Dysfunction
The transcript of Episode 3 of 'Y Pumed Llawr - The Fifth Floor
This podcast is a peak behind the doors of the Fifth Floor of Ty Hywel, the building in Cardiff Bay where Ministers in the Welsh Government are based.
We look at the challenges they face in getting things done.
For five years I had an office up here as a Minister in the Welsh Government. I’ve been speaking to people I worked with.
This is the second instalment of a look at the civil service. The first part considered why officials struggle to meet the demands of Ministers - how constraints on the size and the expertise of the Welsh Government puts the system under strain.
In this episode we look at the way the civil service organises itself. Because when it comes to barriers to getting things done, the civil service often don’t help themselves.
_____________
Arriving on the fifth floor as a new Minister is a culture shock for any Senedd Member.
Your first weeks as a Minister are a blur. A new set of people, a different rhythm, a whole new way of working. In fact a completely different job to being a backbencher. And it takes a while to get your bearings.
The task of getting you up to speed with a bulging in-tray falls to the civil service.
Getting this relationship right is one of the keys to becoming an effective Minister.
Lesley Griffiths was a Minister in the Welsh Government for 8 years,
[LG]
The civil service is a world that I knew nothing about, but as a Minister it was very important to listen to them, to respect them. You're not always going to agree, they're not always going to agree with you. I had a significant issue before I left agriculture that, you know, I disagreed fervently with, with officials. And obviously, it went with me. The current Minister has just reversed that decision. So you can see it really is dependent on the Minister.
You certainly sense pretty quickly there is power in the role - you are very quickly forced to make real choices which will impact on people’s lives.
Learning how to exercise power purposefully and strategically is the real skill though.
But worry not help is at hand - the civil service is there to guide you.
In this very hierarchical culture it is easy to be seduced by the flattery and deference of your civil servants - no matter how you may try, they will not be dissuaded from addressing you as ‘Minister’.
But don’t be deceived.
It may be, as the old saying goes, that ‘Ministers decide’, but it’s the civil servants who advise.
And critically, it’s the officials who take charge of the detail of how those decisions are implemented.
And there are all sorts of ways they can find to try and block or frustrate a Minister who wants to stretch the comfort zone.
Ian Taylor went to bat for me on bus reform. He was a subject expert I was able to bring into the Welsh Government for a period to shape the detail.
We had agreed on a plan for a radical shake-up. Transport officials were on board. The key Ministers were behind it. But other parts of the civil service took against it, and as he recalls, ‘obstacle after obstacle was thrown in the way’ which slowed every thing down.
[IT]
And looking back, one could attribute that various processes that were seen as things that couldn't be shorter than a certain period. You know, the lawyers insisted they have X weeks to work on it. The consultation with various external bodies had to last so long, and then after that you had to do some other sort of rewrite, and all the rest of it. And, you know, you had been very, very clear that this was something that you wanted. Bus reform was something which was embedded in the political mandate of the Welsh Government, in fact. So to my mind, a lot of time was essentially wasted on exercises that didn't need to take place, or that should have been able to happen a lot faster.
And a lot of the officials would claim, ‘we've got limited resources’, the phrase that would come up again and again, again. Well, I've cited already instances where the people that were claiming the most paucity of resources, like the lawyers, seem to be wasting their time rather than actually producing the goods. I think, you know, you could have had one or two meetings, sorted out all of the issues, got something drafted within a week or two”.
The barriers thrown in your way that Ian Taylor describes are very real. And resulted in a lot of wasted time and energy.
And it didn’t just snag junior Ministers like me. In fact this culture did not respect rank. As the First Minister at the time found out.
[Mark Drakeford]
In the run up to the 2021 election. I toured the whole of north Wales, telling people that if they voted for a Labor government, they were going to get a new National Park. It was prominent in all literature. I passionately believe in it. I said it everywhere. Election came in May, and early in June, I was due to make a visit to north Wales, and I wanted to go to meet the people running the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, which was to become a National Park, and I had a note from our Legal Services Department instructing me, and it read like an instruction rather than advice, that I was not to mention the fact that we were going to create a new National Park! Because somehow this would prejudice the process that you had to go through afterwards. And I remember saying, ‘there is no way at all that I am not going to be talking about something which I spend weeks on end talking about through, through the whole of north Wales’.
But it's that precautionary sense that creeps into any hierarchical bureaucracy, there will be that sort of seeping sense of ‘better, not’, ‘think carefully’, ‘don't do’.
Its politicians job very often, to make sure that there are pressures in the opposite direction. We come with a democratic mandate. We come with the impetus that comes from having won an election. And you know, it's often our job to make sure that that inherent caution - which sometimes you're grateful for - that doesn't overwhelm your ability to get things done.
_____________
This sense of caution is deeply embedded in the culture of the Welsh Government civil service.
As one insider put it, “I think partly because deep down we are still worried about mucking up devolution”
As we discussed last time, the Welsh Government is broken down into thirds. A third are officials working on practical delivery, like administering rural payments; a third on supporting Ministers on policy and legislation, and a third on support services.
This is the part of the machine is focused on things like governance, procurement, legal services and compliance - the bits that are there to stop bad things from happening.
This so-called corporate center is seen as having far too high a degree of caution, and too much of a focus on regularity.
Owain Lloyd was a member of the Senior Civil Service as Director of Education and Welsh Language until he left in October 2024. And he agrees that complicated ways of doing things adds to the burden, and the frustration.
[OL)]
I increasingly had the feeling over a number of years that this corporate centre you've alluded to was there to find 99 reasons why you couldn't do something, instead of finding the one reason, or the one way of taking something forward.
So whether that was procurement or whether that was legal - and in legal in particular - there is a huge risk aversion to being creative and to sometimes taking a risk, without understanding, ultimately, it is our job as civil servants to say to Ministers, ‘these are the range of options before you, there are risks associated with it’, but then leaving, ultimately the decision - guided by us - that Ministers, if they want to take the risk, would.
I do think we have a corporate centre that doesn't potentially understand the business needs, and at times, the need and the pace the Ministers want to shift that. So I do recognise that to be fair.
And I think despite efforts over the years to try and simplify and to make things more straightforward, and for the centre to be ‘enabling’, rather than, you know, holding things back, I don't think things have improved over time.
And it has real-world impacts. To stick with the example we started with buses are relied upon by the poorest, the youngest and the oldest people in Wales. Growing their use if vital to tackling climate change. Reforms to improve them have been stuck in the system for several years.
[Ian Taylor]
It is a time-honoured principle that officials who might supposedly be neutral, if they actually don't like the agenda, have a lot of ways that they can make progress grindingly slow”.
As a Specialist Policy Advisor Ian Taylor worked as part of the civil service, but like the special advisor role, had direct access to Ministers to work on a priority area. He had a ring-side seat for the passage - or more like blockage - of the Bus Bill by what he describes as ‘people are in powerful positions, who could drag their feet and get away with it’
[IT]
And goodness me, didn't they take it upon themselves to decide that they knew better than anybody else, even if they weren't specialists at all in transport matters. And they preferred to think that public transport was not important and didn't need changing. And so whilst giving lip service to support, they put every possible obstacle that they could in the way. And that happened as a result of certain individuals, but it also I think was something which stemmed from the top. We could see that it wasn't just the lawyers, but actually those that were in the financial key roles, also decided that they prefer not to spend money on public transport. And that spread across to a phenomenon where the idea of a Bill that would improve public transport was something which they would only give lukewarm backing if it might involve requiring to spend some money”.
These disputes were out of sight, and out of reach of Ministers, who were growing ever more frustrated by the delays.
