The head of the Union of Senior Civil Servants has written to Keir Starmer urging him to rethink his “frankly offensive” criticism of Whitehall for being comfortable with falling standards.
The general secretary of the FDA, the union for senior civil servants, suggested that Starmer had invoked “Trumpian” language when he claimed he did not want to “drain the swamp” but after saying that “too many people in Whitehall comfortable in a tepid bath of managed decline”.
Dave Penman told Starmer he feared it was “much more damaging than you thought when you chose those words”, after years of attacks on the civil service by previous governments had already damaged morale.
The Guardian understands Starmer’s speech suggesting that civil servants were partly to blame for blocking public service reform and Whitehall made even some of its own ministers uncomfortable.
Asked about concern over the tone of his Whitehall remarks, Starmer praised civil servants on Friday, saying they “bring something very special to the job, which is a sense of public service”.
But he also reaffirmed his commitment to reform, saying: “A lot of government officials have said to me that this is great, we really need to go ahead, make this shift to this technology and this AI, different ways to — not just the service that we deliver to voters, which is extremely important – but the very way we run government. I intend to push through this reform to make sure we get better results for the country.”
Some in Downing Street are frustrated by the slow pace of change and reform in government, with the prime minister’s speech on Thursday setting out a “plan for change” along with specific targets for improvement.
Starmer appointed a new cabinet secretary, Chris Wormald, earlier this week to work on “nothing short of a complete reconfiguration of the British state”. Senior Labor a source said the prime minister’s speech was for the whole of government, not just the civil service, and was about “setting the strategic direction and the whole of Whitehall pulling in one direction to achieve it”.
The Institute of Governance said on Friday it felt Starmer was “frustrated with the support he gets from the system”.
“Starmer’s instruction should be taken as a call to the civil service to rediscover its political creativity and shake off the passivity that can characterize the minister-servant relationship,” the think tank said.
However, it said Starmer “must be careful not to alienate and frustrate his workforce, and the approach of some ministers in the last government showed that the harsh blob-bashing doesn’t work“.
In his letter to Starmer, sent on Friday, Penman said he represents 20,000 senior civil servants who are as eager for change as the Prime Minister and want to improve and reform public services to make a real difference.
But he said: “That is why the language you used yesterday in your speech is so disappointing. You, more than anyone else, should understand the challenges that civil servants have faced over the past 15 years.
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“They have been asked to meet the biggest administrative task any government has faced since the Second World War, delivering Brexit, a once-in-a-century pandemic and now a war in continental Europe. All of these followed more than a decade of austerity in which they were asked to provide more with less.
“All this has happened against the backdrop of political chaos under four different prime ministers and literally hundreds of ministerial changes. As a former civil servant, you will understand that the ability to reform and improve vital public services does not rest solely in the hands of civil servants. Ministers’ frustration with pace and efficiency is shared by many civil servants whose ability to deal with them is often constrained by political choices and limited resources.
Penman stressed that Starmer, a former director of the Crown Prosecution Service, is now a civil service minister and there will be a need for civil servants to be “motivated and inspired, not ridiculed and maligned”.
Drawing parallels between the Prime Minister’s speech and those of previous Tory ministers, he said: “The words you used and the briefing that accompanied them, just five months after you came to power, promising to govern differently, were a stark reminder of civil servants for the approach of ministers over the past five years.’
He concluded his letter by urging the prime minister to “urgently consider the impact your speech yesterday” had on his government’s relationship with civil servants, which he said should be a strong partnership based on trust.
“If you want to successfully implement your plan for change, you must work to immediately restore trust with the civil servants who will be tasked with implementing it,” he said.
Asked if the prime minister understood why the general secretary of the FDA union accused Starmer of using Trumpian language against government officials, the prime minister’s official spokesman said: “I wouldn’t characterize it that way. The Prime Minister is setting the direction and pace that British people expect from this government, and he has made clear the scale of his ambitions in this area.
