Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: Planning for the future of the Government’s estates, HC 793
Tuesday 31 January 2023
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 31 January 2023.
Members present: Mr William Wragg (Chair); Ronnie Cowan; Jo Gideon; Mr David Jones; John McDonnell; Damien Moore; Karin Smyth; John Stevenson; Beth Winter.
Questions 58-117
Witnesses
I: Professor Tony Travers, Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science.
II: Alex Thomas, Programme Director, Institute for Government, and Jordan Urban, Researcher, Institute for Government.
Written evidence from witnesses:
Witnesses: Professor Tony Travers.
Chair: Good morning, and welcome to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee. Today, the Committee is continuing our inquiry on planning for the future of the Government’s estates. We are looking specifically at previous attempts to move the civil service out of London in the light of the Government’s ambition to relocate 22,000 posts from the capital by 2030, and will be delving into the Government’s plans in more detail. We will hear from two expert panels this morning, the first of which is solely Professor Tony Travers from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Professor Travers, good morning.
Professor Travers: Good morning.
Q58 Chair: I will begin with a fairly open question. The relocation of civil service posts out of London is a policy that seems to keep coming around every few years. Why do you think that is?
Professor Travers: First, thank you for asking me to give evidence to you this morning. At its simplest, Governments feel the need not only to try to reduce the cost of Government in London, where land values and office rents are very high, but to move some of the decision making—or, at least, some civil servants, which is not quite the same thing—from the core of Whitehall to other parts of the country, in recognition of the fact that people throughout the United Kingdom pay taxes and should, or might expect to, see part of Government near them. That is part of an attempt, not just by this Government, to help areas that have lost jobs because of de-industrialisation by moving better-paid, permanent Government jobs away from London and into towns and cities that have lost jobs because of industrial change. All those factors play a role in why Governments successively indulge in the policy. On the question that I think is implied by yours—why it keeps having to happen—there is a further iteration to explain that.
Q59 Chair: Is it cyclical, or is there sustained growth in those areas outside London where civil servants are located?
Professor Travers: I think it varies to some degree because of the politicians who are in power at the time. Mrs Thatcher as Prime Minister was not particularly enthusiastic about the policy, for example. Other Governments and Prime Ministers have been more enthusiastic—the current Government clearly are, and Labour Governments in the ’60s and ’70s were.
There is the element of what individual politicians think; there is what the needs of the economy at the time appear to be; and there is the priority given to regional regeneration, which comes and goes. In the 1950s and ’60s, there were a series of policies to regenerate, not just through decentralisation of the civil service, but separately though having policies of industrial relocation. That was a policy then, but not today. The cyclical nature of it has something to do with the priorities of the Government of the day, and something to do with the perceived needs of the economy in different parts of the country at a particular time.
Q60 Chair: You mention perceived needs; is there an objective need for the policy?
Professor Travers: There are clearly significant differences in GDP per head and kinds of jobs located in different parts of the country; that is certain. The UK has very unequal GDP per head from one part of the country to another.
Unemployment, oddly, is higher in London than in many other regions, so there is sort of a counterbalance there. It is not as if London has uniquely low unemployment, but it does have a very different job mix and a much bigger private sector than the rest of the UK.
The public sector in London and the wider south-east—if you add them all together in the sort of wider London region—is not disproportionate, in total, to the population of the wider south-east. However, the kinds of jobs that are offered, particularly at the top of the civil service, would, if they were moved out of London, bring higher-value and higher-paid jobs to different parts of the country that may be thought to need them.
I say “perceived” and “may be thought to”; again, clearly all parts of the country should have the same opportunity. That is the policy that levelling up has at its heart, and I think that most Governments would say that that was the policy that they were pursuing. However, there is the second-order question of whether the movement of civil servants away from London will be big enough, and the locations chosen concentrated enough, to make a radical change to the local economy.
Q61 Damien Moore: Good morning, Professor. What are the main lessons to be learned from past initiatives to relocate civil servants out of London?
Professor Travers: At its simplest, the main lesson to learn is that it does not appear to have a particularly great effect. To put it rather simply, as I said to the Chair, there is an almost cyclical attempt by Governments to move small numbers of civil servants, generally, away from London to the regions. However, while there has been a move out, the civil service has grown substantially in London in the past 12 to 15 years, and certainly in the past seven or eight years. The Government attempt to do it; an amount of it happens; and then the civil service grows at the core again. You are locked in a sort of loop, and need to start again.
Q62 Damien Moore: You mentioned economic benefits, but what about policymaking and delivery of Government services? Is that any better or worse when you have offices based in other areas of the country?
Professor Travers: That is a very wide and interesting question. It is very difficult to tell. Moving jobs—certainly in the way that the current Government have discussed—might be thought to bring a number of benefits. One would be, as we have discussed, taking employment to places that need more employment, and ensuring higher paid jobs, but the second would be to change the way that Government thinks. Now, that is a very different thing to try to do.
You could make Government more efficient by reducing costs in London, and bring better paid jobs to another part of the country, but the additional question is whether civil servants operating out of Manchester, Leeds, or wherever would give different advice to Ministers, and, indeed, whether Government would make different decisions if they were located there. I think that the evidence for that is—well, the truth is that there isn’t much. It is theoretically likely, you might say, but there is not much evidence.
It is worth noting that it is possible for relocations to have a bad effect on agencies—let’s not talk about the Government Departments—as you will be well aware. When most of the Office for National Statistics was moved from London to Newport, a report was commissioned from Sir Charles Bean, my colleague, which showed that, in the first instance, a significant amount of damage was done to the ONS’s capability, partly because most of the officials didn’t move; they stayed in London. Sir Charles’s report suggested not only that those kinds of issues needed to be looked at for future relocations, if there were any, but that the ONS needed to have a London presence, because that is where most of its clients were—Government Departments, the Bank of England, and so on. The purposes of doing this are often not as thought through. The idea of bringing jobs to other parts of the country—out of London—gets a lot of discussion, but all the other potential consequences are rather less discussed. Not the least of those is: what is the economic impact on the areas where civil servants are moved to?
