On Monday, Andy Burnham finally set out some of his plans for government. To the surprise of no one, much of it involves greater spending, with the likely next PM pledging that a new ‘No. 10 North’ will oversee the ‘biggest council house building programme since the post-war period.’
Less clear from the speech was how on earth it will be paid for. Instead, it looks like Burnham’s eventual pick for chancellor will be forced to stump up the cash, along with creating ‘good growth in every postcode and hope in every heart’.
In recent years the department has decided to sabotage its own talent pipeline – all in the interests of diversity. Even more worryingly, it has sacrificed the one thing that is meant to be the Treasury’s selling point: its numeracy
That will be easier said than done. Whoever enters No. 11 will find themselves dealing with a country that has somehow managed to combine the highest tax intake since the end of the second world war with decrepit public services. Additional borrowing to boost growth panics the bond markets, while decades of Treasury penny-pinching has led to woeful capital investment.
At times like these, you’d hope that Treasury civil servants – traditionally made up of the mandarin elite – would be on hand to help. But, The Spectator can reveal, in recent years the department has decided to sabotage its own talent pipeline – all in the interests of diversity. Even more worryingly, it has sacrificed the one thing that is meant to be the Treasury’s selling point: its numeracy.
For many years now, the Treasury has run its own talent scheme for highflying graduates. As you’d expect, given the department’s role in managing the nation’s finances, the application process has tested for numerical reasoning. While the programme recruits for policy advisers, rather than economic specialists, you need a least some mathematical ability to understand the department’s often complex financial and economic policies.
But then came 2020, the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the subsequent mental breakdown of the British state. The Treasury’s response to the death of a man in a completely different country, it appears, was to remove the numerical reasoning test from its graduate scheme. After The Spectator submitted a freedom of information request to the department, it explained that following a review of the 2019 scheme:
‘The Numerical Reasoning Test (NRT) was removed due to evidence of the test having adverse impact on candidate diversity. Subsequently, the levels of adverse impact decreased in the 2020 campaign.’
The department’s board minutes explained specifically that the test was removed because, ‘We want more diverse ethnicity at assessment centre’ and ‘having two tests creates an additional “hurdle” for candidates to jump over and another opportunity for candidates to be sifted out of the process.’ You would think that the entire point of an application process is to reduce the number of candidates until you have the most able people left. The Treasury, it seems, does not agree.
Already in 2019, the department had placed its finger on the hiring scale by increasing the numbers who passed its situational judgement test, ‘to maximise the number of diverse candidates in our process.’ This may have led, it speculated, to the higher fail rate for ethnic minorities at the numerical test stage and so would be reversed in subsequent years.
Still, the Treasury would not be deterred. When, in 2023, the programme had a higher number of applications, the department let more people through the early assessment stage to avoid any impact on diversity. This backfired, again, and led to its remarkable observation that, ‘Having to set extremely high benchmarks (higher than in a previous years) typically has an impact on diversity, and this was the case particularly at sift this year.’
You’d think at this stage the department would have learned that attempting to socially engineer your recruitment process is a fool’s game, and it should focus on simply trying to hire the best people for the job. Unfortunately, it appears, standards could be lowered further.
Already following the 2019 application run, the department had noted that in other years the programme’s verbal reasoning test had higher rates of ‘adverse impact on ethnicity’ than the numerical test. This was backed up by expert advice from the ‘ethnic diversity recruitment specialists Rare’, who noted that ‘their candidates tend to struggle with verbal testing in particular.’ Lo and behold, in 2024 the department removed its verbal reasoning test too, to avoid adversely affecting diversity outcomes. It was replaced by the ‘Civil Service Strengths Test’, a hard-hitting assessment which asks candidates if they agree or disagree with statements like ‘I prefer not to have to concentrate on one thing for too long’ or ‘It is important for me to exceed expectations when I am given a task to do.’ Gruelling stuff.
The Treasury’s defence of this kind of thing is that it represents a diverse population and so wants to be reflective of the society it serves. But that aspiration seems pretty hollow if it has to consistently lower standards to get the kind of diverse intake it wants.
It also does feel like there is a hostility to number-crunching at the department more generally. At the moment, the civil service recruitment page boasts that the ‘Treasury is no longer the male bastion it once was… Is the Treasury a “bit blokey” and all about numbers? These women leaders say no.’
That may be the case. But if Andy Burnham really does want to ‘rewire’ the British state and boost growth across the country, having a department which is ‘all about numbers’ might not be such a bad thing after all.
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