I have a nice memory of walking into the then Chancellor’s private office at 1 a.m. and everyone just being there, hammering away on their computers, as if that was just totally normal. And nice memories of watching the senior people in the Treasury slice through some very intractable-seeming problems. But during my time in government I also met some people who were… not so amazing.
The civil service is a weird mix. You have a bunch of people who are amazing and not paid much. And you have a bunch of people who are not good and should have been managed out ages ago. I worry that too often the good people leave not just because they are underpaid relative to their ability, but because they are sick of carrying the people who shouldn’t be there.
Other countries do better. Surely the vision has to be a civil service more like that in Singapore: a smaller number of better paid, much more effective people.
If we aren’t managing for high performance, are we at least managing out the real duffers?
Excess people in the civil service don’t just fail to add value. They often subtract it. The devil makes work for idle hands to do, and there is a connection between regulatory bloat and having a large low-quality workforce. If you have a lean, focussed high-IQ team, you are more likely to get on with core business, rather than have people who spend their time pumping out unnecessary initiatives or EDI nonsense.
There are multiple issues with the civil service. There is incredible churn. Because you generally can’t get promoted in place, the Treasury reportedly has faster turnover than McDonald’s. Too often an official would just be getting good at a brief and I would turn up at their desk to find they had been replaced again with a newbie.
The Fulton Report (1969) complained about the cult of the generalist civil servant but I’m afraid it is still there. Efforts to build specialist professions in finance, project management etc have light years to go. The civil service commissioners act like gatekeepers and the service has far too few people coming in from outside. Where people have spent more of their career outside it makes a big difference and it’s not a coincidence that some of the best people I met in government had done that. But in this piece I want to focus on performance management. Let’s start with recent history.
Concerned about these issues, the government of David Cameron brought in measures in 2012 to strengthen performance management. This civil service reform plan, spearheaded by Francis Maude, warned that ‘exceptional performance is too rarely recognised and underperformance not rigorously addressed’.
There were two bits to the plan. For the senior civil service, it brought in a system requiring each department to identify the top 25 per cent and the bottom 10 per cent of performers. And for the rest of the civil service (the less senior people) it encouraged something similar. Several large departments adopted a similar arrangement for their employees of lower (‘delegated’) grades of seniority.
Unsurprisingly, this ‘enforced distribution’ model proved deeply unpopular with the unions, who argued that it was discriminatory and harmful to staff wellbeing. By 2017, it was already in retreat as departments began to drop formal percentage targets for delegated grades, and in 2019 forced distribution was officially abandoned for senior civil servants as well.
We now have two systems in place. Senior civil servants are assessed by all departments using four box ratings: ‘Exceeding’, ‘High Performing’, ‘Achieving’ and ‘Partially Met’ – with a recommended ‘expected distribution’. Delegated grades, meanwhile, have since 2019 operated under a ‘flexible performance management framework’, which effectively allows departments to determine their own performance management system.
The current government says that this reform ‘has enabled departments to adopt a performance management approach to best suit their organisational and cultural needs’. Is this just fancy code for ‘we’ve let them give up’?
I went to investigate, by firing off a barrage of more than 150 parliamentary questions. I had to do this because amazingly, no department has published its current approach. The information obtained reveals just how much performance management is deteriorating.
When asked how many staff achieved the top performance rating in each department, it became clear that several departments have more or less entirely abandoned efforts to track performance. The Home Office, for instance, explained that they had ‘introduced a no-rating performance management system for delegated grades in 2021 in line with external good practice’. Likewise, at Defra, the minister noted that ‘end-year performance ratings were removed for most staff in April 2023’.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government have both since adopted a ‘rating-less system’ for performance management. The Department for Education (DfE) explained that they do not ‘operate a performance management system that includes ratings’, and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) say their approach ‘does not involve employees below the senior civil service being assigned a performance rating’. You get the idea.
Others like the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) were unable to answer because delegated grades in their department are assessed by just two ratings: ‘Met’ and ‘Not Met’. Meanwhile, at the Treasury, the ‘high performance category’, defined as ‘delivering exceptional performance’ has limited value, given that nearly a third (30 per cent) of all delegated grades were awarded this rating last year. Can 30 per cent really be ‘exceptional’?
Naturally, these ‘rating-less’ departments were unable to answer my question on the number of staff promoted according to their performance marking the previous year. But even where departments had retained some form of rating system, these marks had apparently no bearing on promotion decisions.
So you are twelve times more likely to die in the DfT than be removed for poor performance
That’s supposed to be the point: money and promotion should follow appraisal and performance management. But that’s not happening. At the Department for Business and Trade for instance, having ‘Not Met’ as your rating puts you in the bottom 2 per cent of performers in the department. And despite this, two civil servants in that bracket were promoted up a grade the following year. And of the 576 promotions awarded by DBT in 2024/2025, a third of recipients (194) didn’t have a performance rating in the previous year.
Similarly, at the Department for Transport there were at least six people whose performance was rated as ‘developing’ (the euphemistic bottom ranking) who were still awarded a promotion. While for 81 of the 282 promotions that were awarded that year, there was no performance rating from the previous year on record.
So if we aren’t managing for high performance, are we at least managing out the real duffers? Another question I asked was on the number of poor performance cases recorded, and the number of staff who had left as a result.
