Just the One Cheer for Starmer’s Civil Service Reform

Labour certainly won’t cut workers as indiscriminately as Doge has. Sir Keir Starmer is a public sector technocrat, not a Silicon Valley chaos agent, after all. But his diagnosis is similar: the civil service has ballooned by more than 90,000 staff since 2020, now hitting 546,000 workers. Its salary bill nudges £20 billion a year. Taxpayers haven’t seen better government follow, so why not cut back?

Public sector productivity is still 8 per cent lower than pre-pandemic, suggesting fat to trim. Labour has floated 10,000 civil service job cuts, performance-related pay for senior staff and layoffs for bad employees. And why not? The Effective Governance Forum found that in the year to March 2023, almost ten times more civil servants died in post (420) than were sacked for poor performance across 11 departments. Even the Institute for Government’s sober technocrats admit bad employees get shuffled around and that it requires “harder-edged consequence[s]” to “change the culture”.

So yes — clear out dead weight, eradicate duplicative teams and incentivise good performance, and perhaps certain government operations will become more efficient. In private business, that is basic housekeeping. In Whitehall, it’s revolution.

And yet, I can’t get as excited about these floated changes as many in Westminster. Because while the government preaches “efficiency” it has shown scant interest in shrinking the state’s scope. Starmer often talks of prioritising core missions such as growth and cutting NHS waiting lists, but ultimately still wants government to do what it currently does, just better. But running a sleek operation is impossible with today’s broad raft of objectives, even if we could automate roles and dismiss underperformers.

The UK’s real problem isn’t how government is managed. It’s that it tries to do too much. No civil service — however skilled or well-incentivised — can thrive given these clashing priorities. Our conglomerate government tries to direct healthcare, decarbonise the economy, run industrial strategies, co-ordinate land-use planning and infrastructure, and manage our diets — all at once. A state burdened by these tasks and more cannot be rescued by HR tweaks. Whole functions need to be stripped away.

Worse, as the think tank Reform’s new Everythingism report shows, most government programmes chase multiple national objectives at once, often undermining core aims. Infrastructure must protect bats; procurement must promote net zero, diversity and reskilling. The Planning Inspectorate even opposed a new nuclear power station in Anglesey in part because new workers would dilute Welsh language-speaking communities. Every supplementary goal adds bureaucracy. Inefficiency becomes systemic.

Yes, Brexit required new bureaucrats and Covid brought a further surge in administrative tasks. But other recent policies also required civil service time — net-zero schemes, devolution deals, new regulators for digital markets and football, and Labour’s employment rights overhaul. Labour isn’t up for cutting back on any major area here. It hasn’t even promised to match Doge in axing internal diversity, equity, and inclusion roles — hardly frontline positions.

Ultimately, it’s the government’s ever-growing list of functions — and the additional objectives tacked on — that deepens the public sector and burdens the private sector. Civil service pay is just 1.5 per cent of total government spending. The real cost of government is not bureaucracy, it’s programmes: the spending required, the regulation imposed and the consequent assumption that the state must fix things.

So yes, Labour’s civil service reforms may see certain departments run marginally better. But unless the state does less — or at least tries to achieve less — we’ll soon hit the same brick walls. Nationalise problems and you bureaucratise them. Bureaucratise them and inefficiency gets baked in.