Newton Emerson: Failing civil service must be forced into fundamental reform

Initial hearings at the Covid inquiry in Belfast make it clear the Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS) is incapable of reforming itself.

The lessons of the Renewable Heat Incentive scandal were swiftly forgotten, despite supposedly grave promises to fix them under New Decade, New Approach. That agreement was strongly influenced by civil servants in Whitehall, who were appalled by the amateurism of their counterparts across the water.

If NICS cannot adopt basic professional standards under this degree of political and professional pressure, no amount of asking nicely is going to work. Enforcing fundamental reform on the organisation should be on the agenda.

The most obvious models to examine are the devolved administrations in Scotland and Wales. Stormont is unique in having its own self-contained civil service, set up as a miniature copy of Whitehall, with 23,000 full-time equivalent staff split between nine executive departments. The overhead of running this for a region with the population of Kent is partly why we have twice as many civil servants per head as the UK average.

The system in Scotland and Wales differs in two major ways. First, all civil servants tasked to serve the devolved governments are employees of the national or so-called ‘home’ civil service. If Stormont officials were employed the same way, rather than being in a little world of their own, it is fair to surmise they would be less likely to make the mistakes of RHI and more likely to heed instructions to improve.

Second, Scottish and Welsh civil servants are not organised into ministerial departments. Reforms from 2010 have re-organised them into around 50 specialist directorates, such as ‘legal services’ or ‘procurement and property’.

Many directorates serve multiple ministers at any given time, depending on the policies those ministers are delivering. Directorates can be organised into larger groups, such as health or education, but this does not mean they ‘belong’ to the health or education ministers. It is merely a way of civil servants managing themselves.

This system might sound needlessly complicated. There has been some tweaking with it to better line up directorates with ministerial remits. However, it is generally judged a success, albeit on measurements assessed by the civil service.

The Scottish and Welsh administrations outperform Whitehall on these metrics. While Scottish devolution has not been much of a success in recent years, this has mainly been due to a dysfunctional SNP-Green coalition. Stormont has a dysfunctional executive and a dysfunctional civil service.

While Scottish devolution has not been much of a success in recent years, this has mainly been due to a dysfunctional SNP-Green coalition. Stormont has a dysfunctional executive and a dysfunctional civil service

Directorate reorganisation has been a live topic in Scotland and Wales for over a decade. Almost nobody in Northern Ireland has noticed, raising the question of how plausible it is to expect a serious reform debate here.

Integration of NICS into the home civil service is a remote prospect. It would face huge resistance from management, staff and unions at Stormont, with little or no enthusiasm in London.

Unionists and nationalists would see it as British integration, creating a divide that would ensure political deadlock.

Ironically, Scottish civil servants made preparations for independence before and after the 2014 referendum that would be unthinkable at NICS.

Would Sinn Féin and the DUP be prepared to instigate major reform of the civil service?

In January, Sinn Féin said Stormont should be abolished in a united Ireland, which would make most of its civil servants redundant, so the party has crossed the Rubicon on upsetting staff about their terms and conditions. Nationalism need not be implacably opposed to integration; it just feels inevitable it would be too opposed for the idea to ever be credible.

Reorganising NICS into directorates is another matter and may be worth attempting on its own. Stormont has shuffled its civil servants around before, when departments were merged in 2016. The advantage of the directorate model is providing consistent expertise to all ministers.

Initial hearings at the Covid inquiry in Belfast make it clear the Northern Ireland Civil Service is incapable of reforming itself

It would have the major additional advantage in Northern Ireland of breaking up the silos inherent in power-sharing. This is not only a problem of individual ministers and parties; the most siloed people at Stormont are the civil servants, walled into each department and set in their ways.

It is just about plausible that Sinn Féin and the DUP might consider breaking up some of these vested interests, having frequently been frustrated by them. Senior civil servants might in turn welcome escaping the service of individual ministers and feeling obliged or even forced into covering up their mistakes.

At the very least, directorate reorganisation is a believable scenario to suggest to ministers and officials as NICS continues to fail.