[IT]
There's two different things. There's obstructive empires and obstructive individuals. And then there is the question of whether you have certain processes which are seen as sacrosanct, which in fact are very inappropriate and just get in the way. And Welsh Government does have processes, and some of the requirements for how you consult - it's an unpopular thing to say that you can over consult, you can. You can just get into a position where you're always asking, you're never actually leading. You as ministers have given the lead, the officials were not prepared to follow that with alacrity. Now, whether they felt they could have done, whether there were various procedures is another matter, but these were not officials that were within your command. This is one of the important things - your officials were doing the work; elsewhere obstacle after obstacle was thrown in the way.
Whilst civil servants complain they don’t have enough people to do all the tasks asked of them, a lot of their time and energy is wasted fighting their own machinery
Lets hear again from Sara Faye. She was the Special Adviser who worked closest with Julie James and remind ourselves of her observation:
[SF]
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.
Elen Donovan sat on the board of Debenhams and joined the Welsh Government’s Departmental Board as a non-executive with many of the usual prejudices those in the private sector have about the running of public services. But concluded there’s a degree of inevitability to the difference in pace between a FTSE 100 board room and a public body
[Elen Donovan]
I have to say, having come from private sector background, I think that's the nature of government. You know, you're dealing with with law, you're dealing with processes where you need to get legal advice on so many different steps; you know just the process of consultation, it just takes an awful long time
[LW]
But that would be true of all government departments wouldn’t it?
[ED]
Yes it would be. But why do you think Welsh Government is so different to anywhere else?
[LW]
I’m just passing on the view of some of good officials I've worked with who have experience in other parts of Whitehall and find this uniquely frustrating.
[ED]
Okay
[LW]
That wasn't the sense you've got to the board level was it?
[ED]
Do you know what it is the sense that I get of working in government overall. I've got experience of Welsh Government. I've got experience of working in an integrated care board, which is part of the NHS, which is part of UK Government. And I've got experience of working for the Human Tissue Authority, and also for Qualifications Wales, which is the regulator for exams and qualifications. I just think the nature of government is so much slower than the private sector. It sort of works at a completely different level.
I found that really frustrating when I first came, and then over time, when you look at the process of how things manage, the amount of engagement that you have to move anything forward. You know, the work that you were doing on the Bus Bill. You know the amount of individuals you have to speak to get anything passed was very, very difficult
Up to a point Lord Copper, says Dan Butler. He was a Special Adviser for 5 years and is doesn’t entirely buy that argument
[Dan Butler]
I definitely don't think it's a public sector thing because there are areas within Welsh Government that are very high functioning. I don't think it's across the board, but I definitely do feel that there's a particular sort of institutional inertia working in Welsh Government, I felt, in particularly compared to, you know, in a much more junior role, but working in a local authority. And I think maybe some of that is to do with the distance from the front line that you inevitably are as a government compared to a local authority; you're not dealing with the external pressures quite so immediately, as you are if you're in that sort of role, just because the nature of the role, you're slightly removed.
LW
How much of a constraint do you think that is to the better delivery of the government's objectives?
DB
I think improvement in governance and operational efficiency could make a huge difference.
And I think a lot of it is not hugely complicated organisationally, but how you actually make that happen within the government. Well, you know….?
Well, you know - indeed? How do you make it happen?
_____________
There has been a recognition that the operational running of the civil service needs to be sharper. The role of Chief Digital Officer was upgraded to Director level and given a place on the Executive Team. And a new role of Director of Operations was created to drive modernisation. But Two years on and the role has left no more than shallow footprints
[DB]
When you're working in Welsh Government you see the huge process inefficiency. I mean, I received five, six hundred emails a day. I mean, that's ridiculous. There's absolutely no need for information to flow around an organisation in that way. Cardiff Council didn't work like that in the early 2000s when I was there. So why is the Welsh Government working like that 20 years later? It doesn't need to be that way.
At some point there will be generational changes, and people will start to adopt different ways of working, because I just find it really hard to be persuaded by the sense we would need lots more people just because.
[OL]
I do think there's a need for the Welsh Government internally to look at how it does things smarter. So, for example, are we really serious at the moment around harnessing the power of AI when it comes to generating briefings or answers to questions and so on - which might then reduce workload, might take 80% of the heavy lifting out to some of the stuff we do, which frees up staff to focus on other things. So I do think there is a need for the civil service to look at its processes and we could be making more use of digital technology.
_____________
Another barrier theme that coming up in conversations with civil servants is so-called People management.
Like many large organisations there is a weak culture of performance management in the civil service, and little appetite to deal with poor staff.
There is very low-turnover of staff in the Welsh Government. This is celebrated. But it could equally be seen as an indicator of a lack of dynamism in the middle ranks.
This is a very touchy subject that nobody wanted to talk about openly.
One insider said to me ‘The Welsh Government needs a productivity improvement of about 30%, but that can only be achieved by a highly motivated workforce who are fully invested in creating a dynamic organisation”.
Another senior official said candidly, “If you are earning £60,000 in Aberystwyth, with a great pension and a good work / life balance, why would you want to move”.
Or as a different insider told me “We’ve the problem of a workforce that have been there for a long time, and you can't inject that dynamism into that. You’ve got to get people moving - moving up, moving out”.
[OL]
I wouldn't overplay it. There's definitely some truth in what you say around managing performance. And I think one of the difficulties is in cases where people are genuinely trying to manage poor performance - again it's back to the systems and processes - it's almost impossible. It takes so much effort and so much time, to have to manage that - often people just think ‘you know what it's not worth the hassle, so I will just let it slide’; because the process involved in getting to the point where there's a written warning, or whatever else, it's a really, really difficult one.
I think managers, line-managers in particular, feel at times unsupported by our HR processes around that. So whether rightly or wrongly, I think people just think, ‘I'll let that slide. That might be a poor performing individual, but I've got so much pressure and workload on in other areas, I'm just not going to go there’. If that makes sense?.
That’s Owain Lloyd again. He’s worked in the civil service for 25 years, and until recently at the top tiers in the Welsh Government. .
He made clear last time that the restriction on civil service numbers was adding to the pressure. But he’s also clear that the way the machine operates, and is led, is also an issue.
I put all this to Mark Drakeford. As well as being First Minister for 5 years - and is the current Finance Secretary - his institutional knowledge is unrivalled. He became one of Rhodri Morgan’s Special advisers one year into devolution in the year 2000, and has been a fixture of the fifth floor ever since
Whilst he is unshakable in his view that suppressing the civil service headcount was the right call, his answer on whether the Welsh Government operates in a sufficiently nimble way is much less unambiguous
(MD)
I have huge respect for our colleagues in the civil service. I would say that 25 years on from the start of devolution, my assessment of the Civil Service strengths is higher than it was when I first came through the door here in the year 2000.
The Welsh Civil Service has mirror images, strengths and challenges. The strengths are the people come and they stay, and they are enormously loyal, and they are enormously committed, and very often you are dealing with people who have worked in a particular area for an extended length of time, and the depth of their knowledge and their institutional memory are very important to you as a Minister.
What we lack is the natural refresh you get, for example, in the Whitehall department, when you get a much bigger turnover of people. You get people who arrive, do a stint, move on to do something else, and that brings refreshment with it.
So I think our challenge is to get the strengths that come with the stability we have, while finding new ways of introducing the element of challenge and an element of new insights into the way that work can be done.
He wouldn’t agree to match England and Scoland in allowing the number of civil servants to rise. But when he was First Minister Mark Drakeford did agree to the one-off recruitment. In the Spring of 2021 around 20 senior civil servants at Deputy Director Level came on board, many from other parts of the civil service.
But very, very, few chose to stay on after their initial two years was up. When Owain Lloyd came back to Cathays Park after a two year stint at S4C he found that nothing much had changed
[OL]
I mean what struck me when I returned is that we'd had an influx of around 20 people who had come into Welsh Government externally, at Deputy Director level, who I think were all absolutely astonished by the level of process and bureaucracy, and the hoops that they had to get through to get anything done.
