In shocking detail, one ex-mandarin describes a culture where no one is accountable, sick days are off the scale and unions block any reform.
Last week, Neil O’Brien, who is leading the Tories’ work on policy development, shone a much-needed spotlight on one of the key drivers of appalling productivity in the public sector: Whitehall’s refusal to tackle underperformance.
O’Brien revealed that in the Department for Transport, for example, you’re 12 times more likely to die in your job than be removed from it for poor performance. O’Brien’s findings – gleaned from over 150 parliamentary questions – are shocking but not surprising, at least to me.
Front row seat
I saw these problems for myself over more than a decade as an official at the Foreign Office. I left the Civil Service earlier this month after several years serving as a senior diplomat in Russia and in Israel. During my time in Whitehall I had a front row seat as officials – good and bad – were promoted through the ranks, not based on performance, but on an ability to meet meaningless criteria set out in corporate gobbledegook. The experience was depressing but highly revealing. It showed me why the state is so ineffective.
In Whitehall, there is a pernicious combination of benefit-of-the-doubt and lax management. Take absence for supposed ill health. We have long known that rates of sickness absence in the Civil Service are more than twice the level in the private sector (driven, unsurprisingly, by mental health complaints).