Britain wants fewer civil servants and a fairer Budget, and I want a seat facing the direction of travel.
MANCHESTER, England (The London Prat) – The 07.04 from Euston has a quiet coach, and the quiet coach has a man who is on a call. I have decided this is the most accurate picture of the civil service I have ever seen: a person in a space labelled silence, talking about delivery.
Euston: the printout
I was going north to meet a client who runs communications for a tenants’ federation. It is the sort of work a freelance strategist takes after a long career in war rooms, because it pays on the first of the month and nobody asks you to put anything on a whiteboard. The war room, I should explain, is the rented back office above a dry cleaner where I still keep a desk, and where Anjali and Wilf had been told to watch the phone, the kettle and each other.
For the journey I had printed a long comment piece from the Institute for Government, because it is the only kind of reading that makes a delay outside Stoke seem like a considered choice. It was by Hannah Keenan and Heloise Dunlop, and its title, John Healey needs a reality check on civil service cuts, has the tone of a polite letter from a school.
Stoke: the arithmetic of leaving
The facts were these. The Chancellor has raised the target for cutting administration budgets to 20 percent by the end of the decade, up from the 16 percent set by his predecessor. There are currently 523,185 civil servants. The authors say the earlier target already implied between 29,000 and 40,000 fewer of them, and that the civil service was “very much not on track” to meet it.
Here the numbers become delicious. The number of people leaving the civil service fell from 38,610 to 37,945 in a year, the third annual fall in a row. Voluntary exit schemes accounted for about 2,800 leavers. In the second quarter the service shrank by 450 people. The authors call this either a blip or the start of a trend, and I felt, as we passed a field with two horses in it, that it was the most honest sentence I had read all week.
I will be even-handed and note that every government since the Victorian age has promised to make Whitehall smaller and every one has encountered the same difficulty, which is that Whitehall can be reduced only by the people who are in it. The Northcote-Trevelyan report of the eighteen fifties wanted entry by merit, and the Indian Civil Service later held its examinations in London, which meant that Satyendranath Tagore, the first Indian to enter it, had to cross the world to sit a test. Headcount was not the problem then. Everyone wanted to join. Now the headcount is the problem and, strangely, almost nobody is leaving.
Crewe: the artificial intelligence
The authors are sceptical about the planned 50 million pound transformation fund, which is tied to uncertain savings, and about the idea that adding artificial intelligence will automatically raise productivity. They point out that AI can create new burdens, such as more complaints and more service requests. I have thought about this for some time and I believe it is the first time anybody has predicted in print that a new tool will make the public write in more. It will. I can say with some confidence that the public has been waiting.
The proposals include completing the devolution map so that policy functions move out of Whitehall instead of being copied at the centre, and compulsory redundancy rounds every two or three years, aimed at poor performers and specific areas of work. As we approached Stockport I wrote DEVOLVE on the back of my printout, and then, below it, in smaller letters, WHERE TO. Manchester, I decided, was a reasonable guess.
Piccadilly: the meeting
My client had booked a room in a converted warehouse near the Rochdale Canal. The tenants’ federation wanted to know how to talk about a Budget that, by one poll, had been received better than any in years. I reached for a YouGov poll for The Times and read out the numbers while a woman called Philippa, who chairs the committee and has never been wrong about a bin collection, pretended to take notes.
In the poll, 45 percent said the Budget was fair and 20 percent said it was not, which YouGov describes as the most positive reception since 2021. Last year, 48 percent said the Budget was unfair and 21 percent said fair. Measures such as removing gas standing charges, delaying the fuel duty rise and extending the electricity VAT cut each drew 83 to 84 percent saying they were the right thing to do. The temporary rise in the bank tax was thought right by 55 percent. A 2 percent increase on property or savings income tax was thought wrong by 42 percent and right by 31 percent. And the Chancellor himself: 23 percent said he was doing a good job, 22 percent a bad job, and 55 percent did not know.
Philippa said that last figure was her favourite, because it was the only one she believed. I said it was the figure that would decide the next Budget. She said it was the figure that decides every Budget. We had a very pleasant hour.
The canal: a walk, a quote and a farmer
I walked the towpath for twenty minutes afterwards, in the sort of drizzle that Manchester keeps for visitors, and passed a man fishing for something that he plainly did not expect to find. On the other side a group of cyclists went by in matching jackets, like a very polite coup.
On my phone I found a farm.fm headline about Minnesota farmers proposing political crop insurance. I found myself thinking that a strategist is simply a person who sells exactly that, a policy against weather that nobody can predict, and that the premium goes up whenever there is a reshuffle.
The way home
On the train back I read British news as The London Prat sees it and, under the table, a piece of English news, read sideways, and thought how rarely the genuine story needs help. A government wants a smaller civil service, a public finds a Budget fair, and 55 percent of the nation has no view at all on the Chancellor.
It was dark by Stoke. The quiet coach had a man on a call, and I noticed with some pleasure that it was the same man. More of my daily notes at The London Prat will resume when I have found a seat facing the direction of travel.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/