Chair: To carry on that thought process, we have John Stevenson.
Q63 John Stevenson: You have touched on the move to Newport by the ONS and highlighted what is probably one of the failings of that. Can you elaborate, and say what the positives and other negatives were of that move?
Professor Travers: Well, Sir Charles’s report is a full one. In fairness to the Government of the day and the ONS, the initial impact was problematic, partly because fewer civil servants, or many fewer officials, from the ONS moved than was expected, which had a consequence for the quality of published statistics for a while, but over time, the ONS has been able to build back in Newport, and to improve many of the statistics that the report also considers under its remit.
The lesson from this is that any relocation of officials needs to be thought through. What are the reasons for doing it? What will be the consequences for the Government Department or agency? Perhaps rather more thought needs to be given—I am not saying Newport didn’t, by the way—to which parts of the country would most benefit from such moves, because there is the serious question of whether there would be greater agglomeration benefits from moving civil servants to existing big centres in cities, or to places where levelling up is an aim, which tend to be smaller towns. It is the difference between Manchester and Blackpool. I think what the movement of the ONS suggests is that these things have to be planned well, and the reasons for doing them, in terms of what happens at the arrival point as well as the delivery of the service, have to be fully thought through.
Q64 John Stevenson: I acknowledge that you need to look long term. Do you think that in the long term, the move of the ONS was beneficial to Newport?
Professor Travers: I have not researched it that closely, but it is hard to see any downside for Newport. You would have to ask the Newport economic development agency or the council’s economic development officers about that.
Q65 John Stevenson: That is partly the purpose of moving civil servants.
Professor Travers: Of course. I am not sure that Sir Charles Bean’s report looked at the impact on Newport; I might be wrong about that. Undoubtedly, if I may generalise from the ONS case, if these moves are being made, working out the impact on the town or city of arrival should be part of any decision-making process, because there will be different impacts on places—as I say, on big cities and small towns. This is the question of where the jobs are most needed, but also where the multiplier effects, if there are any, will be greatest. As I say, I cannot answer on whether Newport benefited from the move; perhaps the later witnesses will know more about that.
Q66 Beth Winter: Bore da. I think you seem to be suggesting that there is limited evidence on the social and economic benefits and disadvantages of the relocations, but can you give examples of the effect that past relocations to an area have had on it?
Professor Travers: There is a very limited amount of research—by academics, usually—on the impacts. There is some evidence, from small samples, of small benefits on the economy of the areas to which civil servants are moved. That is in the wider economy. Actually, it is more positive on services than on manufacturing; there was a differential impact in the research that I looked at. As I say, with policies of this kind, the decision to move jobs away from the core of the civil service in London is made more easily than answering the question of what the impact on the economy would be. There are research techniques for doing that, but I am not certain whether any of the currently proposed relocations are subject to such an analysis. What I cannot absolutely answer you on, because I am not sure the research base is there, is whether moving civil servants out of London in the past and creating hubs in the north-east has had a positive impact on the economy there. All we know is that the economy there still needs economic support and investment.
Q67 Beth Winter: The move to regional hubs has resulted in about 160 offices in local areas being shut. What impact is that having on those communities?
Professor Travers: That precisely relates to my earlier point about there being a big choice for Government when it comes to whether, in moving civil servants away from London, they want to create agglomeration benefits. There is a big economic literature about agglomeration.
If you put the civil servants together in one place, that is likely to have a bigger effect than if they are spread thinly. On the other hand, the needs of levelling up might be thought to require many smaller offices, because that would bring more benefits to more places. There is a tension between having a hub in a big city and having smaller hubs in a number of places. That sounds obvious but, as I say, the question of whether the Government are trying to deliver agglomeration is not unique to the locations of civil servants. The movement of the BBC to Salford and the concentration of broadcasting at Salford Quays is an example in broadcasting; both the BBC and ITV have moved jobs, creating quite a big concentration. The economic impact of that would have been very different if the same jobs had been spread out all over north-west England. Again, it might have been better for some smaller places if the jobs had gone to them, but less good in terms of the overall impact on the north-west economy.
Q68 Beth Winter: If there is limited evidence on the economic or social rationale for, and benefits of, these relocations, it begs the question of whether political considerations influence the decision of where civil servants are relocated to. Is that a factor?
Professor Travers: At the risk of giving an obvious answer, all government is political. It is hard to imagine that there are not political considerations. I cannot see into the minds of Ministers making decisions, but—
Q69 Beth Winter: The Lyons review did find a link, apparently, in 2004, with regard to where some of them were relocated.
Professor Travers: Government decisions are inherently to some degree political; it would be surprising if that were not the case. The point I am trying to get across is that there will be political reasons, of course, and there will be economic reasons. Currently, the economic reasons rarely lie on a detailed analysis of what the impact would be of jobs being located in a particular place and in a particular way.
Q70 Beth Winter: Is that a weakness—a concern of yours, as an academic?
Professor Travers: Absolutely. One would have thought that, with any policy—certainly one that involves an explicit attempt to move jobs or economic activity from one part of the country to another—an estimate of the economic impact of the policy at both ends, at the very minimum, would be rational.
Chair: Politicians should always be wary of making political decisions.
Q71 Karin Smyth: You will have to speak for yourself, Chair. Professor, in your opening comments, you touched on the net changes in public sector employment, particularly the 31% decrease in local government employees over the last decade, and how the relocation of the 22,000 civil servant posts compares with that scale of local government reductions.
Professor Travers: Here I do have some research; I prepared some in advance on this particular subject. If you look at the period since 2010—that date was not entirely picked at random—you see that the decline in local government employment, if you take out the transfer of academies, which has to be removed from the data, is around 430,000 posts. Of course, those will have been relatively evenly spread across the country because, according to the National Audit Office, the reduction in local government’s day-to-day spending is in the order of 20% in real terms, so it is barely surprising that there has been that fall in employment.
