Civil service workforce: Recruitment, pay and performance management – Report Summary

Summary

Effective government depends on having a skilled and motivated civil service to administer policies, deliver services to the public and ensure government’s priorities are met. However, recruitment across the civil service is too slow, particularly compared with the private sector. From advertising the job to completing basic pre-employment checks, it takes an average of 99 days to hire staff. For candidates requiring the highest level of security clearance, it can take an additional 171 days on average to complete their security checks. Furthermore, chronic pay issues within the civil service have lowered morale and risk departments not being able to recruit and retain skilled staff.

The civil service is often seen as a single employer, but individual departments and agencies are formally the employers of their civil service staff. There are clear variations between departments in how efficiently they recruit and manage their staff, and a lack of awareness among departments of how well they perform compared to others. Most departments do not know how much it costs to hire people to work for them. Some departments do not even collect vital workforce data such as recruitment times, how many staff are underperforming in their organisation, or what happens to those who underperform.

Despite being responsible for the civil service workforce as a whole, the Cabinet Office has shown a lack of curiosity and willingness to act in areas where it should have strong oversight on workforce issues across government. For example, it does not benchmark departments on the efficiency of their recruitment processes or seek to understand where staff underperformance is a particular issue and how it is being dealt with.

The Government Chief People Officer has set out an ambitious vision for the civil service through the recent Civil Service People Plan, which runs from 2024 to 2027. This vision involves a smaller, more efficient and more productive civil service, where civil servants are rewarded for delivering for the public. However, the People Plan omits crucial detail on how it will meet its aims and how success will be judged. Progress against the People Plan will need to be monitored closely to see if its reforms empower the civil service to address the systemic workforce issues that risk undermining wider governmental effectiveness.