Radio 4’s Any Questions on 23 May included the question: “Which government department would be at the top of a UK DOGE list?” Personally, I take exception to the question because it is manifestly loaded. It is not value-free, carrying the implicit message: ‘let’s slim down the UK civil service’.
A cautionary tale from across the pond
In the USA, Elon Musk has been given a free hand to take his task force (DOGE) into government departments and strip out allegedly unnecessary workers. The results have been disastrous. For example, some government workers who administer pay cheques in the social security system have been sacked. Consequently, recipients are not receiving their federal cheques. This has badly impacted the lives of the most vulnerable – the poor and the disabled.
This is not an example we’d wish to replicate this side of the Atlantic, so why put the question to the Any Questions panel? Or is it all part of the cheap fun of giving our civil service a kicking? For one right-wing panellist, the question merely provided an opportunity to expound on how we could shrink the size of the state and cut government spending. Given the damage caused by austerity policies under Osborne and others, such neoliberal thinking deserves immediate challenge, which the panel failed to do.
Do we actually need more civil servants, not fewer?
In 2015, Germany received a huge influx of over a million Syrian asylum seekers. This caused a logjam in the processing system, with refugees having to be accommodated – at a financial cost. The reaction of the German government was to recruit an additional ten thousand civil servants to deal with the backlog, which was quickly sorted.
The UK asylum-processing system has suffered for years from being under-resourced. The backlog of people waiting to have their cases reviewed has cost millions in accommodation costs – not to mention the human cost of the misery suffered by refugees as they wait for a decision. There is an incontrovertible argument here for employing more civil servants – not fewer.
A further example of where we could use more civil servants is in His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC). Richard Murphy, a professor of accounting at Sheffield University Business School, has identified that 30% of corporation tax in the UK goes unpaid. In a Guardian article, Murphy asserted that £1bn invested in extra staff at HMRC, including reopening some local tax offices, has the potential to bring in £12bn annually. This represents an excellent rate of return, achieved by employing more tax inspectors.
Brexit bloat
Not all additional employment of civil servants is beneficial. Brexit is now widely regarded as a disaster. Once we chose to leave the EU, the UK had to set up new structures to deal with the new trading relationship with the remaining 27 nations. In 2017, The Independent reported that our government had already taken on an additional 3,000 civil servants and was expecting to employ a further 5,000, including 300 more lawyers (who do not come cheap). This is wasteful expenditure: there are strong arguments for the UK to align with the single market and customs union, which would allow for a significant slimming down of that part of the civil service devoted to managing Brexit. It is getting the policy right in the first place that allows staffing reductions.
Pragmatism, not ideology
Any exercise to establish the number of civil servants to employ needs to be policy-led. To a large extent, it already is. Musk taking a chainsaw to the US federal administration might give you a photo opportunity and make for dramatic headlines, but it is deeply damaging. This should be a pragmatic and not an ideological issue and should not be allowed to be a frivolous aside on Any Questions.
