Johnny Luk was the 2024 Conservative Parliamentary Candidate for Milton Keynes Central and Head of Public Affairs at Cast from Clay. 

The Civil Service has been back in the media lately – very much not where officials like to be. The mighty bureaucracy elicits strong feelings. Is it a bulwark of stability that keeps the state ticking or a barrier stopping progress?

Kemi Badenoch has frequently spoken about the need to rewire how the government works to serve the public better. Likewise, after just five months in office, even bureaucrat-in-chief Keir Starmer has decided to have a go, accusing civil servants of being “comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”.

While civil servants may lament being a convenient punching bag for their political masters, their performance is vital, acting as the transmission that turns ministerial direction into action—the literal levers of power. So, if they are underperforming, something needs to change.

The Civil Service sprawls across 44 departments, 421 agencies, and other public bodies, staffed by over half a million people. This size demonstrates just how big of a role the state has in our lives. Actual change will take serious imagination and willpower, and there are questions about whether the quango-loving Labour Party can rise to the challenge. Pat McFadden’s response at the Cabinet Office has been tepid so far, with reheated initiatives like private sector secondments rebranded rather too dramatically as ‘Tours of Duty’.

So, what can make a difference to ensure more effective delivery and better efficiency for taxpayers’ money? There’s potential for reforming policy development.

Policy development is dominated by civil servants in ‘central departments,’ mostly in Westminster.

In practice, this means a small army crafting the perfect ‘sub,’ a concise note for ministers, often through a painstaking process to get it into the red box for ministerial review or decision. Others man the private office or work on consultations, stakeholder management, media relations, and the economic and statistical analyses that underpin policy with data.

Areas of potential reforms could include:

• More experimental approaches to policymaking, such as regulatory ‘sandboxes’ and policy hackathons. These methods encourage innovation, real-world testing, and faster adaptation of new ideas. This happens on occasion but remains piecemeal and inconsistent. For such methods to succeed, we must be more forgiving when trials do not go as planned and move at a faster pace to correct issues.
• More inclusive consultations. It is essential to engage a broader spread of voices, not just the usual well-resourced businesses and pressure groups. Departments need to be better at seeking out new perspectives, particularly from underrepresented groups. This includes drawing from MPs, councils, and even technology to go beyond the existing mailing lists.
• External expertise at more senior levels. Injecting private-sector talent through secondments can be helpful and needs to continue but occurs too often at junior levels to influence substantial change. While there are established routes for graduates like the Fast Stream (which I also went through many years ago), there should also be structured pathways for senior professionals to join the Civil Service permanently and enable the shaping of substantial Directorates. UK Government Investments (UKGI) provides a good example, with its staff predominantly drawn from the private sector, offering corporate finance expertise, although this only succeeds because of their relative autonomy for flexible job titles and competitive pay.
• More percolation between policy and delivery teams. There needs to be a closer relationship between those who design policy and those who deliver it. While McFadden has nodded to this with secondments, more can be done to expand partnerships, including co-designing policy in the same room. Local government officers—though not technically civil servants—also play a crucial role in delivering services and likely have better connections to people on the ground. They could be involved in this process too.

Improving Operational Performance

The other major role of the Civil Service is operational: delivering the actual policies. These officials vastly outnumber policy-focused staff and dominate people-facing departments like HMRC, the Ministry of Justice (prisons), the Home Office (border enforcement), and the Department for Work and Pensions (job centres). Operational roles have a closer resonance with the business world, focusing on practical management.

Operational reforms should focus on:

• Empowering strong, accountable leadership. Just as Free Schools give headteachers greater autonomy, operational roles need dynamic CEOs who understand performance management. These leaders should have control over budgets, pay bands, and staffing in exchange for greater public accountability and consequences for poor performance.
• Providing the right incentives. Perhaps innovation or efficiencies that genuinely save taxpayers’ money should be incentivised? These savings would need to be measured over time to avoid creating perverse incentives. We need to remove the pressure to ‘spend all the budget’ for fear of not getting the same amount the year after.

Sometimes progress is out of the hands of officials. Policy civil servants have roles where performance can be hard to measure, especially if ministers keep changing their minds, get sacked, or are too slow with their red boxes. Officials often focus on processes rather than outcomes.

Without the right ministerial drive, stagnation dominates. It’s easier to overprepare for Parliamentary Questions rather than flush out bold decisions. Ministers (perhaps less so if they are Lords) also face time constraints as part-time operators, balancing government roles with constituency responsibilities. This dual role has strengths, such as maintaining a close connection to voters, but it also highlights the need for a streamlined and effective support system within departments.

Conclusion

None of this is easy. Turning around the super tanker that is the Civil Service requires relentless effort, innovation, and political will. But the stakes couldn’t be higher. Effective reform isn’t just about creating better policies, but about preserving public trust in our institutions.

Perhaps we are all overthinking it. Maybe the Government is simply doing too much and the easier answer is to just shrink the headcount, especially on the policy side. After all, returning money to the pockets of voters might well be more effective than an overly complicated policy on delivering economic growth.

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