Constraints
The transcript of Episode 2 of 'Y Pumed Llawr - The Fifth Floor
In this episode of the 5th floor I’ll continue to look at the pressures you face inside Government, and the barriers Ministers face in bringing about change. My name is Lee Waters, and for 5 years I was a Minister in the Welsh Government with an office here on the 5th floor.
I’ve spoken with former Ministers, Special political Advisers and civil servants to try and paint a picture of what it’s really like. Many of the voices you’ll hear speaking on the record for the very first time.
In this episode I’m going to explore why Ministers are often frustrated by the pace of change delivered by the civil service - the permanent Welsh Government. And why civil servants are in-turn frustrated with Ministers.
(Ian Taylor)
The thing that I came away with as an abiding impression or feeling, was dismay that there's so many good people who are, in fact, wanting to do the right thing - because that applied in spades to a lot of the officials, as well as to the ministers. There were able people - still are. They were hard working people. But it interests me, and it's saddening really, to see that the system serves no one well.
Ian Taylor’s experience as an adviser trying to produce a Bill to reform the bus system was a very frustrating one. His efforts began in 2021. It is now the end of 2024 and there is still no Bus Bill to show for the efforts. It is due to presented to the Senedd in February 2025.
The fact this is a flagship policy with the strong support of the whole Cabinet. Dr Taylor thinks that’s a sign of a dysfunctional system.
[IT]
It doesn't serve the public well. It doesn't serve the officials themselves well, and it doesn't serve the politicians well. So then you have to say, ‘Well, how do we end up in that situation where you've got something which actually serves nobody’? Well, that sounds very negative, but it's important to think ‘how could it be better’? One very good official said he'd never worked in any organisation that was so badly managed, and then he left.
This episode is not a character assasnation of the civil service. Far from it. As Ian Taylor attests, it is an institution full of smart, hard working people deeply committed to public service.
But it is an institution under enormous strain.
And so little is known about it.
Some would prefer to keep it that way.
__________
In 25 years of devolution the Senedd has become increasingly familiar to people. The Welsh Parliament is fairly transparent for all to see. But the Welsh Government - the most powerful branch of our constitution - remains shrouded in mystery.
This series of podcasts is designed to start to fill that knowledge gap.
This is a two-part episode focusing on the role of the civil service - the permanent Welsh Government.
In this episode you’ll hear it laid bare. You’ll hear the frustration of those who work within it. You’ll hear about the human impacts. And for the first time you’ll hear about the data - the hard facts - of just how parlous things have become in Cathays Park, the Welsh Government headquarters.
And in the second part of this episode you’ll hear how the civil service doesn’t help itself.
Whilst the political debate has focused on the Senedd’s lack of capacity to do its job properly. Nobody has been talking about the capacity, or the capability, of the Welsh Government.
And when it comes to the ability of Ministers to deliver change - that matters.
This episode should serve as a distress flare.
But first let me set the scene.
__________
When Dafydd Trystan came onto the Fifth Floor thought he knew the ropes. He’d been around the block before he was seconded as a new Special Adviser for the final months of the Cooperation Agreement between the Welsh Labour Government and Plaid Cymru. He told me it took him some time to get what he calls ‘a deeper understanding of why things happened and why things didn't happen’.
[Dr Dafydd Trystan Davies]
Ian Taylor’s experience as an adviser trying to produce a Bill to reform the bus system was a very frustrating one. His efforts began in 2021. It is now the end of 2024 and there is still no Bus Bill to show for the efforts. It is due to presented to the Senedd in February 2025.
The fact this is a flagship policy with the strong support of the whole Cabinet. Dr Taylor thinks that’s a sign of a dysfunctional system.
[IT]
It doesn't serve the public well. It doesn't serve the officials themselves well, and it doesn't serve the politicians well. So then you have to say, ‘Well, how do we end up in that situation where you've got something which actually serves nobody’? Well, that sounds very negative, but it's important to think ‘how could it be better’? One very good official said he'd never worked in any organisation that was so badly managed, and then he left.
This episode is not a character assasnation of the civil service. Far from it. As Ian Taylor attests, it is an institution full of smart, hard working people deeply committed to public service.
But it is an institution under enormous strain.
And so little is known about it.
Some would prefer to keep it that way.
__________
In 25 years of devolution the Senedd has become increasingly familiar to people. The Welsh Parliament is fairly transparent for all to see. But the Welsh Government - the most powerful branch of our constitution - remains shrouded in mystery.
This series of podcasts is designed to start to fill that knowledge gap.
This is a two-part episode focusing on the role of the civil service - the permanent Welsh Government.
In this episode you’ll hear it laid bare. You’ll hear the frustration of those who work within it. You’ll hear about the human impacts. And for the first time you’ll hear about the data - the hard facts - of just how parlous things have become in Cathays Park, the Welsh Government headquarters.
And in the second part of this episode you’ll hear how the civil service doesn’t help itself.
Whilst the political debate has focused on the Senedd’s lack of capacity to do its job properly. Nobody has been talking about the capacity, or the capability, of the Welsh Government.
And when it comes to the ability of Ministers to deliver change - that matters.
This episode should serve as a distress flare.
