The government should stop worrying about the Daily Mail Test

You can't fix the Civil Service by penny-pinching

Pod! Don’t forget to catch up with this week’s episode of The Abundance Agenda, where I explain why even though I hate cars, I think we need new roads – and we somehow end up raging about golf courses built near train stations. Listen on Apple, Spotify, or Substack.

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It turns out that basically everyone thinks that Dominic Cummings was right.

Since his time in government, all the way through to his current role as a Substacker writing scorching Bismarck takes, he has been a persistent critic of the civil service.

In 2020, Cummings called the idea of a permanent civil service an “idea for the history books”, and described how “failure is normal” in the existing system.

It’s a sentiment that is surprisingly widely shared. In fact, it was recently echoed by Keir Starmer himself, who at the end of last year notoriously said that “too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”.

So it’s not surprising that the government is currently embarking on a bold attempt to reform the civil service. Pat McFadden, the minister responsible, recently channelled the spirit of Cummings, and promised to make the state “more like a start-up”.

The plan itself all sounds pretty sensible to me. The government wants to introduce more performance-related pay and make it easier to sack civil servants who are crap. Then they want to spend more money upfront on digital transformation, to build a modern digital state that will make the bureaucracy more effective.

Now these are all very laudable goals – and I think many of the ideas here are good ones. However – I do think there is something else the government needs to address if it wants to build a civil service that works.

This isn’t a specific policy that is written down, or a particularity about the way the civil service is organised. Instead, it’s a massive cultural problem that hangs over the public sector like the fear of a malevolent God, invisibly shaping how civil servants behave – and even how they think.

And the name of this problem? The Daily Mail Test.

Here’s a cheeky special offer – if you work in government, and sign up for an annual subscription with an email address ending in “.gov.uk”, you can get 20% off:

The Daily Mail Test

Working as a civil servant can be a miserable job.