The Week 26 July 2024
Director
Obviously the most exciting thing this week is the opening of the Olympics, but as this is not a sports blog, read on for my unpopular opinion about Whitehall hiring (but for anyone who is looking for policy/sports crossover, give Sam Freedman a follow!).
How to get the right skills into government is a perennial focus of those of us concerned about building a high-performing Whitehall machine. It is uncontroversial to point out that the civil service needs a better approach to talent-sourcing (we wrote at length about this in Making the Grade), needs more people with technical and delivery-related skills, needs more deep specialist expertise, and needs greater cognitive diversity — which, at least in part, comes from diversity of experience.
What is more controversial is whether ministers should be able to appoint people to senior civil servant roles who they feel will help address these issues and drive their agenda. Which is why, when Politico revealed this week that Emily Middleton has been appointed as a director general (one of the most senior civil servant positions) in DSIT, some people got upset. They’re wrong.
Why might this be controversial? Emily was a policy fellow at Labour Together and was on secondment to Peter Kyle’s shadow team in the run up to the election, which has led some to shout ‘politicisation!’. Concern for ensuring the civil service remains impartial is completely legitimate, but that isn’t necessarily under threat here. The civil service’s main purpose is to deliver the agenda and priorities of the government of the day — as one former permanent secretary put it to me, civil servants are not non-political, they are apolitical. That means they must lean in to delivering the new Government’s manifesto pledges, so being aligned with this is a good thing.
To put it another way, political appointments should be possible to apolitical roles — providing, and this is really the test, the person being appointed is qualified and capable. I don’t know Emily, but her CV looks eminently relevant to the role she has been given, and she can bring a wealth of insight into how other institutions have achieved similar goals to those being sought by government. I do think there’s a question about whether DG is the right level, or whether she should have entered at Director level, but the principle behind the appointment is solid.
A lot is made, rightly, about the quality of ministers. But not enough is made of the total inadequacy of the support they receive. The ridiculous arbitrary cap on the number of special advisers, the failure to embrace the concept of the extended ministerial office, the fear of paying high salaries on additional support roles which could attract people with more experience, the ridiculous civil service recruitment processes. Even great ministers are going to struggle to succeed in the bureaucratic, complex world of Whitehall without really good support. So personally, I hope Emily will up the chances of Peter Kyle succeeding in his new brief.
My recommended read (or rather chart) of the week…
…goes to the Nuffield Trust’s brilliant illustration of why social care reform never happens (and you could apply the same to NHS reform). In a single chart they track where the money allocated for reform in 2021 has actually been spent. The answer? “Almost all of the funding planned for charging reform went into meeting the costs of delivering adult and children’s services.”