But first let me set the scene.
__________
When Dafydd Trystan came onto the Fifth Floor thought he knew the ropes. He’d been around the block before he was seconded as a new Special Adviser for the final months of the Cooperation Agreement between the Welsh Labour Government and Plaid Cymru. He told me it took him some time to get what he calls ‘a deeper understanding of why things happened and why things didn't happen’.
[Dr Dafydd Trystan Davies]
I think the first thing that struck me, and that was clear in both the specialist and special advisor roles, was just the weight of the machine. There is an enormous - and rightly so in many ways - there's an enormous machine and a bureaucracy that churns forward things - and papers and discussions - and there are processes and procedures, and understanding how all of that works - and on occasions doesn't work - was, I think, probably a revelation.
Tom Woodward came into the Welsh Government as an adviser to the new education Minister, Liberal Democrat leader Kirsty Williams. He too was discombobulated:
[TW]
I came into Welsh Government and thought, ‘Wow, there's so many people here’. I'd come working from the Lib Dems, where you've got a handful of people doing a hell of a lot. I’d come all of a sudden into, you know, numerous people in private office, and just what felt like an endless amount of people. Six months in you definitely don't feel like that at all.
If Dr Who’s Tardis is bigger than it seems on the outside, the reverse is true of the Welsh Government
There are fewer than 6,000 civil servants working for the Welsh Government.
That sounds quite a lot. But consider this - it’s smaller than Cardiff Council.
Tom Woodward came into the Welsh Government as an adviser to the new education Minister, Liberal Democrat leader Kirsty Williams. He too was discombobulated:
[TW]
I came into Welsh Government and thought, ‘Wow, there's so many people here’. I'd come working from the Lib Dems, where you've got a handful of people doing a hell of a lot. I’d come all of a sudden into, you know, numerous people in private office, and just what felt like an endless amount of people. Six months in you definitely don't feel like that at all.
If Dr Who’s Tardis is bigger than it seems on the outside, the reverse is true of the Welsh Government
There are fewer than 6,000 civil servants working for the Welsh Government.
That sounds quite a lot. But consider this - it’s smaller than Cardiff Council.
In fact with a workforce of nearly 25,000, Cardiff Council is 60% bigger than the Government of Wales.
Of the 6,000 civil servants in Welsh Government around a third are focused on practical delivery - things like delivering business support, inspecting motorway bridges or guiding visitors around the castles in Cadw’s historic environment estate.
And another third of posts are classed as support roles.
Which leaves just a third of the Welsh Government civil service working on policy, legislation and supporting Ministers.
It’s smaller than you might think.
__________
Before the era of democratic devolution the Welsh Office was known as Whitehall’s smallest department. In 1999 its civil servants had to pivot from serving just three Westminster Ministers to supporting a cabinet and an elected Assembly based in Cardiff Bay.
John Howells is a 40-year veteran of the civil service in Wales and worked in Cathays Park in the days before devolution.
[John Howells]
It's hard to underestimate the scale of the change, just the exposure to politicians in today's Senedd setup, compared to what it was like in the 1980s and the 1990s where ministers spent most of their time in London, would appear in Cardiff for visits on a Friday, sometimes on a Monday.
Going to a Minister's office involved going to London for the day, and there were only three politicians responsible for all of the functions of government in Wales.
So the culture shock for officials involved in having to deal with all those politicians who suddenly arrived post 1999 was quite profound.
Owain Lloyd started work in the civil service just a few weeks before the first Assembly elections, and as he moved up its ranks he saw the machine change
[Owain Lloyd]
I do think the Civil Service, in the Welsh context, has changed quite considerably over the past 25 years. Because I remember when I started in ‘99 we were still in a very much traditional kind of Welsh Office way of doing things, which was very hierarchical actually. During those early days you had to be a certain level, for instance, to have access to Ministers. So it was quite traditional and hierarchical. And I do think that has shifted over time.
I think civil servants at all levels get a lot more access now to Ministers, and understand the decision making process, which I think is a good thing. And I think something that Ministers over time have wanted more of - that direct contact with the people who actually know the level of detail that's required when it comes to a particular policy, rather than at a Director level where it is far more general at times.
Government in Wales is on a human-scale. But just how much smaller it is, can still startle.
Sam Hadley was the Special Adviser for Transport.
SH
So on the size point, I think the anecdote I would share is Peter McDonald, who's the Director of Transport, started basically the same week as me, and very excitedly, one day, came up and said, ‘I think I've just had a chat with my opposite number at the Department for Transport’, and I showed him the organogram of the DFT, which had about 50 of his ‘opposite numbers’. And that was, that was pretty telling.
By the time Owain Lloyd had ascended the ranks to become the Welsh Government’s Director of Education and Welsh language the canvas he had to cover had significantly broadened
[OL]
I was spanning everything that was to do with compulsory schooling, from the curriculum to ALN [Additional Learning Needs], to free school meals to the funding of schools, a myriad of other things.
Whereas I had no counterpart in either a Scottish or an English context. There at Director level, you would have somebody who was focused on a far more discreet area. So in that regards, I was often looking quite jealous at others because the pressure and the workload that comes with that is quite considerable.
