to try to bring experienced private sector leaders into the so-called boards of government departments in order to inject management skills into the top of the civil service. 

Now there is evidence that this reputation for incompetence is justified.  It comes from a recent lecture by Professor Van Reenen of the LSE, as reported by Tim Harford.  Van Reenen evaluated management competence in a double-blind survey based on 8000 interviews.  A striking conclusion was that government-run companies rank right at the bottom of management quality tables.  As Tim Harford put it, "David Brent is alive and working in Whitehall".

Depressingly, this is not a new phenomenon.  As long ago as 1968, the Fulton Report characterised the upper reaches of the civil service as based on the cult of the clever, classically educated amateur. 

Lord Fulton made two important recommendations.  The first was to provide management training for the civil service's policy-makers.  Whilst civil servants do get management training, the evidence suggests there is a continuing systemic failure of the civil service to deliver good management.

Secondly, the Report recommended that scientists and engineers should be given more training and responsibility in management and policy spheres (Chapter 1 para 17 on page 12).  

There has been a total failure here.  Over forty years on, only two of the 42 permanent secretaries that lead the UK's Civil Service have science or engineering degrees.  Only two more have degree level numeracy.   The nearest the UK Treasury's policy-making Executive Management Group has to a scientist is one person with a maths degree.  (Source: Cabinet Office and Treasury FoI answers).  

This failure explains two weaknesses in government policy-making.  Firstly, senior mandarins as a class are scientifically ignorant to an extent that should make them blush.  This makes them vulnerable to stupid mistakes because they have no independent basis for knowing where to probe any subject that has scientific content.  A cadre of specialist scientists is no substitute for mandarins who, collectively, are not scientifically ignorant.

Secondly, the lack of science training amongst mandarins has excluded the scientific culture and way of thinking from the civil service leadership.  The civil service leadership is deprived of the evidence-based culture and rigour that imbues those with a good science education.  This evidence-seeking rigour can be uncomfortable, but it is highly desirable.  

It seems clear that the Civil Service has no intention of developing scientists and engineers to fill the highest levels. This is probably because it does not recognise its own weakness.  A recent FoI answer states "There is no strategy or policy that has been pursued by the Civil Service (either at present or in the last five years), to ensure that current and potential permanent secretaries are selected to ensure a certain distribution of academic backgrounds amongst this group." 

The civil service leadership needs to improve.  Its is notoriously resistant to change as the abiding image of Sir Humphrey reminds us.  It will take a determined government to change civil service culture.  

Political leaders could do worse than resurect Lord Fulton's report because forty years on, its diagnosis still seems to fit. They should commission a small group, well balanced between science and arts graduates, to revisit the Civil Service's culture and competence.  

And in the meantime, they should set the Civil Service Commissioners the objective of making scientific ignorance as embarassing to mandarins as ignorance of literature, history, politics or the rhetorical arts.

Postcript: You will find a recent piece by Richard Bacon MP here.

Anthony Fitzsimmons

www.reputability.co.uk


Anthony Fitzsimmons is Chairman of Reputability LLP and, with the late Derek Atkins, author of “Rethinking Reputational Risk: How to Manage the Risks that can Ruin Your Business, Your Reputation and You”