You can often tell when things have gone awry in an organisation, when its top brass calls for a return to the shop floor.

It happened in Tesco in 2014, when chief executive Dave Lewis ordered hundreds of managers down to the shop floor to deal with disgruntled customers. The concept even spawned an entire reality TV series, Back to the Floor, in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

But the idea has not, so far, been widespread in the civil service. It’s true that in 2007 and again in 2008, Sir Leigh Lewis, then head of the Department for Work and Pensions, had a dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus (or, in his case, in a jobcentreplus), leading many of his managers back to the floor as part of a plan to deal with “disappointing results” in the departmental staff survey.

That plan didn’t seem to prompt any greater appetite among senior civil servants for a spell on the frontline. Perhaps they should think again. There are two statistics that leap out from the Institute for Government thinktank’s latest report on making civil servants more professional. They suggest a return to the shop floor – or the jobcentre, or border control at Heathrow – is long overdue in some parts of the civil service.

One statistic is right at the start of the report. It shows that 54% of all civil servants – so that’s more than 200,000 staff – work on operational delivery. They process benefit claims, run prisons or carry out immigration checks. Only 17,800 civil servants are policy specialists, and a mere 3,950 are in analytics.

The second figure comes at the end of the report. It shows that of the permanent secretaries who head the main civil service departments, almost all – 14 – have spent most of their careers in policy and analytics. Only two – two! – have spent their careers in operational delivery.

That mismatch is highlighted by the report, which notes that expertise in policy has been the traditional Whitehall route to permanent secretary level. There is, even now, a snobberyabout frontline delivery that runs like a stick of rock through the civil service. Policy is seen as the cerebral bit of the civil service. The report notes some exceptions, with specialists like Jon Thompson (finance) at HMRC, Richard Heaton (legal) at the Ministry of Justice, and civil service chief executive John Manzoni (project delivery) at the Cabinet Office, but on the whole, delivery, it’s implied, is for those who can’t, quite, make it to the top.

It’s stuff and nonsense like this that is holding back the civil service. That’s not quite spelled out in this report, which instead focuses laudably on the technical aspects of making the civil service more professional. The report’s authors, Julian McRae and Dr Jen Gold, say that developing specialist skills is vital if the government is to successfully negotiate the complex challenges it faces. They point out that major government projects, including universal credit, have struggled because departments lacked specialist areas of expertise, such as contract management or the design of digital services.

The report calls for sensible changes, including clear funding for specialist areas, such as project management and finance. It wants the civil service to pull together the reform agendas of each specialism, with Manzoni playing a bigger role, and it calls for more stable funding for specialist teams, such as the team dedicated to improving legal quality, or the team working on improving the financial capabilities of the civil service.

But big cultural change is still badly needed in the civil service, if it is to implement the report’s main recommendations: to integrate specialisms better into departmental decision-making, and enable those specialists to reach top leadership positions. The need is urgent as the huge task of managing Brexit looms over all of Whitehall.



Lewis, his civil service career behind him, is now chair of the alcohol education charity, Drinkaware, vice-chair of the homelessness charity, St Mungo’s Broadway, and is a visiting fellow at Greenwich University Business School, as well as holding non-executive roles at Aviva and PriceWaterhouseCoopers. But if the present crop of permanent secretaries do want some advice on what can be learned from going back to the floor – even if for some of them, the floor is a place they have barely visited – he could probably give them some good advice. Pro bono, of course.

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