Because obviously, not only am I expected from a Ministerial point of view to be on top of things, and to be able to answer questions on a myriad of stuff, but my focus also has to be on the leadership and the management of the department, and there's that kind of external stakeholder relationship.
So in that sense it's quite a pressurised job, and maybe too often than not you're pulled kind of in every direction, and a feeling at times maybe that you're not doing justice to the job in its entirety.
To be Minister or a senior civil servant in the Welsh Government means having to cover-off areas that are discharged by far more people in the UK Government.
Sam Hadley came to work with me in the transport department as a Spad. He was on secondment from Network Rail which employs 40,000 people
So definitely there is a kind of size issue, and the breadth of issues that the department are dealing with are kind of broadly similar to the breadth of issues that the Department for Transport and Whitehall are dealing with, but the numbers are just infinitesimally smaller.
And in some ways, I don't think that's a bad thing, because there's probably lots of people in Whitehall, you know, ‘double-hatting’, doing jobs that could be done by fewer people, and the kind of silos are not as great. And we're efficient and lean, and all the advantages that you do have from being small, so there will be advantages too. But I think sometimes we really do struggle just in terms of that kind of manpower to do the job
The civil service in Cardiff’s Cathays Park is no different to any other Welsh branch of a UK-wide organisation - it has always had to do more with less. That has been especially acute since the 2010 austerity cuts, but with long institutional memory to draw on John Howells reminds us we’ve been squeezed before:
JH
There's been a significant growth in the functions of government in Wales over that 40 year period that I know something about. And the normal pattern was that if the Welsh Government did inherit new responsibilities, it didn't receive any additional staffing budget to go with those responsibilities.
So there was always a bit of a squeeze involved in taking on new functions, and it was hard to believe that a new group of politicians in a Senedd wasn't going to want to become involved in all of the things that people in Wales think are important.
So there's always been a bit of a stress, I think, between the understandable desire to get involved in those things. And so what's the fair disposition of resources to support that?
Lesley Griffiths was the Minister for Rural Affairs at the time of Brexit. By then the Welsh Government had been living with an austerity recruitment freeze for a number of years. And had lost lots of old hands through several rounds of voluntary redundancies.
But when the process of leaving the EU was triggered, her Whitehall counterparts in the Department of Rural Affairs started hiring lots of new staff to deal with all the regulations flowing back from Brussels.
LG
“Defra [Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs] I think took on 1500 new officials, new civil servants, to cope with Brexit, whereas I think I had five. I think in the end, I had about 90 over the period of time I was in rural affairs. But as you say, the number was capped. We do not have the capacity.
Which leaves just a third of the Welsh Government civil service working on policy, legislation and supporting Ministers.
It’s smaller than you might think.
__________
Before the era of democratic devolution the Welsh Office was known as Whitehall’s smallest department. In 1999 its civil servants had to pivot from serving just three Westminster Ministers to supporting a cabinet and an elected Assembly based in Cardiff Bay.
John Howells is a 40-year veteran of the civil service in Wales and worked in Cathays Park in the days before devolution.
[John Howells]
It's hard to underestimate the scale of the change, just the exposure to politicians in today's Senedd setup, compared to what it was like in the 1980s and the 1990s where ministers spent most of their time in London, would appear in Cardiff for visits on a Friday, sometimes on a Monday.
Going to a Minister's office involved going to London for the day, and there were only three politicians responsible for all of the functions of government in Wales.
So the culture shock for officials involved in having to deal with all those politicians who suddenly arrived post 1999 was quite profound.
Owain Lloyd started work in the civil service just a few weeks before the first Assembly elections, and as he moved up its ranks he saw the machine change
[Owain Lloyd]
I do think the Civil Service, in the Welsh context, has changed quite considerably over the past 25 years. Because I remember when I started in ‘99 we were still in a very much traditional kind of Welsh Office way of doing things, which was very hierarchical actually. During those early days you had to be a certain level, for instance, to have access to Ministers. So it was quite traditional and hierarchical. And I do think that has shifted over time.
I think civil servants at all levels get a lot more access now to Ministers, and understand the decision making process, which I think is a good thing. And I think something that Ministers over time have wanted more of - that direct contact with the people who actually know the level of detail that's required when it comes to a particular policy, rather than at a Director level where it is far more general at times.
Government in Wales is on a human-scale. But just how much smaller it is, can still startle.
Sam Hadley was the Special Adviser for Transport.
SH
So on the size point, I think the anecdote I would share is Peter McDonald, who's the Director of Transport, started basically the same week as me, and very excitedly, one day, came up and said, ‘I think I've just had a chat with my opposite number at the Department for Transport’, and I showed him the organogram of the DFT, which had about 50 of his ‘opposite numbers’. And that was, that was pretty telling.
By the time Owain Lloyd had ascended the ranks to become the Welsh Government’s Director of Education and Welsh language the canvas he had to cover had significantly broadened
[OL]
I was spanning everything that was to do with compulsory schooling, from the curriculum to ALN [Additional Learning Needs], to free school meals to the funding of schools, a myriad of other things.
