It’s essential that you get ready for when the UK leaves the EU on 31 October” tweeted the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy last Friday, at almost exactly the same time as the chancellor, Sajid Javid, appeared on national television to admit that the UK will not be leaving this Thursday.
That tweet – part of a multimillion-pound ad campaign – was sent out by civil servants. It’s their job to carry out the will of the government of the day, whatever they may think privately. Being impartial is defined by the civil service code as acting “solely according to the merits of the case and serving equally well governments of different political persuasions”. Right now, that means one thing: Brexit.
Thousands of civil servants have been working on Brexit since 2016. Hundreds of staff have been pulled into the huge Yellowhammer operation (described by one anonymous civil servant working in it as “just for show”) to prepare UK businesses for a potential no-deal Brexit.
But what should – or could – civil servants do if they feel the government’s course of action will harm the country?
In August, former head of the civil service Bob Kerslake, said officials should consider putting their “stewardship of the country ahead of service to the government of the day”.
Talk like this makes Gus O’Donnell, former cabinet secretary and former head of the civil service, apprehensive. “That’s a very dangerous route to go down. I’m very nervous about that,” he says. “People think of it in terms of Brexit, but it could be something from the other end of the spectrum.” The only circumstances in which officials should refuse to carry out government business is where it is illegal, or where they feel it is very poor value for money – and even then, he says, “it’s not that you don’t do it, but you will only do it if given a direction by ministers”.
O’Donnell says today’s top officials face far harder issues than anything he had to deal with when he served prime ministers Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron between 2005 and 2011. Worse still, the civil service has been attacked as never before, often by the government’s own ministers, amid accusations that civil servants are either “traitors” or “remoaners”, as well as by top advisers, including Dominic Cummings, who believes a permanent civil service should be consigned to the history books.
Several high profile officials have recently thrown in the towel, including Jon Thompson, the chief executive of HM Revenue and Customs, who faced death threats for advising that post-Brexit customs options could cost up to £20bn.
Last month, senior civil servants told the FDA union they were worried that if they assisted the government in defying parliament, they could be breaking the law. The PCS, another civil service union, has raised its members’ concerns with the Cabinet Office. “Civil servants should never be put in a situation where they could be accused of breaking the law because of the reckless actions of governments,” says Mark Serwotka, PCS general secretary.
“In an ideologically riven world, the civil service has been pulled into conflicts, and people have been very concerned about that,” says Philip Rycroft, who headed up the Department for Exiting the EU until he took early retirement in March. “There has been a constant barrage of unfair criticism of civil servants. The job of giving ministers the advice they need, without fear or favour, has not been made any easier by ill-judged criticism by MPs.”
Rycroft says it’s critically important for civil servants to continue to give ministers impartial advice – such as the assessment last November of the economic impact of the UK’s exit from the EU – even if the government doesn’t like what it hears.
O’Donnell agrees. In a speech he is giving on Wednesday evening to celebrate the centenary of the FDA, he will passionately defend the concept of an impartial civil service. It has, he says, made the UK’s service the most effective in the world, and enables it to build long-term relationships vital to the smooth operation of government. Unlike countries such as the US, where a change of president means a wholesale clearout of senior staff in administrative bodies, the UK system ensures continuity when governments change, he says. Perhaps surprisingly, he remains optimistic that the UK civil service will withstand the present pressure.
It’s true that not everything to do with Brexit has been bad for civil servants. After years of budget cuts, the preparations for Brexit have led to a surge in recruitment. There are now more than 400,000 civil servants, reversing previous cuts in many departments.
For many ambitious civil servants, particularly those still at the early stages of their career, it’s been a huge opportunity – and one many have taken. Rycroft says it was not a problem to attract staff to the new DExEU. “We were able to attract really good people from elsewhere in the service and from outside. They knew what they were coming in to.”
Former senior civil servant Jill Rutter, now senior fellow at the Institute for Government thinktank, agrees – up to a point. “This is a massively interesting piece of work for those who want to take it as an opportunity,” she says. But the real impact, she adds, is on the thousands of staff trying to get other work done. “They are being asked to do more. They [non Brexit-focused departments] are surrendering up people because Brexit’s the priority. Being in the ‘if we have time, if we can get any legislation, if we can get a date in the minister’s diary’ bit of a department is a very depressing place to be,” she points out. “And the bulk of the civil service is in that place. Because although a lot of people are dealing with Brexit, even more aren’t.”
Amid the continuing political chaos over Brexit, pressure on the civil service clearly won’t be going away any time soon. But it may be some small comfort for them to know that trust in civil servants has risen six percentage points since 2016 (according to an Ipsos Mori poll last November) while trust in MPs has tumbled.