Rationalisation

I’m practising my dumb grin again. I smile and nod at my colleagues, and try to ignore the feelings of despair that spring from the inanity of it all.

If the world made any sense, the ultimate goal for anyone working in the public sector would be to make themselves redundant. Their aim would be to eradicate the social problems that our bloated civil service and non-departmental bodies have been created to fix. It should go without saying really: if there are fewer street crimes being committed you don’t need so many bobbies-on-the-beat, if everyone is gainfully employed and society is prosperous you can close the Job Centres, and if people aren’t going bankrupt then you can shut down the Insolvency Service.

Yet the meeting I’m in is a million miles from these lofty ideals. The only principles on display here are cynicism, self-preservation, and a sense of entitlement to a cushy, over-paid job. No-one really wants to improve how things are done: that would only lead to reductions in next year’s headcount, and good golly, “managing people out the door” might mean some truly difficult work had to be done. No. Our job is to fiddle with figures and make sure it looks like we need all the deadwood, 'cos they can always be counted on to sap the enthusiasm out of any progressive initiative that might come along and threaten the status quo. Pretty much everyone sitting round the table knows this, but is too canny or worn-down to admit it. And those who don’t know it are even worse, being too blinkered to notice all the gross inefficiencies staring them in the face.

It’s a problem that’s easy to identify but hard to fix. Where I work, we’re already trying to ‘rationalise’ the workforce, but inevitably, it’s the wrong people who are leaving. Those who are talented and ambitious find it easy to move on to bigger and better things, and so jump before they’re pushed or happily sign up for redundancy. Those who have spent twenty years moving piles of paper from one cupboard to another know that they’re less employable, and so dig in their heels and demand that their right to be useless is protected.

The scale of the culture change required seems insurmountable at times, because of the cursed legacy that’s been passed down. People joining the Civil Service in the 90's or earlier were told they were signing up for a “job for life”. Indeed, ‘job security’ was still being touted as one of the main selling points of a Civil Service career at my school Careers Fair less than a decade ago. Yet it can only be a very perverse logic that says, “come and work for the Department of Health when you leave school. We’ll employ you for forty years and together make sure the country never gets any healthier. That way you’ll always have a job!”

I really want to have faith in the state to fix social problems: its probably most important thing it's there to do. Yet the way it’s set-up seems so fundamentally maladjusted to dealing with the task that it’s difficult not to become disillusioned. It seems like by creating large permanent institutions to solve problems, you just end up with large permanent problems.

Do I have an alternative? Yes: a ruthless meritocracy. Scrap the job for life, get rid of the over-generous pension, and create civil servants who feel grateful for being able to do genuinely worthy work. At two year intervals they’d have to demonstrate that they’d done an amazing job, or get thrown out. Those who passed their reviews would get moved on to another department, to prevent the stagnation that grows from over-familiarity. What you'd end up with is a skilled bunch of civil servants with a broad range of knowledge of the full machinery of government, who through constantly moving around would be immunised against the kind of “silo-thinking” that is currently throttling the system.

Sadly, the PCS would never allow such a thing, and all new Civil Servants would have to sign some controversial kind of waiver to several of their employment rights, but it feels like a nice dream all the same...