Whereas I had no counterpart in either a Scottish or an English context. There at Director level, you would have somebody who was focused on a far more discreet area. So in that regards, I was often looking quite jealous at others because the pressure and the workload that comes with that is quite considerable.
Because obviously, not only am I expected from a Ministerial point of view to be on top of things, and to be able to answer questions on a myriad of stuff, but my focus also has to be on the leadership and the management of the department, and there's that kind of external stakeholder relationship.
So in that sense it's quite a pressurised job, and maybe too often than not you're pulled kind of in every direction, and a feeling at times maybe that you're not doing justice to the job in its entirety.
To be Minister or a senior civil servant in the Welsh Government means having to cover-off areas that are discharged by far more people in the UK Government.
Sam Hadley came to work with me in the transport department as a Spad. He was on secondment from Network Rail which employs 40,000 people
So definitely there is a kind of size issue, and the breadth of issues that the department are dealing with are kind of broadly similar to the breadth of issues that the Department for Transport and Whitehall are dealing with, but the numbers are just infinitesimally smaller.
And in some ways, I don't think that's a bad thing, because there's probably lots of people in Whitehall, you know, ‘double-hatting’, doing jobs that could be done by fewer people, and the kind of silos are not as great. And we're efficient and lean, and all the advantages that you do have from being small, so there will be advantages too. But I think sometimes we really do struggle just in terms of that kind of manpower to do the job
The civil service in Cardiff’s Cathays Park is no different to any other Welsh branch of a UK-wide organisation - it has always had to do more with less. That has been especially acute since the 2010 austerity cuts, but with long institutional memory to draw on John Howells reminds us we’ve been squeezed before:
JH
There's been a significant growth in the functions of government in Wales over that 40 year period that I know something about. And the normal pattern was that if the Welsh Government did inherit new responsibilities, it didn't receive any additional staffing budget to go with those responsibilities.
So there was always a bit of a squeeze involved in taking on new functions, and it was hard to believe that a new group of politicians in a Senedd wasn't going to want to become involved in all of the things that people in Wales think are important.
So there's always been a bit of a stress, I think, between the understandable desire to get involved in those things. And so what's the fair disposition of resources to support that?
Lesley Griffiths was the Minister for Rural Affairs at the time of Brexit. By then the Welsh Government had been living with an austerity recruitment freeze for a number of years. And had lost lots of old hands through several rounds of voluntary redundancies.
But when the process of leaving the EU was triggered, her Whitehall counterparts in the Department of Rural Affairs started hiring lots of new staff to deal with all the regulations flowing back from Brussels.
LG
“Defra [Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs] I think took on 1500 new officials, new civil servants, to cope with Brexit, whereas I think I had five. I think in the end, I had about 90 over the period of time I was in rural affairs. But as you say, the number was capped. We do not have the capacity.
Within a year of Brexit civil service numbers in Defra started rising steadily.
In September 2017 their headcount stood at just over 6,000.
By May 2024, that had risen by 111%, to over 13,000 people.
In the same period the Scottish Government boosted its capacity by 70%. From nearly 16,000 civil servants to more than twenty six and a half thousand.
But in Wales, only 800 extra people were taken on.
The figures are stark, but the choice was conscious.
Dan Butler was Mark Drakeford’s Spad overseeing environmental matters and watched as Whitehall recruitment ballooned.
[DB]
Well, I mean, obviously I had a very close involvement in that work with Defra. I mean vast, vast amounts of that work was utterly redundant. So huge amounts of that work is totally wasted. I mean, we spent millions of pounds setting up all these border units and they're utterly redundant. So, yes, I mean, Whitehall invested more in that, but how much have they got from that investment? I'm not that sure. We did things like change the regulations on the shape of the bottles that wine comes in. Is that really good use of Welsh Government resources to put more people in? You know? I don't think so. What happened to that resource, and therefore what we did instead, I don't know. You'd have to…
LW
[Interruption] I’m interested in the decision by Mark Drakeford to say that local authorities are facing austerity and we should not be increasing our headcount at the same time as we're asking them to let people go. What was behind that thinking?
DB
It's not a decision I was very close to, my work with local government tended to be more on the policy side generally, rather than worry about things like that. But you know, it was supposed to be a better, closer relationship. You know, ‘we're not giving you one rule and then having [another] one’, you know…equally, I never, I never heard anyone from a local authority thank us for that.
LW [laughter]
I asked Mark Drakeford he decided if in hindsight he thinks we was right to continue to constrain the size of the Welsh civil service when Brexit and then Covid hit, a time when the Governments in England and in Scotland expanded
MD
Well, I think there are a number of reasons. The first most obvious is that we're not comparing like with like. Scotland has taken on a whole new range of responsibilities in the welfare field that we don't have in Wales. And the Whitehall expansion is essentially driven by the disaster of Brexit and the enormous growth in the number of people that had to be employed to deal with every disaster that every stone you uncovered displayed, and while we did make some modest temporary increase in staffing in the Welsh Government to deal with Brexit pressures here, we didn't face the same level of demand on us more generally.
When I first became the Finance Minister, we were already five years into Austerity, and the impact on all our public services was very apparent. Local Government, particularly was losing staff in large numbers, and it became a principle for me very early on, that in an age of austerity, when you are having to ask other major public sector bodies to manage with less money that you couldn't treat yourselves any more favorably than you were treating them. And I explored that principle with the then First Minister, Carwyn Jones, who agreed with it, and I've continued with it the whole time that I've been able to.
