Why the civil service delivers failure

Chief secretary to the UK prime minister, Darren Jones, probably thought he would be commended for getting on with what he and his ilk habitually call ‘the serious business of government’. While most of the Labour Party are engaging in an overexcited bout of fratricide, Jones announced last week that all government departments would be getting a new ‘delivery team’ led by a top civil servant to help them, you guessed it, ‘deliver’. For good measure, ministers would be given new ‘delivery advisers’ in their private offices to support this work. Man the desks!

The reaction from the commentariat hasn’t been as warm and fuzzy as perhaps Jones expected. Cue jibes about needing delivery units for the delivery of the delivery units. More civil servants being employed to deliver the thing that every civil servant is meant to be delivering does indeed sound like it came straight out of The Thick of It. It does raise the question: what are the rest of the civil servants doing? As shadow business secretary Andrew Griffith observed, those lanyards aren’t going to wear themselves.

The tinkering with delivery teams is illustrative of Labour’s total lack of ideas for how to fix the civil service. Instead, all this government can resort to is reheated Blairism. Adding yet another layer of bureaucracy to the bloated state and employing yet more Sir Humphreys is quite clearly not the answer to tackling an inert and ineffective civil service that has grown 35 per cent in the past 10 years. But then Darren Jones presumably needs enough civil servants working for him to justify his ever-expanding job title: after all, ‘Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister and Minister for Intergovernmental Relations’ rather puts Jim Hacker’s ‘Ministry of Administrative Affairs’ in the shade.

Successive governments have found themselves confronting the dire problem of Whitehall’s prioritisation of process over results. This explains why the No10 Delivery Unit, first created at the start of Tony Blair’s second term, was revived by the Tories in 2021. Way back in 1999, New Labour’s Modernising Government white paper was meant to herald ‘a new focus on delivery – asking every permanent secretary to ensure that their department has the capacity to drive through achievement of the key government targets and to take personal responsibility for ensuring that this happens’. We continue to wait.

The problem is that actual delivery has become an alien concept to most civil servants. The people on the front lines of public services – nurses, teachers, prison officers, etc – do ‘delivery’ day in, day out. But the civil service in Whitehall sees itself primarily as an ideas factory. Everyone wants to work in a policy job. For that is how you get ahead and into the senior ranks. Implementing those ideas is seen as a bit of an afterthought, if it is thought about at all.

Huge amounts of paperwork are thereby produced by the machine, for the machine, and in volumes far greater than senior decision-makers even have time to read. Former No10 director of strategy Steve Hilton decried civil servants wearing down David Cameron’s government through endless paperwork.

It all comes down to incentives. Officials don’t need to be invested in results when their advancement is not based on them. In the civil service, it doesn’t matter what you’ve actually achieved in your role, so long as you can spin a good story about it or – even better – show how you ‘learned and developed’ from the experience. Those who do best in the civil service and rise to the most senior ranks are the smooth operators who master the jargon required to ace bizarre civil-service ‘behavioural’ interviews, rather than those who have demonstrated competency in their role.

What is more, in recent years, even these appraisals have been removed from the hiring and promotion process in most government departments, thanks to fears that they were discriminating against certain protected-characteristic groups. Results-based performance management has been expunged from the system.

Across the civil service, this leads to an elevation of process over delivery. In the private sector, the market will mete out natural punishment to profligate firms who fail to control costs. Not so in the public sector, where the equivalent of going bust is some stern words from Darren Jones’s private secretary.

Delivery units will not change the basic fact that the apparatus of government has grown far too vast and has become chronically unproductive. The British state is paralysed by a perverse incentive structure that rewards risk-averse proceduralism and foot-dragging over results. More civil servants steeped in the same culture will do nothing to change that. We need a total sea change in how Whitehall is run.

It is depressing but hardly surprising that this Labour government lacks the stomach to do anything truly radical to shake up the state. It is now too beholden to the lanyard class as a key bloc of its voting coalition. But if ‘delivery units’ are the best this government can come up with, the next Labour leader and prime minister will only have himself to blame when he inevitably finds delivery of his agenda runs up against the cold reality of our dysfunctional civil service.

Ameer Kotecha is CEO of the Centre for Government Reform. He was formerly a senior diplomat, serving as the head of the British consulate in Russia between 2023 and 2025.