And I think what's quite telling three or four years since that cohort came in, is how many of those actually are no longer with Welsh Government because they just became frustrated and disillusioned.
I think for those of us who've been in system for a long time, you almost get to the point where you just think, ‘well, that's how it is. You know, it is a battle to get anything done, but that comes with the territory. Things are not going to change’. But I do think it's quite interesting when people come from external organisations or from Whitehall, how struck they are by how difficult it is at times to get things done.
The energy spent fighting the system grinds down Ministers, and it wears down good officials too. And breeds a certain restement.
Many understandably feel that driving forward change in a complex and under-resourced system is hard enough without their own organisation making it even harder.
This is Dafydd Trystan he came in as a Plaid Cymru Special Adviser for the final spell of the Co-operation agreement with the Welsh Labour Government
(DT)
What worries me a little, if I can, this kind of feeds into this, is that you have got those people who remain innovative and sort of trying to do things. You've got people who will try and sort of say, ‘Oh, we have to get every ‘I’ dotted and every ‘T’ crossed’. But I think the culture sometimes pushes some of those people who go into the civil service bright eyed and bushy tailed in order to change things, and over time, I think it can drive people down and make them more conservative in their approach. I mean small ‘c’. That, I think, is the worry.
In October 2024 Owain Lloyd left the top job in Education in the Welsh Government to work in a mid-sized County Council. A rather telling move.
(OL)
Yes. My reasons for leaving Welsh Government were many, but I'd done over three years as the Director of Education and Welsh language, and I did come to a point where I had to ask myself how sustainable that was for much longer.
It does take its toll in terms of the hours you work - so from a practical point of view, I would work most evenings. During those three years there wasn't much downtime. You take work home with you. And I do think at some point you think, from a human point of view, ‘how sustainable is this?’
And I do think Covid and the pandemic has, in one sense, made things more challenging.
What happened during the pandemic is that officials and ministers were on call 24/7. And so I think you would expected to be available on [Microsoft] Teams at all hours of the day. And I do hear many of my colleagues say that, in one sense, from a civil service point of view I'm not sure whether we've ever fully come out of that way working.
So there would be an expectation, ‘oh, well, Owain is showing green [availability on Microsoft Teams]. It's half past seven on a Wednesday night. So it's okay to email in Teams and expect an answer by nine o'clock, or by first thing in the morning’. And I don't think longer term from a sustainability point of view, or from a work/life balance point of view, whatever level in the system you're at, I don't think that's probably a healthy place to be to be honest with you,
Here’s Ian Taylor again.
[IT]
If you get good officials, they're going to go and work in the places that work - not the places where they feel it's difficult. And we saw so many people leave, and that's linked to the thing that we have devolution of Welsh Government, but we don't have devolution of civil servants careers. In fact, the civil service is such that there's more senior jobs available on the other side of the border than there are in Wales - and if people want to progress their career, it serves them well to go to Westminster. And that is a sort of, well, it's almost colonial, isn't it?
Really still is almost a colonial sort of legacy that we're seeing, and I would dearly want to see the Welsh government work better than it does, because I see myself as a devolutionist, as I talked about. The bus bill is something a really good example of that. But as it stands at the moment, the workings of the Welsh Government are something of an argument against devolution, rather than for it, unfortunately. But it could be better.
John Howells is a shrewd observer of the Welsh civil service having spent four decades within it. I put it to him that some of the ablest civil servants are very frustrated and fatigued. They say things like, ‘this is the most difficult organisation I've worked in to get things done’. ‘It's risk averse’. and that Welsh Government is viewed within Whitehall as a place where careers go to die,
[JH]
So I don't think I agree with all of those observations. I certainly don't agree with the last one, because there are still very able individuals who were operating in Whitehall who have chosen to come and contribute to what we're doing down here…
LW
[Interrupts] And a lot of them are very frustrated
JH
…and I think over the last few years, what we've seen is that kind of frustration arising as a result of an understandable desire on the part of Ministers to want things to be happening across the whole of the political agenda, which suggests that there'll be really serious activity in all areas of government business, at a time when even though I don't think the pressures that we've had to face have been as bad as the pressures that local authorities have had to face, in terms of the financial squeeze, there has been a squeeze. And therefore, by definition, there is a limit to what can be achieved. And that all becomes even more difficult if there isn't a clear understanding of what a reasonable level of activity might look like for politicians and civil servants in any particular given area.
LW
Frustration is chiefly a function of denuded resource and maintained expectation?.
JH
You certainly sense pretty quickly there is power in the role - you are very quickly forced to make real choices which will impact on people’s lives.
Learning how to exercise power purposefully and strategically is the real skill though.
But worry not help is at hand - the civil service is there to guide you.
In this very hierarchical culture it is easy to be seduced by the flattery and deference of your civil servants - no matter how you may try, they will not be dissuaded from addressing you as ‘Minister’.
But don’t be deceived.
It may be, as the old saying goes, that ‘Ministers decide’, but it’s the civil servants who advise.
And critically, it’s the officials who take charge of the detail of how those decisions are implemented.
And there are all sorts of ways they can find to try and block or frustrate a Minister who wants to stretch the comfort zone.
Ian Taylor went to bat for me on bus reform. He was a subject expert I was able to bring into the Welsh Government for a period to shape the detail.
We had agreed on a plan for a radical shake-up. Transport officials were on board. The key Ministers were behind it. But other parts of the civil service took against it, and as he recalls, ‘obstacle after obstacle was thrown in the way’ which slowed every thing down.
[IT]
And looking back, one could attribute that various processes that were seen as things that couldn't be shorter than a certain period. You know, the lawyers insisted they have X weeks to work on it. The consultation with various external bodies had to last so long, and then after that you had to do some other sort of rewrite, and all the rest of it. And, you know, you had been very, very clear that this was something that you wanted. Bus reform was something which was embedded in the political mandate of the Welsh Government, in fact. So to my mind, a lot of time was essentially wasted on exercises that didn't need to take place, or that should have been able to happen a lot faster.
And a lot of the officials would claim, ‘we've got limited resources’, the phrase that would come up again and again, again. Well, I've cited already instances where the people that were claiming the most paucity of resources, like the lawyers, seem to be wasting their time rather than actually producing the goods. I think, you know, you could have had one or two meetings, sorted out all of the issues, got something drafted within a week or two”.
The barriers thrown in your way that Ian Taylor describes are very real. And resulted in a lot of wasted time and energy.
And it didn’t just snag junior Ministers like me. In fact this culture did not respect rank. As the First Minister at the time found out.
[Mark Drakeford]
In the run up to the 2021 election. I toured the whole of north Wales, telling people that if they voted for a Labor government, they were going to get a new National Park. It was prominent in all literature. I passionately believe in it. I said it everywhere. Election came in May, and early in June, I was due to make a visit to north Wales, and I wanted to go to meet the people running the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, which was to become a National Park, and I had a note from our Legal Services Department instructing me, and it read like an instruction rather than advice, that I was not to mention the fact that we were going to create a new National Park! Because somehow this would prejudice the process that you had to go through afterwards. And I remember saying, ‘there is no way at all that I am not going to be talking about something which I spend weeks on end talking about through, through the whole of north Wales’.
But it's that precautionary sense that creeps into any hierarchical bureaucracy, there will be that sort of seeping sense of ‘better, not’, ‘think carefully’, ‘don't do’.
Its politicians job very often, to make sure that there are pressures in the opposite direction. We come with a democratic mandate. We come with the impetus that comes from having won an election. And you know, it's often our job to make sure that that inherent caution - which sometimes you're grateful for - that doesn't overwhelm your ability to get things done.
_____________
This sense of caution is deeply embedded in the culture of the Welsh Government civil service.
As one insider put it, “I think partly because deep down we are still worried about mucking up devolution”
As we discussed last time, the Welsh Government is broken down into thirds. A third are officials working on practical delivery, like administering rural payments; a third on supporting Ministers on policy and legislation, and a third on support services.
