Report summary: How to strengthen the civil service through external recruitment

This report was authored by Jordan Urban and Alex Thomas. Feel free to get in touch with us at jordan.urban@instituteforgovernment.org.uk with any questions or follow-ups.

Report name

Opening up: How to strengthen the civil service through external recruitment

Who wrote this report?

The Institute for Government is the leading think tank working to make government more effective. One of our major areas of work is civil service reform and effectiveness.

Best quote

“It is likely that the civil service is about to enter a period of retrenchment, characterised by staff cuts and other efficiency savings. But that is not a reason to abandon plans to increase specialist external recruitment. It is a reason to press forward. These are the people who will provide new capability to the civil service and who – if used properly – will be able to improve the way government runs, saving money by improving public administration and so paying for themselves many times over”.

Key takeaways:

• The biggest barrier to the external recruitment of specialists into the civil service is a lack of specialist roles, particularly at senior levels. New senior specialist roles that allow experts to contribute their technical expertise to government should be established to provide an avenue to bring in and properly use people who can improve policy, operations and more.
• For some jobs, civil service pay is simply not high enough to consistently get the best talent into government. The impending reduction in the number of civil service roles is an opportunity – some of the relatively small amount of money saved would be well spent increasing salaries where doing so would help to attract in-demand talent to particular roles
• External specialists worry that their expert recommendations for achieving ministers’ political goals will be disregarded and they will be forced to defend policies they don’t think will work, damaging their professional reputation. This can lead to experts avoiding roles in the civil service. The government should review how it can publish certain types of civil service advice and implement the findings.

Why should you read this report?

For the past 50 years governments of all stripes have recognised that the civil service’s failure to attract the right external recruits has made it less effective. But little progress has been made. The most recent evidence was new figures that showed the number of senior civil servants recruited externally fell from 20% in 2019-20 to 18% in 2020-21. This report provides a concrete blueprint for how this thorny, long-standing problem can finally be solved in practice.

Who is this report for?

This report is for civil servants, politicians and interested observers who want to understand how to solve one of the biggest problems hampering the civil service’s effectiveness.

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