A senior government minister has rejected the claim that Labour is picking a fight with civil servants after Keir Starmer suggested that some officials are content with the “tepid bath of managed decline” last week.
Pat McFadden, the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, was asked why the prime minister appeared to critique civil servants in his major “Plan for Change” speech on Thursday.
McFadden told Sky News that the government is instead “praising the civil service” and clarified that “we’ve got a lot of good people caught in bad systems.”
The remarks come as McFadden, one of the government’s most senior figures, prepares to announce plans to overhaul the state’s central bureaucracy.
In a speech on Monday, McFadden will unveil plans to put £100 million into the government’s changes to the civil service as part of an “innovation fund”.
New “crack teams” of “problem solvers” will be sent to improve public services and help the government achieve its goals, McFadden will say. The aim is adopt a tech start-up approach in Whitehall.
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In a letter to the prime minister last week, the head of the senior civil servants’ union labelled Starmer’s recent rhetoric and criticisms “frankly insulting”.
The general secretary of the FDA, Dave Penman, told Starmer he feared his speech was “far more damaging than you had considered when you chose those words”.
On Thursday, the prime minister said: “Too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline. Have forgotten, to paraphrase JFK, that you choose change, not because it’s easy but because it’s hard.”
“I totally get that when trust in politics is so low, we must be careful about the promises we make. But across Whitehall and Westminster that’s been internalised as ‘don’t say anything’, ‘don’t try anything too ambitious’, ‘set targets that will happen anyway’.”
Commenting on the government’s civil service agenda on Monday morning, McFadden said: “The point I’m making today is that we’ve got huge change in the private sphere. If we think about all the companies we use and rely on, Airbnb or Spotify or WhatsApp — [they] didn’t even exist 20 years ago. They’ve changed our lives.
“Has the government changed, the way it thinks about delivering services changed at the speed of the private sphere? It hasn’t. So we’ve got to [learn] from what’s happening in the private [sector].”
He added: “When they started developing the universal credit system, they spent hundreds of millions of pounds doing it in the old Whitehall way. You issue a policy paper, you have lots of committees, lots of meetings, and they got nowhere.
“What they did after that was they took the process out of the department, put together a small team of about 30 people, policy people, tech people, frontline workers, said, ‘Let’s do this small, we don’t have to do it for the whole country at once, let’s test this in a really small way and see if it works.’ …
“It’s what we call the test and learn approach where you don’t have to design everything from scratch. You test, you learn. You allow for some failure in the system. You don’t get panicked by that. You learn from that.
“I want to see that approach adopted more in policy in the future.”
Responding to McFadden’s reform proposals, shadow Cabinet Office minister Richard Holden said “The bureaucracy of the British state urgently needs cutting back, which is why at the general election we had a plan to reduce it to pre-Covid levels, plans Labour opposed.
“Everything Labour has done so far has been to swell the size and cost of the state, on the backs of workers, pensioners, farmers and family businesses across the country.”
Josh Self is Editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here.
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