The 22,000 jobs, which of course would not be evenly spread around the country, would need to be seen against that backdrop—so even if achieved, it is small.
Of course, not all the 400,000 jobs are well-paid people in town halls and city halls; they will be a mixture of people at different levels of the employment market, but many will be in town and city halls. The numbers of civil servants being moved to other parts of the country compared with the reduction in local government employment—they are very different numbers.
Q72 Mr Jones: Professor Travers, Government offices for the English regions were created in the 1990s, as you know, and were closed down in 2011 by the coalition Government. What was the reason for their creation in the first place, and what were the reasons for their closure?
Professor Travers: John Major’s Government created them, I think as part of an attempt—this goes back to the Chair’s question at the beginning—to address an issue around Whitehall in a very centralised country. A point that I haven’t really made yet is that we are—the UK and England within the United Kingdom—a very centralised country. I think the Major Government wanted to have a co-ordinated approach to public policy in the standard regions of England, and therefore to co-ordinate all the activities of government within those regional offices so as to be a voice both ways, in some ways.
Certainly for the Blair Government, which kept them on, their purpose was to be the voice of Whitehall in the regions and the regions in Whitehall, to some degree. It was an attempt to bring together different Departments of State that were operating in the regions so that they would operate in a more consistent and co-operative way. That is the theory, but I think the evidence is that the silo mentality of Whitehall was not entirely dispelled by this noble effort.
Q73 Mr Jones: How effective were they? Did they make any difference to Government policymaking, and did they change or affect the relationship between Government and the regions?
Professor Travers: I am afraid that, as with the previous questions, I am not sure it is easy to measure these things. That is also the case for measuring the quality of government more generally; it is a very difficult thing to do. There is no doubt that having a central point for Government in each of the regions did make it easier to understand for business, local government and others.
I cannot honestly answer the question of whether it improved the quality of government in those regions. That has not been researched. In a sense, the decision to create the offices, like the decision to abolish them, is a good example of how policies shift over relatively short periods. I would not be able to answer the question of whether government got worse when they were abolished either, if you see what I mean. It is very hard to assess these machinery of government changes, because so little time and research effort is put into trying to assess the impact of the different configuration of government compared with an alternative.
Q74 John McDonnell: When the new regional hubs were announced, Lord Heseltine, who is always a “glass half full” person, wrote about “the recreation of the old government offices in each region to co-ordinate central government’s interactions with the mayoral authorities.” That is how he viewed it. The levelling-up White Paper promised the introduction of regional levelling-up directors.
I have two questions. First can you update us on where the Government are at with regard to at least the appointment of the regional directors? I believe you are an adviser to the Levelling Up Committee, where, on 23 January, the Minister said that they are reviewing the policy with regard to the appointment of regional directors.
Secondly, the old Government offices were also given the responsibility of developing regional policy. That doesn’t seem to be the case with regard to the new proposals. Is that a missed opportunity that needs to be looked at again?
Professor Travers: I will answer your questions in that order. The levelling-up policy included the idea of levelling-up directors. It is true that the Minister last week, on this corridor, when asked this question by the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee, said that no appointments had been made thus far. I think the answer suggested that the question of whether to make the appointments was now up for grabs—that there is a decision to be made about whether they will be appointed. On that question, there are no levelling-up directors thus far.
On the next question, as I understand it, the hubs referred to earlier are quite different from the regional offices of old. The regional offices were an express attempt to have one per region, and to be Whitehall’s voice in the region and vice versa. The hubs, as I understand them, are more bureaucratic—I don’t mean that in a negative way—in that each is a hub of offices and civil servants from different Departments working together. But unless I misjudged it, I do not think there is a commitment to have them region by region in a comprehensive way across the country. It would be co-locating civil servants in particular places in centres, but not, as you say, with the express intention of then evolving policy.
By the way, there is a bigger question, which I did not fully answer in my response to Mr Jones. This sort of machinery of government reform begs an interesting question as to whether hubs or regional offices are supposed to think differently from Whitehall or to be part of Whitehall thinking consistently across the country.
A much wider issue is begged by the current Government’s approach, which I think is explicitly to try to change the way that Whitehall thinks—to be culturally different. That is a very different thing if it is being done regionally, because it has implications for whether a civil servant based in Darlington or Wolverhampton is supposed to think differently from one based in London, or whether the whole civil service would then think differently, and, if so, how. There is a whole range of questions begged by the regional offices and hubs.
Q75 John McDonnell: Going back to a former life when we worked with you, the old regional offices were to a certain extent champions for the region as well, bringing forward Government resources for initiatives. Is that the role of the regional hubs or regional directors if they are appointed at all?
Professor Travers: It was never clear what the levelling-up directors would do. I think their purpose was to help deliver on the levelling-up policy: to raise opportunities for individuals and areas that have been, as it were, left behind—to use that term.
I am not sure that the hubs have the same kind of purpose. They are bringing together officials, but I don’t think they are like the regional offices of old. The levelling-up directors might have been analogous to those, but I think they would have been different again; if they are created, they will be charged with delivering a particular policy in what I assume would be the regions.
It is worth adding that with the regional offices, there were also regional development agencies, which were created by the Labour Government after 1997, so there was far more machinery at the regional level, which was all then removed in 2010. That begs the question today, especially with the evolution of city regions and county regions, whether regional machinery is quite on the same page anymore, or whether other geographies have now sprung up. That begs all sorts of questions for decentralisation as well as devolution.
Q76 Jo Gideon: Professor Travers, the closure of regional Government offices highlights the fact that future Governments can reverse decisions taken by a previous Administration. They are potentially very costly decisions that cause significant disruption to the lives of those civil servants who have to change location. Based on past relocations that have stood the test of time, what could the Cabinet Office do to future-proof current decisions?