The best data is provided by the Department for Transport. Across its core department and its agencies, there were over 100,000 performance reviews conducted in 2024/25, with 822 of these leading to unsatisfactory performance ratings. A separate question on the number of concluded disciplinary or performance-related cases, revealed that there had been 58 ‘Managing Poor Performance’ cases concluded in that year, with only 2 dismissals as a result of poor performance (0.01 per cent of the proportion of full-time employees).
To put this in perspective, there were 25 civil servants who died in service in the department in the same period. So you are twelve times more likely to die than be removed for poor performance.
Sadly, this pattern is replicated across departments: a tiny proportion of civil servants fall into the lowest performance category or are subject to formal performance management procedures, and very few of these cases result in dismissal.
DCMS, for instance, has recorded just 61 formal performance cases over the past five years. Of these, 11 employees were either dismissed or resigned, representing roughly 1 per cent of its headcount over that period.
Similarly, at the Treasury, 2,057 reviews were completed in 2024/25, with only 28 poor performance markings recorded. The department is unable to specify precisely how many of those individuals were dismissed, on the grounds that the number is so small it would risk breaching data protection rules. We do know though, that in no year since 2020 have more than five staff been dismissed for poor performance. The Treasury generally attracts high-flyers, but still.
Neither the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) nor the DfE could provide data on the number of dismissals as a result of poor performance, though in both cases the number of staff who were flagged for poor performance was miniscule.
At DHSC there were 2,820 end-of-year ratings in 2024/25, with fewer than ten deemed unsatisfactory or below (0.35 per cent). This is a very small risk indeed. For statistical context, for every three members of staff given a bad rating, one will die by drowning. DfE conducted 73,035 ‘monthly check‑in conversations’ in 2024/25, where under performance was recorded in only 516 of these (0.7 per cent).
An honourable mention must also go to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulation Agency (MHRA), where despite 1,272 performance reviews taking place last year, not a single staff member was dismissed for poor performance. In fact, not a single member of staff has been dismissed for poor performance in the last five years in an organisation employing 1,456 full-time staff.
Sacking long-term staff is hard. The easiest time to move out someone who isn’t working out is when they are still on probation. But to my questions about the number of staff who did not retain their employment following their probation – or had their probation extended – there was a similar story.
For the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), ‘dismissals in relation to probation failure since DSIT’s inception occurred during years 2023-25 and totalled two members of staff’. From 2023-2025, there were 1,520 entrants to the civil service who joined this department.
The DfT revealed that they recorded ‘fewer than five staff members who were recruited into the civil service and did not pass their probation, and were subsequently dismissed, since the Department for Business and Trade was created in 2023’. The department saw 2,540 staff recruited into the civil service in this time.
The Deparment for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) revealed that no one had failed probation. There is ‘no evidence in the data held in the DESNZ HR Oracle system of any employee being dismissed during their probationary period’. This is despite the fact that there have been 840 entrants to the civil service who joined this department since its creation in 2023.
So why are these numbers so low? In large part, it’s down to the lengthy and complex procedures that managers must navigate before anyone can be dismissed for poor performance. Obtained via FOI, the Department for Business and Trade’s dismissal policy sets out a ten-step process, requiring a determined manager to pursue the cause through two written warnings, four formal meetings, and ‘regular performance discussions’ during this period.
The levers to dismiss staff are effectively out of reach
Meanwhile, the Home Office provided a flow chart of their dismissal procedure (which was shared by several other departments), illustrating the hoops managers must jump through to dismiss an underperforming colleague.
To make things harder still, appeals can be lodged at pretty much every stage of the process. Guidance from DBT dictates that an employee ‘has a right to one appeal per stage of the procedure’, which are the first written warning, the final written warning, and the decision. And yet despite all these opportunities to appeal a decision, DBT was subject to nine unfair dismissal claims between 2023 and 2025, while civil service statistics show that there were only 60 dismissals in total over the same period.
Given the time and workload required to navigate this process, and the risk that any decision could be overturned by an appeal or subsequent legal action, many managers conclude that it is simply not worth attempting to remove underperforming staff.
I always think the amount of time people have off sick is (other things equal) quite a good proxy for morale and performance management. And when we look at the data we can see both the attempt to get a grip after 2010 and the way that petered out before the pandemic and started to backslide after it. (This data excludes the effect of Covid absences).
If we look by department, it is not obvious why the number of days lost to sickness is so much higher in some departments than others. Sure, there are differences in structure which matter – DWP and the Ministry of Justice have far more frontline staff included in their totals. But it is not obvious why the Home Office should be so much higher than say the Cabinet Office, or why the Welsh equivalent of Ofsted should have 50 per cent more sick days than its equivalent in England. We can see absence is higher in lower grades, among women and older staff, but it is not obvious that composition explains away much of these differences.
Fourteen years on from Maude’s report, the civil service appears to be backsliding on the challenges he identified. The Conservatives under Kemi Badenoch have promised to reduce civil service numbers by 132,000 (back to 2016 levels) saving £8 billion if elected. But this can only be the start of an overhaul.
Today top performers still go largely unrecognised, and promotions do not rely on performance. Meanwhile poor performance is hardly registered, and when it is, the levers to dismiss staff on this basis are effectively out of reach. The losers from this are the public, taxpayers – and the civil servants who are not getting the rewards they deserve and carrying people they shouldn’t have to. Taxpayers have a right to expect a more efficient and better run civil service, and that is what we need to deliver.
This article first appeared on Neil O’Brien’s Substack
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