I think it is simply a matter of fairness. It is always easy to persuade yourself that you are a special case, that while everybody else has to manage with less, you can only manage with more. And I just felt that was an untenable argument to try to make in an era where year after year, we were having to ask our colleagues right across that vast range of things that the Welsh Government tries to fund, but while they were going to have to bear the burden of austerity, we were to insulate ourselves from it.
So it has had an impact, of course, on the Welsh Government and our capacity to do some of the things we would want to do. But that impact is no greater and probably a bit less than other organisations have had to cope with as well
LW
When you plot the data and you see the graphs, once Covid and Brexit kicked in, there was an argument for taking a different view because of the extra pressures, and yet we stuck with that same principle?
MD
I don't myself agree that Covid was a reason for changing that. I think Covid changed the way we worked, and it placed an enormous stress and strain on certain parts of the Welsh Government, but I would not myself regard Covid as a reason for needing to increase the head count of the Welsh Government more say than the health service to deal with those impacts, or the way that local government shouldered the impact of Covid.
Brexit is a different matter, and we did temporarily, because the funding we had from the UK Government was temporary funding the consequentials of their rise for Brexit related purposes came to Wales, and we did devote those resources to the Welsh Government, but I wasn't in a position to agree to make posts permanent for which there was only temporary funding. So you will see that reflected in the figures. And as the temporary funding fades away, then I'm afraid you have to be able to cut your coat according to your cloth.
__________
MD
Well, I think there are a number of reasons. The first most obvious is that we're not comparing like with like. Scotland has taken on a whole new range of responsibilities in the welfare field that we don't have in Wales. And the Whitehall expansion is essentially driven by the disaster of Brexit and the enormous growth in the number of people that had to be employed to deal with every disaster that every stone you uncovered displayed, and while we did make some modest temporary increase in staffing in the Welsh Government to deal with Brexit pressures here, we didn't face the same level of demand on us more generally.
When I first became the Finance Minister, we were already five years into Austerity, and the impact on all our public services was very apparent. Local Government, particularly was losing staff in large numbers, and it became a principle for me very early on, that in an age of austerity, when you are having to ask other major public sector bodies to manage with less money that you couldn't treat yourselves any more favorably than you were treating them. And I explored that principle with the then First Minister, Carwyn Jones, who agreed with it, and I've continued with it the whole time that I've been able to.
I think it is simply a matter of fairness. It is always easy to persuade yourself that you are a special case, that while everybody else has to manage with less, you can only manage with more. And I just felt that was an untenable argument to try to make in an era where year after year, we were having to ask our colleagues right across that vast range of things that the Welsh Government tries to fund, but while they were going to have to bear the burden of austerity, we were to insulate ourselves from it.
So it has had an impact, of course, on the Welsh Government and our capacity to do some of the things we would want to do. But that impact is no greater and probably a bit less than other organisations have had to cope with as well
LW
When you plot the data and you see the graphs, once Covid and Brexit kicked in, there was an argument for taking a different view because of the extra pressures, and yet we stuck with that same principle?
MD
I don't myself agree that Covid was a reason for changing that. I think Covid changed the way we worked, and it placed an enormous stress and strain on certain parts of the Welsh Government, but I would not myself regard Covid as a reason for needing to increase the head count of the Welsh Government more say than the health service to deal with those impacts, or the way that local government shouldered the impact of Covid.
Brexit is a different matter, and we did temporarily, because the funding we had from the UK Government was temporary funding the consequentials of their rise for Brexit related purposes came to Wales, and we did devote those resources to the Welsh Government, but I wasn't in a position to agree to make posts permanent for which there was only temporary funding. So you will see that reflected in the figures. And as the temporary funding fades away, then I'm afraid you have to be able to cut your coat according to your cloth.
__________
Ministers in the Welsh Government set the overall budget, and that includes the staffing budget. So there is political control over the size of the Welsh Civil Service, but not over how it works.
From your office on the Fifth Floor of Ty Hywel the organogram of Cathays Park is beyond your reach.
How resources are allocated against Ministerial priorities, and which civil servants were appointed to key posts is not something the politicians in the Welsh Government get to decide.
“Staffing matters are not your concern, Minister” is the firm message if you express a view on personnel.
If a key official is promoted, or moved to a new posting, often the Minister is one of the last to know.
Complain, or suggest someone is not up to the job, and it is made very clear that Ministers should keep their beak out of the day to day running of the civil service.
This is Dan Butler, he was a close adviser to Mark Drakeford for the whole of his time as First Minister:
[DB]
The thing is you've got a very strange setup in Welsh government, democratic governments generally, is that you have to have an organisation that is set up in such a way that you can cut its head off every five years and it carries on moving. Most organisations are not like that. I mean, most organisations that suffer that kind of damage would really struggle to carry on and often take a long time to recover, whereas the government just carries on going. And that's brilliant, but it means there's a particular disconnect between executive decision making and then the operations.
