Brexit is not proving to be the civil service’s finest hour. Leaderless, smarting under pay restraint and previous job cuts, Whitehall is muddling through by relying on its worst instincts, to keep its head down (why bother speaking truth to power, when power is a bunch of squabbling, self-centred ideologues?); mind its back (departmental – and career – interests come first); ignore, downplay and allow ministers like David Davis to make statements about evidence that invite utter incredulity.

Civil servants are acting as though it’ll be all right on the night, with no prioritisation of Brexit tasks, and no strategy for what lies beyond.

Don’t blame us, says the FDA, the union for senior civil servants, blame austerity. Philip Hammond’s largesse in the budget doesn’t extend to giving civil servants a pay rise or remedying job cuts. Whitehall doctrine says civil servants can only ever be as good as the ministers they serve and when the cabinet is riven, uncertain, duplicitous, why should officials try to hold things together or cover the yawning gaps in policy?

Whitehall is keeping careful notes for when the Brexit reckoning comes | David Walker Read more

Perhaps it’s unfair to blame the head of the civil service for his invisibility. Sir Jeremy Heywood hasn’t been well and his day job, cabinet secretary to an ailing and dysfunctional cabinet, is stressful enough. But he might at least have commissioned one of his fellow permanent secretaries to make some public show of leadership, acknowledging the stresses and strains, perhaps responding to the successive interventions by Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, alarmed at departmental mayhem and system-wide lack of capacity.

Unfair, also, to single out the civil service when parliament hasn’t exactly covered itself with glory with its incoherent voting over Brexit, let alone its failure to organise overview and scrutiny and stop committees in the Commons and the Lords covering the same ground. High irony that the most trenchant criticism of lack of strategy in Whitehall has come from an MP, Bernard Jenkin, who is one of the most obdurate of the entirely strategy-less Brexiteers.

The civil service could, however, still redeem itself.

One way would be to realise that the chaos of Brexit may be the new norm. In a new report the OECD coins the acronym Vuca: civil servants are fated to live and deal with volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. More than ever before they need to escape silo working and learn – in Whitehall that would mean fluid sharing of knowledge and people between departments and expanding those functions (such as digital and commercial services) that try to seed and cross-fertilise.

The second path to redemption is honesty about Brexit. Public honesty, that is. Come next spring, permanent secretaries, especially in the business department and the Home Office, must make big decisions about spending to prepare for a messy UK exit. Legislative cover is patchy; ministers are close to the edge. The Institute for Government warns they may be tempted into short-circuiting due process. In such circumstances permanent secretaries must seek letters of direction, to alert the NAO. So far they have been extraordinarily reluctant to blow the whistle in this way.

Some have shown limited candour. HMRC’s Jon Thompson admitted the big tax transformation project would have to be shelved so he could cope with Brexit. David Bolt, chief inspector of borders and immigration, told MPs the Home Office simply had to get more bodies in if the task of registering EU nationals were to get anywhere near accomplishment.

Bernard Jenkin's attack shows his hatred of Europe has got the better of him | David Walker Read more

But such instances are rare, showing how the civil service has not really come to terms with the recent improvement in scrutiny by parliament. Are tight-lipped performances by permanent secretaries really serving the public interest?

Brexit has, so far, been remarkable for the absence of leaks. Indeed civil servants have gone dismayingly far in the other direction and are complicit in failing to put into the public domain impact assessments and other evidence.

Don’t Whitehall’s professional statisticians and economists feel anything as Davis effectively junks accuracy and truthseeking? That may conform to the narrow definition of the job – protecting the interests of incumbent minister - but is that all civil service professionalism amounts to?

Brexit shows it’s time for a radical rethink of Whitehall duties and responsibilities.

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