A decade ago Cat Little was contemplating the track to becoming partner at accountancy firm PwC when another idea took hold. It began with a question posed by a senior official at the Ministry of Justice, with whom Little, a government and public sector specialist, had worked on a project as a consultant. “It’s all very well you providing all of these professional, lovely reports,” the mandarin said, “but wouldn’t you like to actually do something about it?”
Aware of the limitations of being “on the outside looking in”, Little resolved to accept the challenge and joined the civil service. “Candidly, I thought I’d give it a go,” she said. “I wasn’t entirely sure whether I’d be any good at it. And here I am, 10 years later.” Here she is: head of the government finance function across the civil service overseeing 10,000 staff, and second permanent secretary at the Treasury, roles that make her one of the most senior officials in Whitehall.
Little is far from the only highly skilled manager recruited to Whitehall from industry in recent years. Gareth Rhys Williams, a four-time private sector chief executive, joined in 2016 to transform the government’s commercial activities, and Nick Smallwood was brought on board in 2019 to improve the oversight of big projects, following a career spanning almost four decades at Shell. Last autumn, Fiona Ryland was appointed to streamline human resources in Whitehall, having previously led HR and communications teams at the food service company Compass.
This trend of drafting in industry executives to the highest echelons of government administration is one Jeremy Quin, minister for the Cabinet Office, now wants to turbocharge. Ministers are concerned the system lacks speed and nimbleness, issues brought to the fore in the Covid-19 inquiry. This summer Quin told the Financial Times he was determined to “tap into the talent” of the private sector, particularly in areas where the public sector is facing skills shortages, such as artificial intelligence, data science and technology. The government also wants to address the perennial issue of people leaving the civil service to join the private sector by bolstering retention and making it easier for them to return later in their career.
Recruiting more external staff to the civil service, which employs about 488,000 people across Britain, is one pillar of the government’s strategy to tackle the public sector’s longstanding productivity problem, a significant constraint on the UK’s economic growth. It is also a riposte to warnings issued by authorities such as Ann Francke, chief executive of the Chartered Management Institute, who said this summer that the need for more highly skilled managers to improve public services had been “dangerously overlooked” by ministers for 20 years.
As inflation erodes state spending power, and government departments come under pressure to deliver their priorities within budgets, tapping into private sector experience is a way to further professionalise Whitehall. There are also hopes AI and other digital advancements can drive efficiency and reduce bureaucracy.
This is one reason that, despite the chancellor announcing in October a freeze on the overall civil service headcount and a plan to reduce its size by 60,000 jobs in the longer run, departments are still allowed to recruit — and have been told to prioritise — outside workers and those with digital experience.
With that in mind, Quin is on a mission to overhaul the recruitment processes that have proven an obstacle to hiring externally. Last year he opened up almost all senior Whitehall roles to external candidates. Now he is determined to stamp out “gobbledegook” jargon in job adverts to ensure people outside government “understand what the posts would involve, what the tasks would be”. Quin is also tackling the length of time recruitment takes in government, which is often “80 days plus”. The vetting required for successful candidates, which can add “weeks” of delay, is another process he aims to expedite.
These measures will go some way, he hopes, to improving the number of senior civil service-grade roles filled by private sector applicants, which at present stands at about one in five. Little agreed Whitehall needed to better explain what it did, which is one reason she is launching a campaign to demystify senior government finance jobs, telling external applicants “what do we actually do, why does it matter, how do you apply your professional skills to the world of government”.
Smallwood, the government’s projects chief, stressed that the day-to-day work that forms the core of senior Whitehall roles should be a draw to outsiders, even though Whitehall’s reputation for cumbersome bureaucracy could be a potential deterrent. “We get to see some of the most novel, contentious, difficult, challenging projects and programmes anywhere in the world,” he said.
The part of Whitehall Smallwood oversees has attracted “people from private banking, from the legal profession, HR profession, as well as project and programme delivery people, people who’ve run railway schemes [and] operated docks . . . they’ve come with deep expertise, basically,” he said.
He added that outsiders could bring “new energy and new ideas to what’s an essential service to the public” and that since joining the civil service from the corporate world, he had been impressed with the “openness to learn and do things differently”. He said his motivation for taking the job after a career at Shell, where latterly he had managed global engineering projects, was to “give something back to the public sector” and noted it was “absolutely not money”.
“Everyone will tell you if you come into the civil service in a senior role, the salaries will not compete with the private sector.” Smallwood earned just under £200,000 last year, while Little received about £165,000 and Rhys Williams almost £255,000. They are among only 1,600 senior officials who earned more than £100,000 in 2022. All three could earn multiples of these sums working at equivalent seniority in parts of the private sector.
Dave Penman, general secretary of the FDA trade union that represents senior civil servants, warned that uncompetitive pay was the “single biggest impediment” to Whitehall recruiting from the private sector. “If ministers genuinely want to attract and retain the best talent, then they need a credible plan to address the glaring pay disparities with the private sector,” he said. Pay constraints are one reason Quin is launching a digital and data secondment scheme, seeking to attract professionals from FTSE 100 companies to join Whitehall for limited periods of time. He has also introduced flexibility on salaries for Whitehall technology roles, although the government acknowledges it must show restraint on pay during a time of high inflation.
Rhys Williams has brought the experience he gained working as chief executive at two private equity firms and two public companies to his current role overseeing about 6,000 people working in procurement across government. In the last audited year, the commercial “function” he runs delivered more than £225mn in efficiencies. “That frees money up for departments to spend on other things that they think are useful, whether that’s more ammunition, more nurses, more drugs, more schools,” he said.
While the government’s emphasis is on bolstering external recruitment, officials are at pains to knock down “lazy” stereotypes about internal Whitehall staff. Little admitted she “probably had a preconception a lot of people in the private sector have” regarding the “quality of people” in the public sector but said she had been “really surprised by the exceptional talent and quality of leadership”. Rhys Williams agreed: “This place is full of seriously clever people.”
On the day Rhys Williams met the FT, he said 1,000 officials across Whitehall had signed up to a negotiating masterclass, while more than 50,000 had received training through a government commercial college. “We are becoming much more consistent, much better trained,” he said.
He is also optimistic about Quin’s plan to accelerate hiring from outside the civil service, given about 800 industry professionals have already been recruited into the 1,500-odd commercial roles in central government under his watch. “We don’t shout about it”, Rhys Williams said, but “it is possible to recruit really good people from the private sector into government”.
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