civil service

civil service. Despite repeated campaigns to reduce numbers, the civil service remains one of the great growth areas of modern Britain. In the 17th cent. the civil service—i.e. persons directly employed by the government—was tiny. The royal household, it is true, numbered some 2,000 persons, but that included 210 Yeomen of the Guard, 55 gentlemen pensioners, together with cooks and porters, who were not civil servants in the modern sense. The two secretaries of state had a staff of about fifteen—four clerks of the signet, a French and a Latin secretary, a German translator, and between four and eight junior clerks. There was no career structure, posts were filled by patronage, and remuneration was by fees rather than salary. When the two secretaries of state were divided into foreign and home in 1782, the Home Office began with two under-secretaries, a chief clerk, ten other clerks, and some domestic staff. The Rockinghams began, and Pitt continued, a campaign of economical reform, and sinecures were snipped away, but the persistent warfare from 1793 led to further increases in numbers, particularly in the revenue and in naval administration.

The growth of the civil service in the 19th cent. was steady and moderate and hardly kept pace with the rise in population. In 1815 there were 25,000 civil servants; 39,000 by 1851; 54,000 by 1871; and 79,000 by 1891. Some reforms were introduced piecemeal by departments. In the Treasury, North had launched the concept of promotion by merit (1776), Shelburne had inaugurated fixed salaries (1782), and in 1805 an assistant secretary was appointed, the forerunner of the permanent secretary. A comprehensive review waited for the Northcote–Trevelyan Report of 1854, which recommended a division of labour between graduate policy-makers and humble administrators; entry by competitive examination; transfer between departments; and promotion by merit based on assessment. The proposals were implemented piecemeal, though a Civil Service Commission, to supervise recruitment, was set up at once in 1855.

The vast expansion of the civil service in the 20th cent. is not easy to calculate, since definitions are troublesome and one commentator has referred to the ‘statistical conjuring tricks’—e.g. recategorizing thousands of civil servants—to give the impression that numbers are falling. The biggest growth has been in welfare and education services, beginning in the first decade of the century. By 1939 the numbers had risen to 387,000 and by 1979 to 730,000. These developments were accompanied by further reports. Haldane in 1918 was concerned that senior civil servants had little time to think, though the proposals were modest. Plowden in 1961 complained that the Treasury had no adequate system for forecasting or controlling expenditure—a rather worrying observation—and the Fulton Committee in 1968 deplored the survival of the cult of the amateur gentleman, the generalist, and called for the expert or specialist: ‘the cult is obsolete at all levels.’ One consequence was the establishment of a Civil Service College in 1970 to conduct research and training.

Among other criticisms, it has often been suggested that the senior civil servants really run things and can frustrate the plans of all but the most determined of ministers—a view reinforced by the popular television series Yes, Minister. Generalization in so wide and imprecise an area is hard, but an equally cogent view is that the upper civil service has been too subservient to party whims and ideologies—what is sometimes known as the ‘grovel factor’. Neutrality of the civil service is a concept readily conceded, but practice is more difficult, and the line between warning and frustrating, concurring and encouraging, is not easy to establish.

Though the public image of the civil servant may remain a pin-striped bowler-hatted Whitehall mandarin, most civil servants work outside London and half of them are women. Of the non-industrial civil service, the large employers are the Ministry of Defence, the Department of Social Security, the Board of Inland Revenue, the Department of Education and Employment, the Department of the Environment, the Home Office, and Customs and Excise.

J. A. Cannon