It's very unusual and quite hard to navigate, and very difficult for people from the outside to understand. So, if I was working in a business, and there was somebody managing an area and it was causing problems for stakeholders, then at some point you'd expect the executive to be able to do something directly about that. Well, in government, you can't beyond, you know, you have a conversation with someone who has a conversation with someone else who has a conversation with the First Minister, who has a conversation with the Perm [Permanent Secretary]. But what happens after is that often, especially as a Special Adviser, you're not even told so you don't even necessarily know what the management actions being taken are.
It’s quite clear that it’s the First Minister who heads the Welsh Government. But the running of it is pretty opaque.
The most senior civil servant is Sir Andrew Goodall. He’s the Permanent Secretary, typically referred to inside Cathays Park as ‘The Perm’.
He is officially the Principal Accounting Officer. That means he’s responsible for the day-to-day running of the Welsh Government. One his most important formal responsibilities to provide ‘assurance’ that the budget is properly spent. He has to sign it off.
He is part of the UK senior Civil Service and is line-managed by the UK Cabinet Secretary, but answerable to the First Minister. And accountable to the Senedd for the use of public money.
He takes seriously his annual hearing in front of the Senedd’s Public Accounts and Public Administration Committee - in truth more seriously than they do.
As Principal Accounting Officer he has to assure the Senedd that the spending decisions are properly made. And stand behind that judgement.
From your office on the Fifth Floor of Ty Hywel the organogram of Cathays Park is beyond your reach.
How resources are allocated against Ministerial priorities, and which civil servants were appointed to key posts is not something the politicians in the Welsh Government get to decide.
“Staffing matters are not your concern, Minister” is the firm message if you express a view on personnel.
If a key official is promoted, or moved to a new posting, often the Minister is one of the last to know.
Complain, or suggest someone is not up to the job, and it is made very clear that Ministers should keep their beak out of the day to day running of the civil service.
This is Dan Butler, he was a close adviser to Mark Drakeford for the whole of his time as First Minister:
[DB]
The thing is you've got a very strange setup in Welsh government, democratic governments generally, is that you have to have an organisation that is set up in such a way that you can cut its head off every five years and it carries on moving. Most organisations are not like that. I mean, most organisations that suffer that kind of damage would really struggle to carry on and often take a long time to recover, whereas the government just carries on going. And that's brilliant, but it means there's a particular disconnect between executive decision making and then the operations.
It's very unusual and quite hard to navigate, and very difficult for people from the outside to understand. So, if I was working in a business, and there was somebody managing an area and it was causing problems for stakeholders, then at some point you'd expect the executive to be able to do something directly about that. Well, in government, you can't beyond, you know, you have a conversation with someone who has a conversation with someone else who has a conversation with the First Minister, who has a conversation with the Perm [Permanent Secretary]. But what happens after is that often, especially as a Special Adviser, you're not even told so you don't even necessarily know what the management actions being taken are.
It’s quite clear that it’s the First Minister who heads the Welsh Government. But the running of it is pretty opaque.
The most senior civil servant is Sir Andrew Goodall. He’s the Permanent Secretary, typically referred to inside Cathays Park as ‘The Perm’.
He is officially the Principal Accounting Officer. That means he’s responsible for the day-to-day running of the Welsh Government. One his most important formal responsibilities to provide ‘assurance’ that the budget is properly spent. He has to sign it off.
He is part of the UK senior Civil Service and is line-managed by the UK Cabinet Secretary, but answerable to the First Minister. And accountable to the Senedd for the use of public money.
He takes seriously his annual hearing in front of the Senedd’s Public Accounts and Public Administration Committee - in truth more seriously than they do.
As Principal Accounting Officer he has to assure the Senedd that the spending decisions are properly made. And stand behind that judgement.
A signal from the office of the Perm that he needs further assurance to fulfill his duties as Principal Accounting Officer is a warning sign to Ministers that the civil service is twitchy about what they plan to do.
In Westminster Ministers regularly set this aside and go ahead anyway, issuing what’s called a ‘Direction’ to the civil service to proceed.
It is a perfectly legitimate thing to do on occasions when a policy imperative justifies working around the conventional rules
But Welsh Ministers don’t like to do it. On occasions where there is a stand-off endless energy and hours are spent on devising imaginative work-arounds.
But none of this is done in the open, even Ministers don’t have full sight of these backroom contortions.They know something is up, but it is not a conversation they are part of.
It’s all part of the operational independence of the civil service.
__________
Where scrutiny and accountability lies for the running of the Welsh Government civil service is fuzzy.
Cathays Park is part of what’s known as the UK Home Civil Service. In other words, its not devolved.
There is some oversight in the running of each Government department through what's called a Departmental Board. Every Whitehall office has one, and the Welsh and Scottish Government’s have one too.
Each Board is charged with providing ‘advice, challenge and assurance’ for their organisation.
Their focus is meant to be strictly on operational delivery, not policy.
In Whitehall each Departmental Board is chaired by the Secretary of State. In Wales, as in Scotland, there are no Ministers or Special Advisers on the boards.
It is the senior civil servants themselves who make up the Welsh Government Board, and they appoint four independent non-executive members.
