📜 Meaningless meetings damage your influence

Government is stuck in the analog age

The system hasn't adapted to the modern age and the speed at which government needs to move. It's still quite analog. It’s stuck in an era of physical letters, not one of social media and emails. This isn’t new of course - Tony Blair was talking about this back in the late 90s. It's one of those perennial issues in government, where the changes needed are longer term intergenerational changes and the politicians and advisers are focussed on the next election. It's not a nettle that anyone's really grasped.

Why civil servants need permission to act

Civil servants need to be more empowered to make those day-to-day, smaller decisions rather than pushing everything up to ministers. Responsibility for changing this goes both ways: politicians have got to give up a little bit of power and give a bit more responsibility to the civil servants, and the civil servants have got to be a bit bolder and willing to take decisions and take accountability for them. To be fair to a lot of the civil servants, they would say it's ripe for change and we haven't adapted as well as we might have done.

The civil service's most powerful weapon is inaction

The power that civil servants have is the power to not do stuff. There were a lot of things in government where civil servants wouldn't actively block what you wanted to try and do, but they would come at it from a problems-first perspective. If there was something where civil servants agree with you, the submission would pop out a week later. If they didn't agree with you, it would pop out three weeks later and you'd have to chase and have lots of back and forth with officials. We had to hone in on the priorities of the ministers and priorities of Number 10, which meant the lower priority issues that do need tackling just coast because advisers don’t have the time to keep pushing the relevant officials to make something happen.