Brexit ten years on: the civil service

Ahead of the ten year anniversary of the EU referendum on 23 June, UK in a Changing Europe experts have written a short series of blogs reflecting on some of the issues at the heart of Brexit then and now. Here, Jill Rutter considers how Brexit has impacted the civil service.

We could never persuade former Brexit minister and European Research Group chair Steve Baker to relive Brexit for UK in a Changing Europe’s Brexit Witness Archive. But two quotes from his recent Ministers Reflect interview for the Institute for Government are perfect illustrations of the way in which Brexit impacted the civil service.

Speaking of his own civil servants in his brief ministerial stint at the Department for Exiting the EU (DExEU) he said:  “The officials were absolutely excellent in the Department for Exiting the EU, absolutely brilliant and brilliantly led”.  But a few paragraphs later he describes how officials reacted to the DExEU ministerial team concluding that the UK had to leave the EU with an FTA-style agreement: “officials all sat there looking crestfallen. They’d all briefed us individually that we should do something hybrid that involved the customs union and alignment. We all said no individually. So they put on a summit. Again, notice they’re managing us, which is a thing to come back to. We gave them very clear directions on what we required as a team.” That sounds much more like the scepticism about the civil service to be expected from Eurosceptic ministers.

But Baker himself acknowledges that the civil servants were pursuing the Brexit that the Prime Minister and Chancellor wanted – and his real frustration (which resulted in his post-Chequers resignation) should be directed at his ministerial bosses, as they were the ones taking the policy in a direction he did not like, not the civil service.

The good news for the civil service is that it managed to deliver a Brexit which was broadly the one chosen by the Johnson government. Gaping holes did not emerge – either in UK legal frameworks or at the borders for goods (failure to stem cross-Channel irregular migration has become a running sore post-Brexit). UK regulators have mostly been able to substitute adequately for their EU counterparts – and, even before the final completion of Brexit, the UK’s medicines regulator gave the first approval for a Covid 19 vaccine. The UK developed missing trade capacity, rolled over EU-era trade agreements and negotiated its own new free trade agreements (FTAs) with countries such as New Zealand and Australia.

The price of that delivery was a massive expansion in the size of the civil service, which is now over a third bigger than it was in June 2016. Not all of that is down to Brexit itself – it was inflated by the need to deal with the pandemic and more recently by attempts to get on top of the asylum backlog. Nonetheless, that is an expansion that is way in excess of initial estimates of the impact of Brexit on the size civil service (and the expansion in the number of public servants in some arm’s length bodies should be added as well to take full account of Brexit as a driver of state expansion).

The bad news for the civil service is that Brexit catalysed a breakdown of relations with a significant segment of the political and ministerial class.

In the Theresa May government, civil servants were collateral damage as her cabinet could not agree on the model of Brexit it wanted to pursue. In some departments, Brexit supporting ministers were reluctant to confront the problems officials raised with them in implementing Brexit.  The UK’s permanent representative, Ivan Rogers, resigned after being “stabbed in the back” by Theresa May’s chiefs of staff briefing against him. The Treasury was already bruised by what then-Chancellor Philip Hammond described as “being painted as the villain of the referendum campaign”. Ministers went on the record rubbishing official forecasts.  Senior officials who had specialised in European relations found that their CVs were regarded as what former Deputy Permanent Representative to the EU Katrina Williams described as “unfortunate”. Theresa May herself repeatedly denied she was a puppet of her Europe adviser, Olly Robbins.

Although, in one part of the forest, Lord Frost was working more effectively with civil servants to deliver the Trade and Cooperation Agreement, relations elsewhere in government became ever tenser under the Johnson administration. In that administration’s version of Henry VIII, one permanent secretary resigned (the head of the Government Legal Department) over government willingness to break international law; the services of the Cabinet Secretary, Mark Sedwill, were dispensed with and several more permanent secretaries were sacked or not extended as part of Dominic Cummings’s war on the bureaucracy.  Meanwhile Johnson’s ministers went on the warpath against civil service wokery and working from home, while attempting to impose headcount reductions to roll back the increased numbers since Brexit.

Keir Starmer came in, determined not just to reset relations with the EU, but also with the civil service. But he too became disillusioned with a government “machine” which he never got to grips with managing – within months of taking office he was complaining about the civil service being too happy in the “tepid bath of managed decline”. Starmer’s peremptory sacking in April 2026 of Olly Robbins, who had rejoined the civil service eighteen months earlier, over Peter Mandelson’s vetting has reportedly had a dire effect on ministerial-civil service relations and on civil service morale, which intriguingly peaked in 2020.

Meanwhile, Starmer’s political opponents used his recruitment in opposition of former civil servant Sue Gray as chief of staff as evidence of political sympathies within the civil service – and to argue the case for the politicisation of appointments more along US lines. That remains a significant plank in Reform UK’s vision for the future state. Starmer’s actions make it harder for Labour to defend the current set-up.

The increasing frustration of ministers with the system and their civil servants is rooted in their own failure to deliver people’s aspirations for higher living standards, make inroads on regional inequality and improve public services, all while navigating an increasingly hostile external environment. That frustration contributed to the initial decision to vote for Brexit in June 2016. It is clear that ten years on, that frustration has grown rather than diminished.

By Jill Rutter, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Government.