This is the part of the machine is focused on things like governance, procurement, legal services and compliance - the bits that are there to stop bad things from happening.
This so-called corporate center is seen as having far too high a degree of caution, and too much of a focus on regularity.
Owain Lloyd was a member of the Senior Civil Service as Director of Education and Welsh Language until he left in October 2024. And he agrees that complicated ways of doing things adds to the burden, and the frustration.
[OL)]
I increasingly had the feeling over a number of years that this corporate centre you've alluded to was there to find 99 reasons why you couldn't do something, instead of finding the one reason, or the one way of taking something forward.
So whether that was procurement or whether that was legal - and in legal in particular - there is a huge risk aversion to being creative and to sometimes taking a risk, without understanding, ultimately, it is our job as civil servants to say to Ministers, ‘these are the range of options before you, there are risks associated with it’, but then leaving, ultimately the decision - guided by us - that Ministers, if they want to take the risk, would.
I do think we have a corporate centre that doesn't potentially understand the business needs, and at times, the need and the pace the Ministers want to shift that. So I do recognise that to be fair.
And I think despite efforts over the years to try and simplify and to make things more straightforward, and for the centre to be ‘enabling’, rather than, you know, holding things back, I don't think things have improved over time.
And it has real-world impacts. To stick with the example we started with buses are relied upon by the poorest, the youngest and the oldest people in Wales. Growing their use if vital to tackling climate change. Reforms to improve them have been stuck in the system for several years.
[Ian Taylor]
It is a time-honoured principle that officials who might supposedly be neutral, if they actually don't like the agenda, have a lot of ways that they can make progress grindingly slow”.
As a Specialist Policy Advisor Ian Taylor worked as part of the civil service, but like the special advisor role, had direct access to Ministers to work on a priority area. He had a ring-side seat for the passage - or more like blockage - of the Bus Bill by what he describes as ‘people are in powerful positions, who could drag their feet and get away with it’
[IT]
And goodness me, didn't they take it upon themselves to decide that they knew better than anybody else, even if they weren't specialists at all in transport matters. And they preferred to think that public transport was not important and didn't need changing. And so whilst giving lip service to support, they put every possible obstacle that they could in the way. And that happened as a result of certain individuals, but it also I think was something which stemmed from the top. We could see that it wasn't just the lawyers, but actually those that were in the financial key roles, also decided that they prefer not to spend money on public transport. And that spread across to a phenomenon where the idea of a Bill that would improve public transport was something which they would only give lukewarm backing if it might involve requiring to spend some money”.
These disputes were out of sight, and out of reach of Ministers, who were growing ever more frustrated by the delays.
[IT]
There's two different things. There's obstructive empires and obstructive individuals. And then there is the question of whether you have certain processes which are seen as sacrosanct, which in fact are very inappropriate and just get in the way. And Welsh Government does have processes, and some of the requirements for how you consult - it's an unpopular thing to say that you can over consult, you can. You can just get into a position where you're always asking, you're never actually leading. You as ministers have given the lead, the officials were not prepared to follow that with alacrity. Now, whether they felt they could have done, whether there were various procedures is another matter, but these were not officials that were within your command. This is one of the important things - your officials were doing the work; elsewhere obstacle after obstacle was thrown in the way.
Whilst civil servants complain they don’t have enough people to do all the tasks asked of them, a lot of their time and energy is wasted fighting their own machinery
Lets hear again from Sara Faye. She was the Special Adviser who worked closest with Julie James and remind ourselves of her observation:
[SF]
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.
Elen Donovan sat on the board of Debenhams and joined the Welsh Government’s Departmental Board as a non-executive with many of the usual prejudices those in the private sector have about the running of public services. But concluded there’s a degree of inevitability to the difference in pace between a FTSE 100 board room and a public body
[Elen Donovan]
I have to say, having come from private sector background, I think that's the nature of government. You know, you're dealing with with law, you're dealing with processes where you need to get legal advice on so many different steps; you know just the process of consultation, it just takes an awful long time
[LW]
But that would be true of all government departments wouldn’t it?
[ED]
Yes it would be. But why do you think Welsh Government is so different to anywhere else?
[LW]
I’m just passing on the view of some of good officials I've worked with who have experience in other parts of Whitehall and find this uniquely frustrating.
[ED]
Okay
[LW]
That wasn't the sense you've got to the board level was it?
[ED]
Do you know what it is the sense that I get of working in government overall. I've got experience of Welsh Government. I've got experience of working in an integrated care board, which is part of the NHS, which is part of UK Government. And I've got experience of working for the Human Tissue Authority, and also for Qualifications Wales, which is the regulator for exams and qualifications. I just think the nature of government is so much slower than the private sector. It sort of works at a completely different level.
I found that really frustrating when I first came, and then over time, when you look at the process of how things manage, the amount of engagement that you have to move anything forward. You know, the work that you were doing on the Bus Bill. You know the amount of individuals you have to speak to get anything passed was very, very difficult
Up to a point Lord Copper, says Dan Butler. He was a Special Adviser for 5 years and is doesn’t entirely buy that argument
[Dan Butler]
I definitely don't think it's a public sector thing because there are areas within Welsh Government that are very high functioning. I don't think it's across the board, but I definitely do feel that there's a particular sort of institutional inertia working in Welsh Government, I felt, in particularly compared to, you know, in a much more junior role, but working in a local authority. And I think maybe some of that is to do with the distance from the front line that you inevitably are as a government compared to a local authority; you're not dealing with the external pressures quite so immediately, as you are if you're in that sort of role, just because the nature of the role, you're slightly removed.
LW
How much of a constraint do you think that is to the better delivery of the government's objectives?
DB
I think improvement in governance and operational efficiency could make a huge difference.
And I think a lot of it is not hugely complicated organisationally, but how you actually make that happen within the government. Well, you know….?
Well, you know - indeed? How do you make it happen?
_____________
There has been a recognition that the operational running of the civil service needs to be sharper. The role of Chief Digital Officer was upgraded to Director level and given a place on the Executive Team. And a new role of Director of Operations was created to drive modernisation. But Two years on and the role has left no more than shallow footprints
[DB]
When you're working in Welsh Government you see the huge process inefficiency. I mean, I received five, six hundred emails a day. I mean, that's ridiculous. There's absolutely no need for information to flow around an organisation in that way. Cardiff Council didn't work like that in the early 2000s when I was there. So why is the Welsh Government working like that 20 years later? It doesn't need to be that way.
At some point there will be generational changes, and people will start to adopt different ways of working, because I just find it really hard to be persuaded by the sense we would need lots more people just because.
[OL]
I do think there's a need for the Welsh Government internally to look at how it does things smarter. So, for example, are we really serious at the moment around harnessing the power of AI when it comes to generating briefings or answers to questions and so on - which might then reduce workload, might take 80% of the heavy lifting out to some of the stuff we do, which frees up staff to focus on other things. So I do think there is a need for the civil service to look at its processes and we could be making more use of digital technology.
_____________
Another barrier theme that coming up in conversations with civil servants is so-called People management.
Like many large organisations there is a weak culture of performance management in the civil service, and little appetite to deal with poor staff.
There is very low-turnover of staff in the Welsh Government. This is celebrated. But it could equally be seen as an indicator of a lack of dynamism in the middle ranks.
This is a very touchy subject that nobody wanted to talk about openly.
One insider said to me ‘The Welsh Government needs a productivity improvement of about 30%, but that can only be achieved by a highly motivated workforce who are fully invested in creating a dynamic organisation”.
Another senior official said candidly, “If you are earning £60,000 in Aberystwyth, with a great pension and a good work / life balance, why would you want to move”.
