A class apart
Britain's civil servants are too cool for school
Britain’s civil service is chummy, opaque and mediocre. Its top officials are “generalist” bluffers whose confidence often exceeds their competence. They glide from ministry to ministry, and then into plum jobs in the private sector. They dodge accountability, resist all reform and stymie the plans of elected ministers.
These were the findings of the Fulton Committee in 1968, tasked by Harold Wilson with shaking up Whitehall. The committee’s conclusions were not so different from the seminal Northcote-Trevelyan report in 1854, which called for Britain to recruit a highly-educated, exam-tested bureaucracy equal to the task of running its empire. But Fulton railed against the “cult of the gifted amateur”, complaining that Northcote-Trevelyan put too much faith in fusty Oxbridge degrees like PPE, rather than the specialist professional training increasingly standard in the private sector.
After a string of recent scandals and botches, Whitehall faces almost identical complaints - as if nothing has improved in half a century. Its critics range from the upstarts of Reform UK to stolid establishment types. A post-Covid review by Lord Maude, a Conservative grandee, found that even the most “uncontroversial” of Fulton’s recommendations had been ignored or defeated. The pandemic had shown how desperately Britain needed a competent and up-to-date bureaucracy. Yet the basic “shape” of the civil service had not changed for 100 years, even as the world changed around it.
It is worth asking why. Whitehall’s phobia of reform is part of the story, but not all of it. Fulton’s main recommendation was that Britain should be more like France, which trained its senior civil servants at the École nationale d’administration (ENA), founded by Charles de Gaulle in 1945. Highly selective and funded by the state, the ENA combined a wonkish grounding in public policy with a broader humanist education. It was the main model for the Civil Service College (CSC), which the Wilson government launched after the Fulton report.
The CSC was supposed to generate French-style administrative excellence. But it was haunted by a sense of box-ticking. The ENA recruited a tiny elite of students through tough exams, only a minority of whom went onto top jobs in the civil service. The CSC trained thousands of civil servants who already had jobs lined up. After its funding was slashed in the 1980s and 1990s, the CSC started charging Whitehall departments for their employees’ courses. Several decided not to bother.
Tony Blair’s government replaced the CSC with a National School of Government, which was supposed to be a better copy of the ENA. It was little different in practice, and was shut by the Conservatives in 2012. Britain’s civil servants remain amateurs, whether gifted or otherwise.
The Labour government is unhappy about that. Sir Keir Starmer and his political handlers have often clashed with senior civil servants since last year’s election. Sir Patrick Vallance, the science minister, lamented the grip of “generalists” at an Institute for Government event earlier this year. Certainly, a comparison of France’s well-run public sector and Britain’s would seem to endorse having another go at a British ENA.
But consider the fate of the original. Many in France have charged the ENA with breeding elitism, corruption, clannishness and groupthink, says Philippe Marlière, a professor at University College London. France’s bureaucratic éclat is probably down to high salaries, not seminars. Emmanuel Macron (himself an énarque) scrapped the ENA in 2021, in a sop to gilets jaunes protesters and his populist opponents. He has since revived it as the Institut du Service Public, a much more low-key affair. If the French have tired of over-educated mandarins, then good luck to them in Britain.
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