One of those for the last six years has been Ellen Donovan. She is a former board member of Debenhams and now sits as an non-executive on the boards of a number of public bodies.
She told me she and her fellow non-execs worked closely with the senior officials, challenging them against the delivery of the Cabinet’s Programme for Government.
But she concedes the level of staff resource available was a constant challenge
[Ellen Donovan]
The fact that we've got a very ambitious government with an ambitious problem for government, but if you were to drill down to those in those priorities, you know, sometimes you'd have one person or half a person driving that priority. So I so it then comes down to a question of how ambitious are we able to be?
You can be as ambitious as you want to be, but if you haven't got the resource behind it to deliver against those, then they're sort of empty priorities, aren't they?
So for us at the Welsh Government Board, I think we felt the challenges and constantly reprioritised. Or as non-execs, we would support the organization to reprioritise to deliver against those priorities.
From the 2021, election onwards there was a real focus, partly driven by the First Minister, on the program for government at priority level. We spent a lot of time going through the key priorities, identifying, the red priorities that were stuck and we're not moving forward. And would have discussion, debate, and we would provide scrutiny on what the organisation was doing to try and try and improve that.
I would say is that the top level of the Civil Service felt that struggle and probably dealt with it in the best way possible
In Westminster Ministers regularly set this aside and go ahead anyway, issuing what’s called a ‘Direction’ to the civil service to proceed.
It is a perfectly legitimate thing to do on occasions when a policy imperative justifies working around the conventional rules
But Welsh Ministers don’t like to do it. On occasions where there is a stand-off endless energy and hours are spent on devising imaginative work-arounds.
But none of this is done in the open, even Ministers don’t have full sight of these backroom contortions.They know something is up, but it is not a conversation they are part of.
It’s all part of the operational independence of the civil service.
__________
Where scrutiny and accountability lies for the running of the Welsh Government civil service is fuzzy.
Cathays Park is part of what’s known as the UK Home Civil Service. In other words, its not devolved.
There is some oversight in the running of each Government department through what's called a Departmental Board. Every Whitehall office has one, and the Welsh and Scottish Government’s have one too.
Each Board is charged with providing ‘advice, challenge and assurance’ for their organisation.
Their focus is meant to be strictly on operational delivery, not policy.
In Whitehall each Departmental Board is chaired by the Secretary of State. In Wales, as in Scotland, there are no Ministers or Special Advisers on the boards.
It is the senior civil servants themselves who make up the Welsh Government Board, and they appoint four independent non-executive members.
One of those for the last six years has been Ellen Donovan. She is a former board member of Debenhams and now sits as an non-executive on the boards of a number of public bodies.
She told me she and her fellow non-execs worked closely with the senior officials, challenging them against the delivery of the Cabinet’s Programme for Government.
But she concedes the level of staff resource available was a constant challenge
[Ellen Donovan]
The fact that we've got a very ambitious government with an ambitious problem for government, but if you were to drill down to those in those priorities, you know, sometimes you'd have one person or half a person driving that priority. So I so it then comes down to a question of how ambitious are we able to be?
You can be as ambitious as you want to be, but if you haven't got the resource behind it to deliver against those, then they're sort of empty priorities, aren't they?
So for us at the Welsh Government Board, I think we felt the challenges and constantly reprioritised. Or as non-execs, we would support the organization to reprioritise to deliver against those priorities.
From the 2021, election onwards there was a real focus, partly driven by the First Minister, on the program for government at priority level. We spent a lot of time going through the key priorities, identifying, the red priorities that were stuck and we're not moving forward. And would have discussion, debate, and we would provide scrutiny on what the organisation was doing to try and try and improve that.
I would say is that the top level of the Civil Service felt that struggle and probably dealt with it in the best way possible
__________
There’s a clear frustration from some in the senior civil service that they are being asked to keep staff numbers down, whilst also delivering more.
The headcount of the Welsh Government civil service has been pretty flat for the last decade. The data has not been widely shared but in an answer to a Written Question I tabled the Permanent Secretary, Sir Andrew Goodall confirmed the numbers.
And when set alongside the data on staff numbers in other Whitehall Departments, and in the Scottish Government, they are stark.
Between this 2024 and 2017 the Department for Education in England has increased the numbers of civil servants by 53%. Over the same period the Scottish Government grew by a remarkable 70%.
The Welsh Government staff numbers went up by 17% across the whole range of its responsibilities.
I showed the figures to Owain Lloyd. After three years as a well-regarded Director of Education and Welsh language in the Welsh Government he resigned the autumn of 2024..
When we spoke he was one month into a new job, as Director of Education in Carmarthenshire Council...
[Lee Waters]
I’ve just shared a slide with you, I’ve been doing some digging because the data is not easy to get hold of, and though not surprising on one level it is quite startling. The headcount of Welsh Government education department, compared to England and Scotland and the difference looks quite bonkers. And I’ve checked the data and it is right. What are you reflections looking at that slide?