Professor Travers: As we all know, Governments cannot bind their successors. With reconfigurations of the machinery of government—Whitehall Departments, as well as any sub-national manifestations of Whitehall—it would be very hard for a Government to stop their successor changing the machinery. That is just the way the system is.
Having said that, the more sub-national machinery, were it to be created—I realise that “sub-national” is a slightly clunky way of putting it, but I am trying to embrace all the different geographies—would have a better chance of survival in the long term if local players had a stake. Local players include local government, city region Mayors, county regions, whatever they are. If that machinery was seen as more local, that might engender some degree of local pride and identity.
However, a bigger question than for today is: are regions a geography that has ever worked well in England? There is a discussion to be had on that. But on the question of any particular geography, the more the central Government activity in a region felt as if local areas owned it and had a stake in it, the more MPs and councils would defend it, I think—more than if it was just a manifestation of a temporary Whitehall structure outside London.
Q77 Jo Gideon: Only just over five years ago, the Business Department announced the closure of its Sheffield headquarters, saying it wanted all its policy officials in one place. I know that not all the posts went, but a lot of them did. How big a risk is there that, in a few years’ time, permanent secretaries will say exactly the same thing about having secondary headquarters in different cities?
Professor Travers: I would say that is almost inevitable. The truth is that there is an element of fashion in all this—it comes and goes over time—but, more than that, as I was saying earlier, there is a deeper issue at the bottom: you could have a very differently configured civil service, with much more of it outside London and the south-east. That might change the way it thought, but I doubt it would if Ministers were not out there too.
There is therefore the question of whether Ministers, when they are in their office, want to have direct access to all the most important policymaking officials. That would create a barrier—a difference between the civil servants outside London and those in the private office doing the policymaking at the core of Government. From that, you can see why being moved or located outside London might be less attractive for civil servants, which is definitely a potential challenge.
All the evidence from the past is that the machinery of Government is regularly reconfigured, apart from Departments like the Treasury—even it has an outpost now—or the Home Office. The great offices of state remain not exactly but broadly the same, though even the Treasury has been split in the past. But the other Departments are regularly reconfigured. It is inevitable that sub-national Government agencies will be reconfigured.
Chair: We have a flurry of supplementary questions. I will go to David Jones first.
Q78 Mr Jones: Professor Travers, there is an increasing move towards hybrid working, much to the displeasure of the former Minister in the Cabinet Office, the Minister for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency. Officials appear to be resisting returning to work anywhere in particular—I don’t mean that they are not working, but that they are not working anywhere in particular. To what extent do you think that that will influence the way in which Government think about where they should be locating civil servants?
Professor Travers: It is inevitable—it must be. If people are only working in the office x days a week—fewer than five or possibly significantly fewer—then the question of where they are located, or what location means, is very much up for grabs.
Working from home, or partial working from home, does have profound implications. It could mean that many more people are located in London but do not live in London; it could also mean that they were located in Wolverhampton, but did not live in Wolverhampton either. It will have an impact. Having said that, I would be amazed if Ministers did not want to continue to be co-located with senior officials in offices near other Ministers and near the Prime Minister.
Q79 Mr Jones: So they will probably stay in London.
Professor Travers: It is human nature, and I think it is hard to get away from. I was thinking, when I was preparing for this morning’s session, that if you have got to the top of an institution, one of the things you want is—I will put it rather bluntly—to feel powerful, and you will feel powerful if you have got civil servants around you doing things for you. It is harder to get that experience if they are not there. I think there are human attributes buried in this discussion as much as discussions of bureaucratic systems.
Q80 Damien Moore: Professor Travers, you mentioned with the regions that there has been a change from regional to sub-regional, and now city regions have emerged. You also mentioned a sense of belonging and pride, and that those areas could work. But do you not think that for many parts of them, the necessary building blocks—generally local authority areas—are not right to start with?
We have not actually done what we probably should do, and what everybody seems to be frightened to do, which is to change local government to build it up to a level where local areas can feel a sense of pride and belonging and that that works for them, so that when the bigger administration is put over the top, they feel as though their voices are heard. Lots of areas are drowned out, and in a city region generally the bigger part of that gets more funding, gets a bigger voice, gets a bigger say and feels it works for them. Those at the edges, wherever those areas are, are left to get what is left behind, so you almost need levelling up within those regions as well.
Professor Travers: Absolutely, but let me deconstruct that. I do think that the accidental geography of England, separately from Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland—it is in part a product of the industrial revolution and in part about where rivers are, where the sea is and the two linked together, and so on—has left us with a particular layout of one big city, lots of other big cities and then thousands of towns and villages. You wouldn’t lay it out like that if you were Napoleon. You would not have laid it out like that from first principles, but we are where we are.
Against that backdrop, the system of local government varies enormously from one part of the country to another. If there were a consistent form of local government across England—I am not advocating unitaries for all—as there is in Wales and Scotland, in fact, and then it was possible to have combined authorities or some such thing on top of them, it would be much easier for Whitehall to consider a rational sub-national approach of its own to that more rational system. I think that is an answer to your question; I hope it is.
I take your point entirely that with the strange geography—take Greater Manchester, with 10 local authorities and a combined authority with a Mayor—it is hard to see how a north-west region, if we were to go there again, would quite work with that, or the Liverpool city region next door. There is no question but that the geography of local government feeds back into any consideration of a rational sub-national geography for Whitehall. I totally agree.
Chair: We have even more demand for supplementary questions.
Q81 Ronnie Cowan: I got the impression from the answers to some of the questions that we do not really know if moving these Departments into other areas of the United Kingdom is benefiting those areas. We certainly do not seem to know whether it is affecting in a positive manner the machinery of government in the first place. Whose job is it to do that research? Is it yours, professor? I am really keen on this idea that Government make decisions based on evidence.
