The coincidence is delicious and telling. Civil servant Kashim Chowdhury was convicted of nine counts of fraud, having held five full-time government jobs at the same time. Today, the Cabinet Secretary Antonia Romeo is speaking at the LSE on civil service reform, arguing that it must urgently improve productivity, and that it needs to be reimagined in “the most fundamental way” to address the emergence of AI and low public trust in government.
Romeo is not wrong. She is said by close observers to have a clear grasp of the problems with the civil service, and the drive and determination to address them. As she puts it in her speech, Whitehall “needs to change” and “the Civil Service of tomorrow must look very different from the Civil Service of today”.
It’s not what Chowdhury did – or rather, didn’t – do that makes the real point about his case
There could hardly be a clearer demonstration of that than Chowdhury’s ability to hold down five full-time civil service jobs. Having one such job should stretch anyone to the limits of their abilities. Having two should be both conceptually and practically impossible. But five? Chowdhury was described by his various managers as “largely ineffective” and his work as “exceptionally poor”, with one manager saying she gave him no work because he was unable to complete even basic tasks.
But it’s not what Chowdhury did – or rather, didn’t – do that makes the real point about his case, but rather that someone as appalling at any one of his five separate jobs was able to remain in post, paid by the rest of us to do nothing, with no one either able or willing to do anything about it. No wonder the number of civil servants has risen by 36 per cent in a decade, from 384,230 full-time equivalents to 523,635.
I’ve no doubt that Romeo has the best of intentions. But the waste of time and money across the civil service is so endemic, and the barriers to reform so deep, that the chances of her succeeding must be slim.
For one thing, she will need the determination of ministers to take on the civil service unions. More unlikely things have happened, but not many. It was this government, for example, which in April removed the cap on departmental spending on trade union facility time, when union representatives are given time off during working hours for union duties. The numbers are staggering, with the Ministry of Justice alone having 647 representatives taking time away from their desks for union activity.
It should be easy to make the civil service leaner and more efficient, given the amount of obvious waste. A recent Cabinet Office review found 380 full-time equality, diversity and inclusion staff. There are 570 diversity staff networks with 2,965 committee members, some of whom spend as much as half their week on network work.
According to the Institute for Government, the new civil service jobs created over the past decade have been almost entirely in mid-ranking and senior levels, which are those least likely to be culled by the mid-ranking and senior civil servants who would push through reform.
In looking at the figures, one thing that emerges is that Chowdhury missed one trick: 200 Land Registry staff were reported as not having been into the office for over six months, 78 of them for over two years. That could have been a sixth job for him.
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