Or as a different insider told me “We’ve the problem of a workforce that have been there for a long time, and you can't inject that dynamism into that. You’ve got to get people moving - moving up, moving out”.
[OL]
I wouldn't overplay it. There's definitely some truth in what you say around managing performance. And I think one of the difficulties is in cases where people are genuinely trying to manage poor performance - again it's back to the systems and processes - it's almost impossible. It takes so much effort and so much time, to have to manage that - often people just think ‘you know what it's not worth the hassle, so I will just let it slide’; because the process involved in getting to the point where there's a written warning, or whatever else, it's a really, really difficult one.
I think managers, line-managers in particular, feel at times unsupported by our HR processes around that. So whether rightly or wrongly, I think people just think, ‘I'll let that slide. That might be a poor performing individual, but I've got so much pressure and workload on in other areas, I'm just not going to go there’. If that makes sense?.
That’s Owain Lloyd again. He’s worked in the civil service for 25 years, and until recently at the top tiers in the Welsh Government. .
He made clear last time that the restriction on civil service numbers was adding to the pressure. But he’s also clear that the way the machine operates, and is led, is also an issue.
I put all this to Mark Drakeford. As well as being First Minister for 5 years - and is the current Finance Secretary - his institutional knowledge is unrivalled. He became one of Rhodri Morgan’s Special advisers one year into devolution in the year 2000, and has been a fixture of the fifth floor ever since
Whilst he is unshakable in his view that suppressing the civil service headcount was the right call, his answer on whether the Welsh Government operates in a sufficiently nimble way is much less unambiguous
(MD)
I have huge respect for our colleagues in the civil service. I would say that 25 years on from the start of devolution, my assessment of the Civil Service strengths is higher than it was when I first came through the door here in the year 2000.
The Welsh Civil Service has mirror images, strengths and challenges. The strengths are the people come and they stay, and they are enormously loyal, and they are enormously committed, and very often you are dealing with people who have worked in a particular area for an extended length of time, and the depth of their knowledge and their institutional memory are very important to you as a Minister.
What we lack is the natural refresh you get, for example, in the Whitehall department, when you get a much bigger turnover of people. You get people who arrive, do a stint, move on to do something else, and that brings refreshment with it.
So I think our challenge is to get the strengths that come with the stability we have, while finding new ways of introducing the element of challenge and an element of new insights into the way that work can be done.
He wouldn’t agree to match England and Scoland in allowing the number of civil servants to rise. But when he was First Minister Mark Drakeford did agree to the one-off recruitment. In the Spring of 2021 around 20 senior civil servants at Deputy Director Level came on board, many from other parts of the civil service.
But very, very, few chose to stay on after their initial two years was up. When Owain Lloyd came back to Cathays Park after a two year stint at S4C he found that nothing much had changed
[OL]
I mean what struck me when I returned is that we'd had an influx of around 20 people who had come into Welsh Government externally, at Deputy Director level, who I think were all absolutely astonished by the level of process and bureaucracy, and the hoops that they had to get through to get anything done.
And I think what's quite telling three or four years since that cohort came in, is how many of those actually are no longer with Welsh Government because they just became frustrated and disillusioned.
I think for those of us who've been in system for a long time, you almost get to the point where you just think, ‘well, that's how it is. You know, it is a battle to get anything done, but that comes with the territory. Things are not going to change’. But I do think it's quite interesting when people come from external organisations or from Whitehall, how struck they are by how difficult it is at times to get things done.
The energy spent fighting the system grinds down Ministers, and it wears down good officials too. And breeds a certain restement.
Many understandably feel that driving forward change in a complex and under-resourced system is hard enough without their own organisation making it even harder.
This is Dafydd Trystan he came in as a Plaid Cymru Special Adviser for the final spell of the Co-operation agreement with the Welsh Labour Government
(DT)
What worries me a little, if I can, this kind of feeds into this, is that you have got those people who remain innovative and sort of trying to do things. You've got people who will try and sort of say, ‘Oh, we have to get every ‘I’ dotted and every ‘T’ crossed’. But I think the culture sometimes pushes some of those people who go into the civil service bright eyed and bushy tailed in order to change things, and over time, I think it can drive people down and make them more conservative in their approach. I mean small ‘c’. That, I think, is the worry.
In October 2024 Owain Lloyd left the top job in Education in the Welsh Government to work in a mid-sized County Council. A rather telling move.
(OL)
Yes. My reasons for leaving Welsh Government were many, but I'd done over three years as the Director of Education and Welsh language, and I did come to a point where I had to ask myself how sustainable that was for much longer.
It does take its toll in terms of the hours you work - so from a practical point of view, I would work most evenings. During those three years there wasn't much downtime. You take work home with you. And I do think at some point you think, from a human point of view, ‘how sustainable is this?’
And I do think Covid and the pandemic has, in one sense, made things more challenging.
What happened during the pandemic is that officials and ministers were on call 24/7. And so I think you would expected to be available on [Microsoft] Teams at all hours of the day. And I do hear many of my colleagues say that, in one sense, from a civil service point of view I'm not sure whether we've ever fully come out of that way working.
So there would be an expectation, ‘oh, well, Owain is showing green [availability on Microsoft Teams]. It's half past seven on a Wednesday night. So it's okay to email in Teams and expect an answer by nine o'clock, or by first thing in the morning’. And I don't think longer term from a sustainability point of view, or from a work/life balance point of view, whatever level in the system you're at, I don't think that's probably a healthy place to be to be honest with you,
Here’s Ian Taylor again.
[IT]
If you get good officials, they're going to go and work in the places that work - not the places where they feel it's difficult. And we saw so many people leave, and that's linked to the thing that we have devolution of Welsh Government, but we don't have devolution of civil servants careers. In fact, the civil service is such that there's more senior jobs available on the other side of the border than there are in Wales - and if people want to progress their career, it serves them well to go to Westminster. And that is a sort of, well, it's almost colonial, isn't it?
Really still is almost a colonial sort of legacy that we're seeing, and I would dearly want to see the Welsh government work better than it does, because I see myself as a devolutionist, as I talked about. The bus bill is something a really good example of that. But as it stands at the moment, the workings of the Welsh Government are something of an argument against devolution, rather than for it, unfortunately. But it could be better.
John Howells is a shrewd observer of the Welsh civil service having spent four decades within it. I put it to him that some of the ablest civil servants are very frustrated and fatigued. They say things like, ‘this is the most difficult organisation I've worked in to get things done’. ‘It's risk averse’. and that Welsh Government is viewed within Whitehall as a place where careers go to die,
[JH]
So I don't think I agree with all of those observations. I certainly don't agree with the last one, because there are still very able individuals who were operating in Whitehall who have chosen to come and contribute to what we're doing down here…
LW
[Interrupts] And a lot of them are very frustrated
JH
…and I think over the last few years, what we've seen is that kind of frustration arising as a result of an understandable desire on the part of Ministers to want things to be happening across the whole of the political agenda, which suggests that there'll be really serious activity in all areas of government business, at a time when even though I don't think the pressures that we've had to face have been as bad as the pressures that local authorities have had to face, in terms of the financial squeeze, there has been a squeeze. And therefore, by definition, there is a limit to what can be achieved. And that all becomes even more difficult if there isn't a clear understanding of what a reasonable level of activity might look like for politicians and civil servants in any particular given area.
LW
Frustration is chiefly a function of denuded resource and maintained expectation?.
JH
No, growing expectations.
LW
Okay
JH
I think because the natural evolution of government in Wales, which is still a pretty new beast in historic terms, to me it's only understandable that Ministers, learning from the experience of their predecessors have been anxious to engage across, even more deeply, across all of the areas for which the Senedd and Welsh Government has responsibility.
And so we come back to the question of whether we asking a Welsh government civil service of sound 6,000 people to do too many things.
When faced with finite resources most management consultants would advise that the leadership needs to focus on prioritising.