Professor Travers: We all have an obligation, and certainly academics have an obligation, to look at what Governments do. I think the National Audit Office definitely has a role in this. But pre-eminently, as I was saying earlier, if a Government, any Government, is making a decision of this kind, then having a research policy as to what the impacts are supposed to be is where you would start, because the impact of moving a large number of civil servants to one city or one centre is very different from moving them to dozens of smaller places. I think I am right in saying that the current Government has made a decision about moving 20,000-odd civil servants out from the centre, but I don’t think it has done any research beyond that, and I do think you need to have a thought-through policy about what the impact—not just the economic impact but the impact on decision making—is supposed to be.
Q82 Ronnie Cowan: Who should do the research?
Professor Travers: If it’s the Government’s policy, the Government, in the first instance, ought to research what the impact is supposed to be.
Q83 Ronnie Cowan: Are you not better qualified to do this?
Professor Travers: Let’s put it another way. There are people much more qualified than me. There are excellent economic geographers out there, all over the country, in university departments who do look at this kind of thing. But I think that even they would need to know what the Government was going to do, precisely where the 20,000-odd—is it 22,000?—were going to go and what other policies would run alongside the decision. Would they be in a hub or in several hubs, and so on? It’s quite hard to research it. There would certainly be different if you put a hub in Blackpool and if you put a hub in Manchester; it would have a completely different economic effect. Until we know what the policy is to be in terms of who goes where, it’s very hard to research it. Is that an answer to your question?
Q84 Ronnie Cowan: My first take on this would be that we need to know what we are trying to achieve before we decide what the policy is going to be. If I don’t know that moving 10,000 people to that area of the country is going to help the local economy, it is hard for me to make that decision in the first place.
Professor Travers: I agree, yes.
Q85 Ronnie Cowan: Is this why we have been doing it for decades and doing it badly?
Professor Travers: I wouldn’t say it is done badly; I think it is done without much understanding of what the impact is or the purpose is.
Q86 Ronnie Cowan: We don’t know whether it has been done badly?
Professor Travers: No, we do not know it is done badly, but we do not know what the impact is. As I say, there are two questions. Particularly with the current Government’s policy, there is not just the question of what the economic impact would be on the areas where jobs arrive, but a second question. I think that the Government has talked about the policy as trying to change the way Whitehall thinks, which is a very different issue. The idea is that if less of it were based in London, in the centre here, different decisions would be made. That is an argument. My guess is that if you moved the whole of the Department for Transport from central London to somewhere that had very poor public transport, my guess is that the public transport in the place you moved it to would improve, but it might also tilt policy away from trains towards roads, because that’s the way many people get about, and so on. Those issues, which are glancingly referred to, have not really been thought through, either.
Q87 John Stevenson: Following on with that theme, and given what you have said and the comments made by my colleague Damien, do you think that until such time as we do a fundamental review of the relationship between the centre and the regions, this whole policy is broadly pointless?
Professor Travers: I might not put it exactly like that, but if I may slightly rephrase it, I think there would be a lot to be said for having a policy about civil service location—including, by the way, in London and the wider south-east. The eastern region has, I think I am right in saying, the lowest number of civil servants of any part of the country, and that is just outside London, to the east. I think the question whether the civil service is to be part of an economic regeneration process or whether it is just to aid Government to deliver policy, whether it is to think differently by being located in a different way—there is a debate to be had about all of that, but I can see that your question has merit, yes. Sorry, I’m not supposed to put it like that. Yes, I agree.
Chair: That is a very good answer to any question from this Committee. John McDonnell, please.
Q88 John McDonnell: I am not sure whether this question will have any merit, but I’ll follow on from John. You can sense people’s frustration with this continuous cycle of policy. The reality is that staffing resources should and will always go where the power lies, so until we have clarity in the constitutional debate about where power is distributed in our country—until we grasp that nettle—will we not always be going through this cycle of policy made by whim, often unresearched and unproven?
Professor Travers: As I said a moment ago, it is very likely that unless there is a fully thought through debate about the configuration of the civil service and its purposes—not the policy purpose and the delivery purpose; we know about them—economic regeneration will be an add-on purpose. The civil service was not really set up to be an economic regeneration tool, but at some level we and the Government are discussing it in that way, as have previous Governments of all parties. Rather as the BBC, in moving jobs away from London, saw itself as an economic regeneration enterprise—it is a national corporation and it has the right to do that—the Government need to think more deeply about what the purpose of the civil service is, beyond policy advice and delivery of government. Is it also supposed to help parts of the country that have not found it as easy to generate private sector jobs as others?
Q89 Beth Winter: There is an argument that the UK Government knows where it wants power to lie, and that is here. We have had 4,000 jobs plonked in the middle of Cardiff with one of these new hubs, with very little consultation in advance with Wales and the local community. Do you agree that the UK Government is failing to engage and involve the devolved Governments in this policy agenda in the way it should?
Professor Travers: If we talk about civil service location as part of a levelling-up policy, which I think we are doing today—
Beth Winter: Top down.
Professor Travers: Given how centralised the UK is, and not only under this Government, any form of policy of devolution or decentralisation is inevitably a centralised process. What is interesting about levelling up is that it is a UK-wide policy and it has slightly changed the relationship between the UK Government and the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland Governments, because it reaches out over or into the devolution settlement to some degree. I am not privy to the discussions, if there were any, that took place between the UK Government and the Welsh Government about the location of civil servants in Cardiff, but there is no doubt that levelling up is a UK-wide policy. In a sense, it is the UK Government in London, or wherever it is located, delivering a UK-wide policy. That is not to say that the UK Government should not talk to the devolved Governments, but it is a UK-wide policy.
Q90 Beth Winter: Should it be able to override the devolution settlement?
