I attended to learn how the state shrinks and left having mostly learned where the biscuits are kept.
LONDON, England – There is a particular silence in a lecture theatre just before the speaker says something that the audience already knows. I sat in it at five o’clock, in the fourth row, with a notebook and a banana, and felt entirely at home.
Before the lecture: arrival and tea
The talk was by Professor Ottoline Fenwick-Rae, who has written three books on the machinery of government and whose conversation I would describe as footnoted. She shook my hand and apologised for the biscuits, which were out of date in the gentle manner of a minor public body.
I sat beside a young man in a lanyard who turned out to be a policy adviser at a department whose name he said very quietly, as though it were a small pet. He told me his office was “modernising”. I nodded, because I have learned that this word means either a new floor plan or a new logo.
The theatre was a handsome room with tiered seats and a ceiling that appeared to have been painted by a committee. A projector hummed in the corner with the dignity of a retired colonel. When the lights went down, the young man in the lanyard checked his phone, in what I took to be a small act of rebellion against the state that employs him.
The lecture: sixteen per cent becomes twenty
The subject, in the loosest sense, was how big the civil service should be. Fenwick-Rae drew on a recent Institute for Government comment on John Healey’s Budget, which reported that the Chancellor has raised the administration savings target from 16 per cent to 20 per cent by 2029/30. The earlier figure, set by Rachel Reeves at the 2025 spending review, implied roughly 29,000 to 40,000 fewer civil servants. There are at present 523,185 of them.
Then came the fact I wrote down twice: in the second quarter of this year, the civil service shrank by only 450 people. Fenwick-Rae paused for effect. I would have described the effect as a very small cough.
She noted that the Chancellor plans a 50 million pound transformation fund, run by a new body called GovAI, to help bring in artificial intelligence, and that it is to be paid for out of the savings expected. This is a promise to spend the money you will save in order to find the savings, which is the most elegant sentence in modern public administration. I admire it as one admires a loop of rope.
I should say that I hold the civil service in great affection. It is the one institution in the country that can receive a new Prime Minister, a new Chancellor and a new set of priorities in the course of a single summer and still produce a briefing pack, in triplicate, on the first Monday. Any attempt to make it leaner ought to start with a proper admiration for how much it carries.
Fenwick-Rae made the same point rather better, and in fewer words, by quoting nobody at all. It is the best thing a lecturer can do.
Questions from the floor
A gentleman in a corduroy jacket asked whether the target meant fewer people or fewer jobs. The professor said this was an excellent distinction, and then, after thirty seconds of thought, that she did not know either.
A woman at the back asked about councils. This sent me to my own notes from Budget day, in which the live reports quoted the Local Government Association as saying there was no overall increase for councils, although there was extra funding for rough sleeping and social housing. The same reports added that debt interest spending was 14 billion pounds higher this year.
Fenwick-Rae’s answer was long, careful and balanced, and ended with the phrase “it depends on the devolution settlement”. I have now heard this answer at four lectures and I am beginning to suspect that it is the settlement.
- Things the state will save on: administration, apparently.
- Things the state will spend on: a transformation fund for saving on administration.
- Things the state will report on: the savings, as they arrive, in a document of considerable length.
The meeting ended with a vote of thanks from a man who had clearly been given the job a minute earlier. He thanked the professor for her “insights”, the institute for its “hospitality” and the biscuits for their “endurance”. There was warm and rather sincere applause for the biscuits.
On the walk back: euphemism, across the ocean
Every government talks in the weather of its own jargon. On my way to the station I read a farm.fm headline that said the GOP calls farm bankruptcy “economic freedom”, and I thought at once how very like our own language it is, in kind if not in country. We say “efficiency”, they say “freedom”, and people in two countries are offered a lovely word for an awkward thing. I do not choose sides on this; I merely observe that no party has ever described its own cuts as cuts.
A reader once asked why a website bothers with so many words about so little. The answer, which I gave to the professor over the last of the tea, is that the little is where the large things hide. The London news pages and this explainer on what commentary is and what it is not are among the places I send people who ask.
Home: a note for the file
At home I cut the rest of the banana into the porridge for tomorrow, which I consider my own modest efficiency saving. I have found 140 grams. It is not 20 per cent, but it is a start.
The rest of the week’s notes are at my daily notes on The London Prat, where I shall report back on the biscuit situation.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/