Tom Woodward had seen the system at work up-close for five years as a Special Adviser by the time Vaughan Gething became First Minister. He agreed to stay on to work with the very small Cabinet Office to get Ministers to focus on a small number of key priorities to focus the system on.
[TW]
The number one thing that I have always found that ministers and special advisors will have to learn is you can't keep asking everyone to do everything because you won't get anything done. You do need to prioritise, and you do need to kind of let things go. And the difficult judgement for any minister and special advisor is, then not to lower your standards.
So you go in and you want all of these things done, and by this time; and you slowly realise that's going to be difficult, and actually you want to support improvement in the key areas. But at what point do you start relaxing too much, and then it's kind of a coasting? It’s the big question. So yeah, to answer your question, I felt like constantly everyone was over-stretched.
What I don't have oversight of is, does that mean that there's not enough people? Or does it mean that people are mobilised in the wrong places? It's very difficult. Historically, you know, I'll make this up: ‘Education will have this amount of people. Economy will have this amount of people, rural will have this amount of people’. My understanding is that doesn't change very easily. And can, you know, can go way back when; and doesn't necessarily logically follow with how much policies or funding, or regulations, are in a particular area.
So I can't answer whether this is a problem of whether people are in the wrong places doing the wrong bits of work, or whether there's just not enough people. I presume maybe a bit of both.
John Howells has worked at a senior level in nearly every major area of Welsh Government activity over four decades in the Welsh civil service. He is firmly of the view that the system is running ahead of its capacity and capability and needs to focus more.
Having had experience of trying to pin him down when I was a Minister I put it him that he must have been frustrated by Ministers coming in wanting to do all sorts of things which realistically, the resource or capacity wasn't there to do
JH
I felt my job was to engage with Ministers on what a reasonable list of to do items might look like.
LW
I never felt I had a conversation where there was pushback from officials saying, ‘you've asked us to do X, Y and Z, we've only got the ability to do X’
JH
No
LW
Okay
JH
I think because the natural evolution of government in Wales, which is still a pretty new beast in historic terms, to me it's only understandable that Ministers, learning from the experience of their predecessors have been anxious to engage across, even more deeply, across all of the areas for which the Senedd and Welsh Government has responsibility.
And so we come back to the question of whether we asking a Welsh government civil service of sound 6,000 people to do too many things.
When faced with finite resources most management consultants would advise that the leadership needs to focus on prioritising.
Tom Woodward had seen the system at work up-close for five years as a Special Adviser by the time Vaughan Gething became First Minister. He agreed to stay on to work with the very small Cabinet Office to get Ministers to focus on a small number of key priorities to focus the system on.
[TW]
The number one thing that I have always found that ministers and special advisors will have to learn is you can't keep asking everyone to do everything because you won't get anything done. You do need to prioritise, and you do need to kind of let things go. And the difficult judgement for any minister and special advisor is, then not to lower your standards.
So you go in and you want all of these things done, and by this time; and you slowly realise that's going to be difficult, and actually you want to support improvement in the key areas. But at what point do you start relaxing too much, and then it's kind of a coasting? It’s the big question. So yeah, to answer your question, I felt like constantly everyone was over-stretched.
What I don't have oversight of is, does that mean that there's not enough people? Or does it mean that people are mobilised in the wrong places? It's very difficult. Historically, you know, I'll make this up: ‘Education will have this amount of people. Economy will have this amount of people, rural will have this amount of people’. My understanding is that doesn't change very easily. And can, you know, can go way back when; and doesn't necessarily logically follow with how much policies or funding, or regulations, are in a particular area.
So I can't answer whether this is a problem of whether people are in the wrong places doing the wrong bits of work, or whether there's just not enough people. I presume maybe a bit of both.
John Howells has worked at a senior level in nearly every major area of Welsh Government activity over four decades in the Welsh civil service. He is firmly of the view that the system is running ahead of its capacity and capability and needs to focus more.
Having had experience of trying to pin him down when I was a Minister I put it him that he must have been frustrated by Ministers coming in wanting to do all sorts of things which realistically, the resource or capacity wasn't there to do
JH
I felt my job was to engage with Ministers on what a reasonable list of to do items might look like.
LW
I never felt I had a conversation where there was pushback from officials saying, ‘you've asked us to do X, Y and Z, we've only got the ability to do X’
JH
No
LW
‘Prioritise’
JH
No. Well, I think a little bit of that did happen, but I'm not sure that we were very good at having that, at facilitating that discussion.
LW
No. Well it’s awkward for civil servants because it’s in the DNA to say yes to Ministers
JH
Yes
LW
But one of the frustrations from my side of the line, I suppose, is that, you know, the government can't get involved in civil service staffing, or internal organisation too much. There's an understandable Chinese wall there. But where is that internal drive coming from, that dynamism to get that nimbleness within the machine, to make it perform better?
JH
Well it's a very complicated machine, and even though scale of government in Wales is tiny compared to government in Whitehall, the idea that a person or a tiny group of people, can look across all of the functions for which the Welsh Government is responsible and work out what the correct allocation of officials between those tasks is using some magic metric, you know, that's that's always going to be a difficult thing to get right.
Prioritising on a smaller number of issues can work effectively in the short-term. But eventually the demands of voters for progress on others things that matter to them will prove irresistible.
Sam Hadley spent two years on secondment as a Special Adviser and worked with three First Minister, and closely with three departmental Ministers. Here’s his perspective
[SH]
I think sometimes we can respond really well to something, because actually you put a small number of people on it who are your best people, and they will do a really good job. But I think that when you're trying to operate across the whole bandwidth, and you only have a certain number of people, inevitably things sometimes will move too slowly, and that's frustrating for ministers, especially.
And, you know, Ministers get rightly frustrated when an issue that they've raised two years ago still seems to have not moved on very much. And it's not always because of the size. I don't think sometimes there are wider issues at play, but I think sometimes it is purely down to that.
A pretty bleak picture is emerging of the health of the Welsh Government machine. And there’s not just one contributory factor.
But might it about to get worse?
After the next Senedd elections in 2026 the Welsh Parliament is going to get bigger - up from 60 members to 96.
A 60% increase in the size of the Senedd, and a greater number of Ministers in the Welsh Government to serve, is bound to have a knock-on effect on the demands on the civil service.
Here’s Lesley Griffiths, she served as a Minister for 15 years until stepping down this summer
[LG]
Senedd reform will have a massive impact on the Welsh Government. Are they prepared for it? Probably not.
You're going to have an increase in the number of members of the Senedd, and you're therefore going to have an increase in the number of Ministers - not significant; I think it's up to 19 from 14 - but that's another five departments.
If we get the devolution of youth justice, you need expertise in that area. Have we got the expertise within the current civil service? I'm guessing probably not. Have the civil service thought about the impact of additional ministers on Welsh Government? Because I know, and you know, as a Minister if you want something you want it straight away.
So once the new Senedd is returned in May 2026, those new Ministers that come in, if they've got a new portfolio or or if the portfolios have been split in a way that I think would be more compatible, have we got the expertise in the civil service?
Have we got the capacity to have five more private offices? Because you rely hugely on your senior private secretary and your private office. I don't think that preparation has been done in a way that really is needed. And I think we know we need to be a bit more transparent on that.
An awful lot of political capital has been extended to secure the change which will come in at the next Senedd elections in 2026.
It doesn’t feel as though there is any appetite, or political capital left, to mirror the capacity increases in the Welsh Government.
[OL]
I think most of my colleagues would say that Senedd expansion is going to have an absolute impact in terms of workload, and the work it kind of generates for government with no recognition of that. I think inevitably more Members, more scrutiny, more committee reports more oral questions, written questions, and so on and so forth, will have an impact in terms \of how the government responds to that.