Professor Travers: This is a matter of big news really, isn’t it? For the avoidance of doubt, let me say that I am strongly in favour of devolution personally; but I think it is inevitable, in a quasi-constitutional system like the UK, that occasionally the UK Government and one of the devolved Governments will have different views on things and come into conflict. We do not—quite—have a constitutional court to deal with that, but it is an inevitable consequence of the UK now being, particularly for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, a quasi-federal settlement.
Q91 Jo Gideon: Professor Travers, you mentioned earlier that the preferred model was a hub or campus, as we have in Cardiff and, I think, in Darlington as well. In Stoke, we have 500 Home Office jobs coming, but no other Department. If at the same time you want to spread the benefit, presumably you have to water down the way Government Departments are devolved as well, with multiple offices of multiple Departments across the country. How effective do you think that would be in terms of the operation of Government?
Professor Travers: This is a profound issue. As I said earlier, you could just have 22,000 civil servants move to one place, and that would have a particular effect—quite a big effect—but that is very different from moving 220 civil servants to various places. That is at the heart of the levelling-up challenge. Levelling up is predominantly about cities such as Stoke-on-Trent, Blackpool and other places that need an enormous amount of economic attention, but the temptation with hubs is, for efficiency purposes, to move civil servants to a smaller number of large hubs in big cities. That would probably make it easier to convince some officials to move. I am not saying that Stoke-on-Trent wouldn’t be an excellent place to go to, but you see what I mean. There is a big tension, not unique to the civil service, in how you make the location of civil servants work with levelling up, which is predominantly about particular medium-sized and larger cities and some smaller towns, rather than just putting them in big hubs in a small number of large cities. Levelling up is not as much about city centres as it is about smaller cities and towns—and the people in those areas, I should say. It is about people rather than places.
Chair: Professor Travers, thank you very much indeed for your time this morning. You’ve sparked plenty of supplementary questions, and we are very grateful.
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Alex Thomas and Jordan Urban.
Q92 Chair: I am pleased to welcome to our Committee Alex Thomas and Jordan Urban, who are, respectively, programme director and researcher at the Institute for Government on the civil service in policy making. Would you introduce yourselves for the record?
Alex Thomas: Thank you for having us, and we thank the Committee for their interest in this topic, which is very Institute for Government-friendly. I’m Alex Thomas, a programme director at the Institute for Government. I lead our work on the civil service in policy making—I have been doing that for about three years—and part of that work has involved looking at the relocation of civil servants. Before that, I was a civil servant in DEFRA, the Cabinet Office and the Department of Health.
Jordan Urban: Yes, thank you for having us. My name is Jordan Urban and I am a researcher at the Institute for Government working under Alex in the civil service in policy making team. Alongside Alex, I help to lead our work on civil service relocation.
Q93 Chair: Mr Thomas, the proportion of the civil service based in London has been going up in the past decade, and the increase has accelerated since 2016. Why is that?
Alex Thomas: Two words: Brexit and covid. As the Committee will be aware, the civil service as a whole has been growing since 2016, after a period of decline; we have now just about hit the level it was at in 2010. Initially, the growth was to deal with the process of leaving the European Union, and then there was an incremental build-up to deal with the functions being repatriated from the European Union, which required more civil servants to work on them. Then, the crisis of the pandemic led to a rapid increase in recruitment: the civil service did a lot of bulk recruitments throughout covid.
Most of those jobs that were added to the civil service were added in London. That is for a number of reasons: first, they were in large part policy jobs, helping Ministers respond to the crisis of the pandemic and the consequences of Brexit. Most policy jobs, as we may go on to talk about, are in London, so there was a sort of self-fulfilling element to that.
Also, I think the people who were recruiting those jobs were based in London and so tended to recruit in their own image, if you like, so there was an increase in the numbers in London. It is easier to recruit to an office that you are already working in, so while the civil service has made progress on the objective of moving jobs out of London, that has been more than offset by the increase in growth in those jobs in London.
Q94 Chair: Continuing on that theme, Mr Thomas—Mr Urban might like to come in as well—the Government’s places for growth programme, under which it wishes to move tens of thousands of civil service posts out of London, dates back to 2018. If in actual fact, the civil service has been getting more London-based since 2012, why do you think this became a serious issue five years ago? What was the driver behind adopting the policy, and is it wise to maintain it?
Alex Thomas: I will pass to Jordan in a moment. One comment to make about the 2018 ambition was just how unambitious it actually was. I think it talked about creating the circumstances for up to 1,000 jobs to move out of London, so it was only really 2019-20 when the places for growth programme was turbocharged, if you like. The ambition was certainly raised over the course of the last few years.
Why did it come about? I think there was a general desire to make better use of the Government estate. That then translated, as you heard from Professor Travers, into the levelling-up agenda, and this was seen as a helpful vehicle for pursuing various Government objectives on that. Is it a good thing? Yes, I think it broadly is. It is good for the civil service to reflect the geographic circumstances of the country as a whole.
But I think—again, we may come on to talk about this in a bit more detail—one of the notable points about this whole agenda is how there are at least three, four or five different objectives that the Government might be wanting to achieve from this, whether that is to save money, improve service provision, change the way in which policy is made, raise the economic circumstances of a particular area or region, or sustain the health of the civil service long term. There are a lot of those objectives bound up together in what the Government are trying to do here. Governments, as they tend to do, will claim that they can do all of those and there is not an inconsistency in them, but I do think that too often, it has not been clear whether the Government’s priority is, for example, to save money or to “level up” a particular local area or economy. To the extent that it is not a good thing, it is because those objectives are in tension.
Jordan Urban: I completely agree with everything Alex said. I think there are two more reasons why it became a serious endeavour, as you put it: first, it is quite an easy lever to pull. If you are trying to level up local areas, there are lots of entrenched regional inequalities that are very difficult to get rid of, and one of the easiest things that you can do is relocate your own civil service workforce.
I think it was also partly about Brexit. In Michael Gove’s Ditchley lecture, he talked about the civil service and the political class as a whole, if you like, being closer to the 52%, and I think that levelling up and civil service relocation into, primarily, more deprived northern towns was seen as a vehicle to achieve that.