[Owain Lloyd]
Yes, so that was part of the enormous challenge that I had to deal with, and my predecessors had to deal with, because effectively the increases are minute over time. But when you think about the agenda, particularly since 2017/2018 - a new curriculum, a new ALN [Additional Learning Needs] system, then the pandemic…
I came back at a time where you had a change in not just Director, but a change in Minister. So Jeremy Miles had taken over from Kirsty [Williams], with a Programme for Government that then included a myriad of new stuff. So for instance, Universal Free School meals in primary. ‘Let's roll that out. Let's drive forward with the Community Schools agenda. Let's drive forward with the national music service’.
On top of implementing a curriculum and ALN, on top of dealing with the effects of the pandemic, and with a staffing structure which shows a tiny increase in capacity and capability. And it's just it's an impossible task.
Because in effect, what I had to do, for example, once the Cooperation Agreement was signed, was all of a sudden ‘we're rolling out free school meals to every primary’. Now to do that, I have to build capacity internally, and effectively have to move a team of staff to do that, which takes away from some of the core work we needed to do, for instance, around the curriculum in ALN.
So there were really difficult choices around that. And if you look at, internally, where morale and where stress levels are, I think it's a kind of an obvious thing that we didn't see the equivalent increase in staffing capacity and capability to deal with that expanding agenda.
__________
As First Minister Mark Drakeford was, in his words, ‘completely convinced’ that constraining the size of the Welsh Government civil service was - as he puts it - ‘politically and ethically correct’. It’s a position he continues to hold as Finance Secretary.
But many of his Ministers could see the impact on their ability to deliver on key priorities. Mick Antoniw served in the Cabinet as Counsel General
MA
I actually think it becomes self-defeating in the end not to properly resource government, because if you don't put the resources in you don't make the correct decisions, you don't make the best decisions. You don't necessarily maximize the use of the resources that you have, or ensure that policies that you are funding are properly carried out and effective, and effectively works out in terms of, I think, waste. I think there are probably a number of examples around where that has happened.
So better quality government, better resourced government, probably gives you better value for the money that you actually have. I think if you look at government as effectively a business, Welsh Government is a 21-22 billion pound business. What company running that business would say, ‘well, we're not going to fund the management that we actually need to ensure that business is operated and developed properly’? It is a balance you don't want an open pit of money continually pouring in for more and more civil servants. And that is an easy road to go down.
__________
With a fixed, and declining, budget these were not straightforward choices.
More money for hiring Welsh Government staff means less money for staff on the frontline.
And even though the Departmental Board made the case for an increase in civil service numbers, the call for reinforcements rang hollow for some.
Special adviser Dan Butler told me “We did need more people, but equally, we needed to make better use of the people that we had”.
He was part of our team after the 2021 elections in a climate change Super-Ministry. Julie James and I had a long to-do list of urgent priorities to cut carbon emissions.
But, it seemed, not everyone got the memo.
[Dan Butler]
There was the famous ‘edible dormice’ case [an example often quoted by Julie James], where the first piece of legislation that the climate change minister - brand new ministry, new minister coming in, you know, officials have been off working on this ‘very important piece of work’, to change regulations about edible dormice, and then she's being told, we need more people and we haven’t got legislative capacity. Well, it's hard to be persuaded by that when the machine is then outputting this. And, you know, lawyers have worked on that, senior officials have signed that on - you know that there's been a whole process behind that. And I was finding things like that all the time, wasn't I, then just waving them in front of her and setting her off!
And set her off it did, and the First Minister.
Sara Faye was the Special Adviser who worked closest with Julie James
[SF]
So we think in any big organisation there's a layering. So how to stop an organisation doing things they did before? You know, you have a change of First Minister - how do you get them to stop doing that other stuff that they've already got so far down the line and shape? I think that's kind of natural.
I think there's a sense in the civil service that they're overwhelmed. I don't necessarily think that that is true. I think that they have, like any big bureaucratic organisation, they've made it bureaucratic. So they have complicated ways of doing things.
Everyone I have spoken to agrees that there is an issue with the size of the Welsh Government.
But there is also broad agreement that the Welsh civil service doesn’t help itself either.
Those ‘complicated ways of doing things’ made difficult tasks even harder.
In the next episode of this two parter I’ll be looking at the dysfunction in the system, and the impact it has on those who try their best to get round it to get things done.
This is all, what Peter Hennesy calls, ‘the hidden wiring’ of the constitution.
It is not something discussed or understood outside the Welsh Government offices in Cardiff’s Cathays Park, or off the Fifth Floor of Ty Hywel.
But when you become a Minister you quickly become acutely aware for your ability to deliver is not entirely in your hands.
In the first episode we look at the constraints presented by the breath of the portfolios and the workload you have to manage. The first part of this episode adds the extra dimension of the limited bandwidth of the civil service to support you in your ambitions.
When you step out of the elevator on the Fifth Floor as a Minister you’d do well to remember that politics is much an art as a science. And you it is not as straightforward as it may have seemed when you starred to climb the greasy poll.
I find myself falling back once again on the wisdom of Harry Truman. When he was succeeded as American President by the wartime General Dwight Eisenhower, Truman knew he’d be in for a shock when he was confronted with the limits of political leadership, and the government machine
“Poor Ike” said Truman. “When he was a general, he gave an order and it was carried out. Now he’s going to sit in that big office and he’ll give an order and not a damn thing is going to happen.”
More on that next time.
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