...we've created Commissioners and other people who often report with recommendations, which again then feed into workload in how we respond to things - I don't think that can be forgotten about either
Ideas to disrupt the inertia of the civil service have been knocked around for decades. Harold Wilson’s advisers in the 1960s advocated a continental style ‘Cabinet’ in Ministerial private offices, in which experts, advisers and civil servants would blend together in what’s been called an Extended Ministerial Office.
The Conservative / Lib Dem Coalition experimented with them a decade ago but they were abolished by a more conservative minded Terresa May when she became Prime Minister.
Ian Taylor thinks there’s merit in trying them in the Welsh Government as a way of challenging blockers to reform
[IT]
One could have an office attached, to say, the First Minister, that is dedicated to clearing obstacles out the way and achieving the two or three highest priorities of the Welsh Government. It is recognised - you were telling me earlier - that the Bus Bill is the top priority for legislation in this term, we've got to that stage now. Well, if there'd been a team that had been tasked with shifting that forwards from the first ministerial level a few years ago as it is now, maybe things would have been a little bit different.
I've talked about people who got in the way, but actually a lot of the people I worked with within your department certainly, they wanted to see these things happen. They were highly intelligent people, and they were hard working. That's something to cling on to.
So in a way that makes it more dismaying that you've got good ministers and good officials, and people are lined up, then the fact that it still takes you several years to get to the point you would expect to expect it to be out a few years ago is difficult.
So I think a crack team under the First Minister's direct command focusing on their few priorities would be part of that. And then that doesn't preclude also making sure that you've got a bill team which is has a unity of purpose when it comes to legislation.
Another structural reform that has been gaining currency is that of a single Welsh public service, which would reduce the distinction between Welsh Government civil servants, local government officials, and Health board executives for example
Here’s Mark Drakeford:
I still think myself that we're too small a country to have siloed forms of public service, and they will be to the advantage, not just of the Welsh Government, but other bodies as well. If we had that more fluid way of people mapping out careers by moving between the different elements of public service in Wales and bringing the that refresh mindset that would go with it.
[Dafydd Trystan]
I am not convinced we are in the place we need to be in terms of the Welsh civil service, or indeed the Welsh public service. My belief is a School of Government or a mechanism to develop that culture which is willing to maybe take some more risks. I mean, civil servants are risk averse by nature, but in order to get things done, you need to be able to willing to take calculated risks.
So I think that is my concern and my worry about the state of Welsh public service. I think I would say that dotted around that public service, there are an enormous amount of really impressive public servants who, if given the opportunity and given the structure, could really thrive in a more independently minded Welsh civil service / Welsh public service.
_____________
This podcast is based on 12 lengthy interviews with people I worked with inside Government. 10 of the transcripts are being published in full by Cardiff University.
In my conversations I’ve focused on six main pressures we faced in trying to get things done.
In the first episode I focused on the size of the jobs that Ministers in the Welsh Government have to get to grips with.
In future episodes I’ll be looking at the tricky relationship with local government; the quality of scrutiny Ministers face; the pressure from within our own parties, and other parties, on decision-making; and the headaches caused by the law-making process to deliver the government’s legislative programme. All that’s to come.
These last two episodes have looked at the civil service and the constraints it faces in responding to ministers.
Some of that comes from political decisions to suppress the size of the Welsh civil service. Some is the result of the culture and processes the civil service itself have developed which make things harder than they need to be.
So what can be done about it?
Clearly this needs much wider discussion, and the purpose of this podcast is to draw attention to the problem and provoke a discussion.
So here are some of my thoughts.
The view that the staffing of the civil service is not a matter for Ministers needs challenging. It absolutely impacts on the ability of the civil service to deliver against Ministerial priorities.
The latency in the performance of civil service is certainly not unique to the Welsh Government .
In April 2024 the public service think-tank Reform issued a report looking at performance across Whitehall and concluded a lack of focus on workforce performance was leading to underperforming public services.
They recommended bringing more people from outside into the civil service by a greater use of external recruitment - too many jobs are a closed shop, only open to insiders. And a greater emphasis on talent-spotting within.
I’d add that there needs to be a social partnership based agreement with the main trade unions to manage out poor performers. The fixation on avoiding compulsory redundancies is not helpful in closing off a route for removing dead wood either. This will clearly be fiercely resisted but refusing to confront the issue is dragging the whole system down. And after all public service is about the services the public receive, and not an end in itself for the benefit of public servants.
‘Prioritise’
JH
No. Well, I think a little bit of that did happen, but I'm not sure that we were very good at having that, at facilitating that discussion.
LW
No. Well it’s awkward for civil servants because it’s in the DNA to say yes to Ministers
JH
Yes
LW
But one of the frustrations from my side of the line, I suppose, is that, you know, the government can't get involved in civil service staffing, or internal organisation too much. There's an understandable Chinese wall there. But where is that internal drive coming from, that dynamism to get that nimbleness within the machine, to make it perform better?
JH
Well it's a very complicated machine, and even though scale of government in Wales is tiny compared to government in Whitehall, the idea that a person or a tiny group of people, can look across all of the functions for which the Welsh Government is responsible and work out what the correct allocation of officials between those tasks is using some magic metric, you know, that's that's always going to be a difficult thing to get right.
Prioritising on a smaller number of issues can work effectively in the short-term. But eventually the demands of voters for progress on others things that matter to them will prove irresistible.
Sam Hadley spent two years on secondment as a Special Adviser and worked with three First Minister, and closely with three departmental Ministers. Here’s his perspective
[SH]
I think sometimes we can respond really well to something, because actually you put a small number of people on it who are your best people, and they will do a really good job. But I think that when you're trying to operate across the whole bandwidth, and you only have a certain number of people, inevitably things sometimes will move too slowly, and that's frustrating for ministers, especially.
And, you know, Ministers get rightly frustrated when an issue that they've raised two years ago still seems to have not moved on very much. And it's not always because of the size. I don't think sometimes there are wider issues at play, but I think sometimes it is purely down to that.
A pretty bleak picture is emerging of the health of the Welsh Government machine. And there’s not just one contributory factor.
But might it about to get worse?
After the next Senedd elections in 2026 the Welsh Parliament is going to get bigger - up from 60 members to 96.
A 60% increase in the size of the Senedd, and a greater number of Ministers in the Welsh Government to serve, is bound to have a knock-on effect on the demands on the civil service.
Here’s Lesley Griffiths, she served as a Minister for 15 years until stepping down this summer
[LG]
Senedd reform will have a massive impact on the Welsh Government. Are they prepared for it? Probably not.
You're going to have an increase in the number of members of the Senedd, and you're therefore going to have an increase in the number of Ministers - not significant; I think it's up to 19 from 14 - but that's another five departments.
If we get the devolution of youth justice, you need expertise in that area. Have we got the expertise within the current civil service? I'm guessing probably not. Have the civil service thought about the impact of additional ministers on Welsh Government? Because I know, and you know, as a Minister if you want something you want it straight away.
So once the new Senedd is returned in May 2026, those new Ministers that come in, if they've got a new portfolio or or if the portfolios have been split in a way that I think would be more compatible, have we got the expertise in the civil service?
Have we got the capacity to have five more private offices? Because you rely hugely on your senior private secretary and your private office. I don't think that preparation has been done in a way that really is needed. And I think we know we need to be a bit more transparent on that.
An awful lot of political capital has been extended to secure the change which will come in at the next Senedd elections in 2026.
It doesn’t feel as though there is any appetite, or political capital left, to mirror the capacity increases in the Welsh Government.
[OL]
I think most of my colleagues would say that Senedd expansion is going to have an absolute impact in terms of workload, and the work it kind of generates for government with no recognition of that. I think inevitably more Members, more scrutiny, more committee reports more oral questions, written questions, and so on and so forth, will have an impact in terms \of how the government responds to that.