Q95 Ronnie Cowan: On relocating the civil service, there were targets set for relocating the most senior civil servants. If you look across the whole board, just for background—for our viewer—of the whole civil service, 21% are based in London. If you look down the middle of the table, there is Wales, at 7%, about a third. But when it comes to senior civil servants, London is sitting at 65%, which is only down 3% from the original plan, and Wales is sitting at 5%, a 13th. What has proven so difficult in moving the senior civil service? At this rate, if it is 1% per year, we are not going to hit the target of 2030: it is going to be 2038. What is the difficulty?
Alex Thomas: The Government said that they want to move 22,000 civil service jobs out, and they want half of senior civil servants to be based outside London. Why are so many senior civil service jobs in London? Because those jobs tend to be more involved in policymaking, and policy civil servants tend to be in London, as that is where Ministers and Parliament are, self-evidently. There is a gravity to London for senior civil servants who are more established in their careers and more involved in those decision-making processes with Ministers. Why is it hard? Because of that, and because proximity is power, as you touched on with Professor Travers.
Also, Jordan might want to say more about this, but the further people go on in their career, the stickier their personal circumstances get—the mortgage, the kids and the location—so it is perhaps harder to persuade senior civil servants, who are further on in their career and have more ties to a geography, to leave an area they have built their career in.
Jordan Urban: I have nothing to add. Alex has covered it.
Q96 Ronnie Cowan: Did you not say that the low-hanging fruit would be easier to move? The 1% per year low-hanging fruit appears to be harder to pick than we thought it would be. If we are not getting that now, it will not accelerate as the programme goes on. Normally, we might expect a big start-up, which would then decline, but it seems as if we will have to do it the other way around to meet that target.
Alex Thomas: If you were an optimist, I guess you could say that the programme might gather momentum. Also, it takes time to persuade people to move. There is a legacy of civil service contracts whereby people might be able to say, “I was employed in this location, so you need to continue to employ me in this location.” There is an opportunity to build momentum with sustained political and administrative will.
I completely agree, as we put in our evidence, on the low-hanging fruit point. The point that we were making was that a lot of energy had been built up, in particular around the Treasury relocation to the Darlington economic campus—there was energy, dynamism and enthusiasm among civil servants around that—but the more mobile people would be more attracted to it. The civil service and Ministers will need to continue to persuade people to make that big move. Yes, I think it will get harder, as the people who were more mobile move on.
Jordan Urban: There is something here about proof of concept, almost. Senior civil servants who work in London know that they can do their jobs effectively in London; because of the cyclical nature of these relocations, which Professor Travers pointed out, they are not yet convinced that they will be able to move to the regions, do their jobs well from the regions, and stay in the regions without getting dragged back to London. Basically, one of the big challenges of the agenda is to prove that relocating very senior civil servants out of London can work. In particular, the fact that the Darlington economic campus has senior civil servants, including the second permanent secretary to the Treasury, gives civil servants an indication of whether moving out of London would work for them and stick for them.
Q97 Ronnie Cowan: To pre-empt your next answer, do you believe that moving people out successfully would stop the tendency for the 50%—once we get to that number—to swing back to being proportionately higher in London, if we do the job properly?
Jordan Urban: It is hard to say. It relies on sustained commitment by Ministers and by senior civil servants. As Professor Travers pointed out, a lot of this relies essentially on the whims of the Government of the day. If it is clear, for example, that a Minister wants you present in person all the time, you will not be able to work from Darlington or Wolverhampton; you will have to be dragged back to London.
Obviously, this crop of Ministers and senior civil servants were very socialised by the pandemic into hybrid ways of working, so they are very used to giving or receiving briefings virtually. However, Ministers churn, and a new crop of people and senior civil servants will come in. The question of whether they are as comfortable with, or as used to, doing that will help to define whether they feel the need to be physically co-located with Ministers.
Q98 Ronnie Cowan: You have mentioned Darlington. You have visited the campus; what did you make of it?
Alex Thomas: We were quite impressed. We talked to various local leaders outside the civil service, and we spent some time with the civil service on the economic campus. We would give it quite a positive review, from our research. One of the reasons for that is that real momentum has been generated behind it. Another reason is the sense that the top of the office—ministerially, but particularly very senior civil servants—was committed to Darlington being a sustained part of the Treasury’s approach to running itself. I would almost never take issue with anything Professor Travers says, but he did refer to Darlington as an outpost; I did not get the sense that it was. It felt like quite a core part of the Treasury, because they were taking it seriously. There were some risks and problems, as well as things that might be problems down the line, but overall we were fairly impressed.
Jordan Urban: Absolutely. To go back to my previous answer, one of the most impressive things was the level of senior buy-in. Ministers and senior civil servants cared about making it a success. It was serious; it had its own centre of gravity; and it was not just an outpost. It was part of the core Treasury, even though it was based in Darlington.
Q99 Ronnie Cowan: Given current and previous conversations, why was Darlington chosen for the economic campus?
Alex Thomas: We don’t know. I will try to avoid sounding like an ex-civil servant, but a number of factors go into decisions that are made—
John McDonnell: You have just failed.
Alex Thomas: It would be naive to suggest that there was not an element of political decision making going into the location of these things. As Professor Travers said, politics happens; government is about politics, and that is not always a bad thing.
On the point about there being a number of different factors, it is important that when Ministers make these decisions, they have the practical success factors for a location in mind. There are two things I will say about that. First, you buy different things from different locations. If you locate in a big city, you are potentially buying proximity to a world-class university, other equivalent civil service jobs and a more resilient labour market. If you locate in a town, you are buying more impact on the local economy, less expensive living costs for the civil servants and so on. Those are the first set of considerations for Ministers.
