Senior United Kingdom Public Servants accept the bureaucracy must be eventually be reduced in the wake of COVID-19 and the exit from the European Union – but the amount that Government does should also be reduced, a survey has found.
In this year’s annual State of the State report, Public Service leaders expressed a desire for a more streamlined Government.
A total of 54 senior bureaucrats were interviewed between July and October for the report, including Permanent Secretaries, Local Government leaders, National Health Service Trust Executives and politicians.
All the interviewees agreed that the Public Service should shrink.
Many said Whitehall could be “substantially smaller”.
However, there were mixed views among the interviewees about the now-scrapped target to cut 91,000 jobs.
Asked about the plan — which was still understood to be in play when the interviews took place — some respondents said they disagreed with it, saying it was not the time to reduce the Government’s capacity.
Others felt cost reduction would be better achieved through a wider approach that looked beyond staff numbers.
At the other end of the scale, some senior Public Servants suggested “wholesale reductions of layers within the Civil Service”.
Many interviewees said they wanted their organisations to become “sharper” or “more focused” by 2030.
They argued that the State had expanded its scope in recent decades, and in some cases insourced functions that could be commissioned by the public sector rather than delivered by it directly.
One senior official said the Government was asking a lot more of the Public Service than 30 years ago.
“I’m running services that could be run by the private sector, but there’s no Ministerial appetite to outsource,” the official said.
Another said: “By 2030, I hope we’re connecting better with the private sector. It shouldn’t be about public versus private.”
However, none of the public sector leaders argued that front-line services should be privatised, the report said.
London, 5 November 2022