...we've created Commissioners and other people who often report with recommendations, which again then feed into workload in how we respond to things - I don't think that can be forgotten about either
Ideas to disrupt the inertia of the civil service have been knocked around for decades. Harold Wilson’s advisers in the 1960s advocated a continental style ‘Cabinet’ in Ministerial private offices, in which experts, advisers and civil servants would blend together in what’s been called an Extended Ministerial Office.
The Conservative / Lib Dem Coalition experimented with them a decade ago but they were abolished by a more conservative minded Terresa May when she became Prime Minister.
Ian Taylor thinks there’s merit in trying them in the Welsh Government as a way of challenging blockers to reform
[IT]
One could have an office attached, to say, the First Minister, that is dedicated to clearing obstacles out the way and achieving the two or three highest priorities of the Welsh Government. It is recognised - you were telling me earlier - that the Bus Bill is the top priority for legislation in this term, we've got to that stage now. Well, if there'd been a team that had been tasked with shifting that forwards from the first ministerial level a few years ago as it is now, maybe things would have been a little bit different.
I've talked about people who got in the way, but actually a lot of the people I worked with within your department certainly, they wanted to see these things happen. They were highly intelligent people, and they were hard working. That's something to cling on to.
So in a way that makes it more dismaying that you've got good ministers and good officials, and people are lined up, then the fact that it still takes you several years to get to the point you would expect to expect it to be out a few years ago is difficult.
So I think a crack team under the First Minister's direct command focusing on their few priorities would be part of that. And then that doesn't preclude also making sure that you've got a bill team which is has a unity of purpose when it comes to legislation.
Another structural reform that has been gaining currency is that of a single Welsh public service, which would reduce the distinction between Welsh Government civil servants, local government officials, and Health board executives for example
Here’s Mark Drakeford:
I still think myself that we're too small a country to have siloed forms of public service, and they will be to the advantage, not just of the Welsh Government, but other bodies as well. If we had that more fluid way of people mapping out careers by moving between the different elements of public service in Wales and bringing the that refresh mindset that would go with it.
[Dafydd Trystan]
I am not convinced we are in the place we need to be in terms of the Welsh civil service, or indeed the Welsh public service. My belief is a School of Government or a mechanism to develop that culture which is willing to maybe take some more risks. I mean, civil servants are risk averse by nature, but in order to get things done, you need to be able to willing to take calculated risks.
So I think that is my concern and my worry about the state of Welsh public service. I think I would say that dotted around that public service, there are an enormous amount of really impressive public servants who, if given the opportunity and given the structure, could really thrive in a more independently minded Welsh civil service / Welsh public service.
_____________
This podcast is based on 12 lengthy interviews with people I worked with inside Government. 10 of the transcripts are being published in full by Cardiff University.
In my conversations I’ve focused on six main pressures we faced in trying to get things done.
In the first episode I focused on the size of the jobs that Ministers in the Welsh Government have to get to grips with.
In future episodes I’ll be looking at the tricky relationship with local government; the quality of scrutiny Ministers face; the pressure from within our own parties, and other parties, on decision-making; and the headaches caused by the law-making process to deliver the government’s legislative programme. All that’s to come.
These last two episodes have looked at the civil service and the constraints it faces in responding to ministers.
Some of that comes from political decisions to suppress the size of the Welsh civil service. Some is the result of the culture and processes the civil service itself have developed which make things harder than they need to be.
So what can be done about it?
Clearly this needs much wider discussion, and the purpose of this podcast is to draw attention to the problem and provoke a discussion.
So here are some of my thoughts.
The view that the staffing of the civil service is not a matter for Ministers needs challenging. It absolutely impacts on the ability of the civil service to deliver against Ministerial priorities.
The latency in the performance of civil service is certainly not unique to the Welsh Government .
In April 2024 the public service think-tank Reform issued a report looking at performance across Whitehall and concluded a lack of focus on workforce performance was leading to underperforming public services.
They recommended bringing more people from outside into the civil service by a greater use of external recruitment - too many jobs are a closed shop, only open to insiders. And a greater emphasis on talent-spotting within.
I’d add that there needs to be a social partnership based agreement with the main trade unions to manage out poor performers. The fixation on avoiding compulsory redundancies is not helpful in closing off a route for removing dead wood either. This will clearly be fiercely resisted but refusing to confront the issue is dragging the whole system down. And after all public service is about the services the public receive, and not an end in itself for the benefit of public servants.
The keenness on avoiding compulsory redundancies when retrenchment has been necessary has closed off a route routinely used in the private and NGO sectors for tightening performance. This will clearly be fiercely resisted but refusing to confront the issue of wasted capacity in the form of a minority of weak staff is adding to the drag. After all public service is about the services the public receive, and not an end in itself for the benefit of public servants.
There needs to be a robust review which listens to the frustrations of middle and senior leaders about the risk-aversion and complexity of the systems policed by the so-called Corporate centre in the Welsh Government - what Owain Lloyd referred to as a culture that seemed to exist to find 99 reasons why you couldn't do something, instead of finding the one way of taking something forward.
And the issue of the headcount restrictions needs to be reconsidered too. Lets put to one side whether Mark Darkeford was right or wrong to stick to the austerity staffing once Brexit hit. There is an overwhelming argument for looking again at the policy now.
But let me give the last word to Sam Haldey. He was the Special Adviser I worked with the closest, and invariably provided sound counsel.
SH
In terms of my big reflections on Welsh Government. So I actually think that above all my biggest reflection is that it is operated by a whole group of people who are really passionate, work really hard, really want to do the right thing and make Wales a better place. And I know that sounds really cheesy, but that's kind of what drives me and my career. And I think that motivation is manifest across the whole of the civil service. So I don't subscribe to the view that civil servants are rubbish at all, and I actually think that we should build from that, and we should empower them and make sure that they have the resources they need.
And I think we shouldn't be afraid to say actually we need a slightly bigger civil service to deliver on the goals that we want to achieve. Because every other organisation I've worked in, you know, they grow according to the things that they take on, and people will make business cases internally, because ‘I need a person to do this new thing that you've asked me to do’.
So I think we can't go on stretching the same number of people to do an ever increasing number of things, because that's just not realistic. So I think it would be, ‘let's size up according to the kind of things that we're asking government to do’, or ask it to do less things. And maybe, you know, that's another option.
There needs to be a robust review which listens to the frustrations of middle and senior leaders about the risk-aversion and complexity of the systems policed by the so-called Corporate centre in the Welsh Government - what Owain Lloyd referred to as a culture that seemed to exist to find 99 reasons why you couldn't do something, instead of finding the one way of taking something forward.
And the issue of the headcount restrictions needs to be reconsidered too. Lets put to one side whether Mark Darkeford was right or wrong to stick to the austerity staffing once Brexit hit. There is an overwhelming argument for looking again at the policy now.
But let me give the last word to Sam Haldey. He was the Special Adviser I worked with the closest, and invariably provided sound counsel.
SH
In terms of my big reflections on Welsh Government. So I actually think that above all my biggest reflection is that it is operated by a whole group of people who are really passionate, work really hard, really want to do the right thing and make Wales a better place. And I know that sounds really cheesy, but that's kind of what drives me and my career. And I think that motivation is manifest across the whole of the civil service. So I don't subscribe to the view that civil servants are rubbish at all, and I actually think that we should build from that, and we should empower them and make sure that they have the resources they need.
And I think we shouldn't be afraid to say actually we need a slightly bigger civil service to deliver on the goals that we want to achieve. Because every other organisation I've worked in, you know, they grow according to the things that they take on, and people will make business cases internally, because ‘I need a person to do this new thing that you've asked me to do’.
So I think we can't go on stretching the same number of people to do an ever increasing number of things, because that's just not realistic. So I think it would be, ‘let's size up according to the kind of things that we're asking government to do’, or ask it to do less things. And maybe, you know, that's another option.
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