My new article in the Municipal Journal. https://www.themj.co.uk/one-way-only-won-t-work
Full text:
Don’t rebuild Whitehall inside mayoral authorities; turn civil service secondments into a public service talent exchange
The government’s plan to send civil servants into mayoral authorities should become a reciprocal Public Service Talent Exchange. The secondments aren’t the mistake, though they got my back up – and I’m not the only one. The one-way model is.
From this autumn, each mayoral authority is due to receive five to ten civil servants for six to nine months. Mayors can request the skills they need. This will bring useful short-term capacity to small and developing institutions, while civil servants should gain a better understanding of how national policy meets place – albeit at a large scale. The programme also follows requests from mayors. But the announcement describes ‘high-performing’ civil servants being ‘posted’ to provide the ‘skills and expertise’ needed to build local capability. Expertise appears to flow from an able centre to a deficient locality. That framing matters because it reveals underlying thinking which could easily become the design.
This isn’t a criticism of civil servants – in fact the framing is unfair on them. There is formidable talent in Whitehall, and many officials will approach these placements with curiosity, humility, and enthusiasm to both contribute and learn. The problem is the system around them. It casts them as carriers of superior expertise – packages of generic Whitehall competence – while giving them little apparent agency beyond being ‘posted’. Local government employees appear chiefly as the recipient – indeed it raises the question of whether mayoral and strategic authorities are to be ‘local government’ at all.
At the same time, local government reorganisation will turn 134 councils into 38 unitaries. Some consolidation is unavoidable – especially at senior levels, where chief executives and senior officers are leading incredibly difficult transitions while their own roles face uncertainty. Appointments to the new organisations must be open and rigorous. But just because the org chart changes, that doesn’t reorganise the knowledge and experience people carry.
Rather than discarding experience though administrative accident, we should treat this as a great opportunity to use the talent we have to build shared learning, collegiality, institutional memory, and – ultimately – a shared public service workforce. I argue that we should start from the assumption that civil servants can learn and contribute best by mucking in and helping districts and boroughs in particular , counties and unitaries go successfully through local government reorganisation, while some from councils are distributed into the civil service and go to support mayoral and strategic authorities.
Why second people from districts and counties if those councils are disappearing? Precisely because they are disappearing. Districts hold deep knowledge of housing, planning, local economies and community networks. Counties hold social care, children’s services, highways and public health. Their institutions may be abolished, their capability will still be needed, and they are the ones who can directly take that expertise to where it most needs to be understood.
Civil servants seconded into districts and counties now can support the heavy work of reorganisation and learn how policy works in services and democratic institutions. A placement only in a strategic authority may teach someone how the new regional machinery works. It may not show them how decisions are made, contested, and delivered closer to residents.
England is rebuilding a second tier of local government, much of it around directly elected mayors. These new bodies could become genuinely local institutions, rooted in their places and drawing on council experience, actually focused on ‘commissioning’ for outcomes in the complexity of place. Or they could become regional outposts designed mainly to be legible to Whitehall, drawing substantial funding, eventually taking on substantive service delivery and leaving us in position where power pays more attention to the centre and local government is relegated to a delivery body, not a true partner in governance and citizen satisfaction. There is a sharp irony in the risk of using mayors, intended to embody local political authority, to reproduce central government’s operating system. At its worst, this can look like administrative colonialism: the centre supplies the people, categories, and methods, and calls the process devolution.
The alternative is practical. Before councils are dismantled, as as Rob Huntington, chief executive of Rossendale Borough Council, has suggested (declaring his own potential interest), map senior and specialist capability across every affected area. Give those people visibility of opportunities in new unitaries, strategic authorities and government departments. Make secondments reciprocal between Whitehall, districts, counties, unitaries, and strategic authorities. Let receiving organisations define what they need and individuals apply, rather than moving people as pieces on a structure chart. Build return routes so learning changes the institution that sent them.
GDS Local offers a useful precedent: it assembled a mix of civil servants, people moving from local government, and direct council secondees – on the model of the Public Service Transformation Network from the community budgeting era of Osborne (reportedly described in Number Ten later as ‘a chaotic mess’ – a revealing turn of phrase). That’s closer to the workforce devolution needs. The exchange should also connect, where useful, with the NHS, police, fire, universities and voluntary organisations. Places don’t experience public service through departmental career boundaries.
This would signal real equality of esteem. That doesn’t mean pretending everyone has the same skills. Whitehall has national policy, fiscal, and convening expertise that local government needs. Councils have operational, democratic, and place knowledge that Whitehall repeatedly shows lacks. Neither should be seen as the natural teacher of the other – shared learning is the first goal, shared institutional memory (which central government often sorely lacks) the ultimate price.
The government has created a useful opening. I’m not sure local government was yet consulted, never mind an equal partner in this plan. It should invite mayors, council leaders, chief executives, civil servants, staff representatives, and unions to redesign the pilot before placements begin. Measure not only the capacity inserted, but the capability retained, the decisions changed and the careers opened in both directions.
We can’t rewire the state while treating its workforce as three separate labour markets with an implicit hierarchy. I would welcome engagement on how to build the shared public service workforce this moment now requires.
Benjamin Taylor, RedQuadrant and the Public Service Transformation Academy
chosen path 