Secondly—this is where Darlington is a really interesting example—is connectivity. Why does Darlington work? It is because Darlington is extremely well connected by road and rail to large parts of that area of the country, and to London. The reason why Darlington, as a relatively small location for the Treasury economic campus, seems to be working is that it is extremely well connected. Whatever additional political layer Ministers might have put on top of that, I hope that they were thinking about those sorts of factors when they made a decision.
Ronnie Cowan: I worked in Darlo for seven years. I discovered this morning that my old factory has been demolished and they have built houses on top of it. I am very upset about that. I would never consider Darlington an outpost.
Alex Thomas: Good. We agree on that.
Chair: There are very strong links with Surrey as well, so I don’t know what the suspicion is.
Q100 Mr Jones: What response did you have from the officials working there when you asked them how they enjoyed working in Darlington as opposed to London?
Alex Thomas: They were very positive. Do you want to take that, Jordan?
Jordan Urban: They seemed to enjoy it. Some of the factors that are known as being beneficial for civil servants outside London were there. The cost of living came up time and again. On a civil service salary in London, you might be able to afford a small flat on the outskirts of London; in Darlington, you can buy a three-bed detached house. Things like that made a difference.
People there felt that Darlington and the campus had done really well to create a cross-campus community. People really felt that they belonged to it. It was articulated to us that people were worried that it would feel like it was disconnected from the main Treasury, but it is not. There is the added layer that the campus is a thriving, cultural and social hub in its own right. That is a credit to the senior leadership team. It links back to the theme that I am banging away at: it takes real commitment from senior people to make this work. That really came across from the people we were talking to.
Alex Thomas: We reflected on the importance of there being a clear career path for civil servants in locations outside London. One of the things we heard a little bit was that there are particular accelerator jobs that help civil servants in their careers; being a private secretary would be an obvious one. I think there is only one private secretary, or possibly two, located on the Darlington campus, so there is an absence of those accelerator roles. There was a sense, though, that that was made up for by being part of the Darlington community. There is now a second permanent secretary there in Beth Russell, and there are a number of senior people. The trade-off for the civil servants is that they do not have access to all the London gossip, and they do not have access to some of those accelerator roles, but they do have a different sort of career opportunity and career boost. To some extent, they almost felt slightly sorry for people in London, who had to cope with property prices and so on.
One little niggle is that it is really important that the Darlington campus, or any campus, does not define itself too much in opposition to London. These are national civil servants working on national policy, and we may come on to how it benefits policy to look at that through the prism of being in a different location. Equally, on what you were talking about earlier, if there is a problem with civil servants looking at policy through a too London-centric lens, then you do not want to look at national policy just through the lens of the north-east, or any location.
Jordan Urban: On career paths for people working there, something that felt really important to the people there was that every job in the Treasury can be done from Darlington. There was a sense that there was no regional ceiling, and that there was not a funnel whereby, as you got more senior, you had to move back to London because that is where the jobs were. There was a sense that, because every job could be done there, progression was available to people, basically.
Q101 Karin Smyth: We have had quite an interesting and broad discussion on why you think Darlington is successful, but as you know, the IFG published four tests of what would constitute a success. Although it all felt good and positive, does the Darlington campus pass those four tests?
Jordan Urban: It is the all-important question. The first of our four tests was: does the labour market meet the Department’s needs? The answer to that, as Alex said, is that we think so for the moment. Because it is such a well-connected place, the effective travel-to-work area is very large, and there is the opportunity for lots of talented people to work in Darlington. The local leaders we spoke to were quite relaxed about the prospect of some people commuting in from other parts of the north-east and the north more generally. I think that was an accepted part of Darlington’s sell—the fact that it was so well connected and had access to all this talent across a broad area.
The second test was: is there a critical mass of roles in the new location, particularly senior roles? As we have touched on, yes, we feel that that is the case so far. At the moment, there is certainly a disproportionate number of senior civil servants. We will have to wait and see whether that continues as the campus grows. It is too early to tell whether this critical mass has been reached, but it certainly has its own centre of gravity.
The third test was: is there co-ordination between other Departments and with local government? The co-ordination with local government could be better. If you go to Darlington, the office that the Treasury are in is opposite the council buildings, but I did not get too much of a sense that there was too much working between civil servants and local council officials. The DFE building in Darlington has a shared space with the council. I am not sure how much that is used, but obviously the concept of the economic campus is that seven Departments and a public body—I think the ONS is based there—all come together to provide a unified campus, which provides the career paths that are necessary.
The fourth test is whether Ministers and senior officials have a plan for the long-term sustainability of the campus. I think this is the most in question of the four tests. As we said, there is a lot of ministerial support right now. Obviously, part of that is driven by the Prime Minister, a former Chancellor. I know that at one point there was a rule in the Treasury that one Minister a week had to visit the campus, and I believe that since the campus has been fully operational, every Chancellor has gone to visit, but who knows how long that will last? As was discussed in the previous session with Professor Travers, these things are at the whims of individual Governments.
Alex Thomas: That is the main critical question. To be a bit glass half empty—taking the cue from your question—there is energy in the Treasury around the economic campus, but I think it is fair to say that there is less energy in other Departments. There are plenty of other Departments represented there but, to be kind, they are at an earlier stage of the process and there is probably less genuine senior commitment to making it a hub that is firing on all cylinders, so I would be concerned about the sustainability.
It was very interesting to hear about whether Ministers or civil servants are more important in that sense. We heard was that ministerial visits are great—political commitment is needed to get things going—but it does feel a bit like they are there on a visit. They come up to look at it, and then they go back to London again.
What is far more important is the senior official commitment. The critical test will be whether very, very senior officials really are happy to continue with that commitment. The ministerial role is more about whether Ministers are happy to have hybrid meetings and not summon people back to London. The energy around the campus would degrade very quickly if you had a Chancellor who insisted on in-person meetings, because the whole thing would flip. It is fragile.
Jordan Urban: The past evidence of civil service relocation suggests that that is an absolutely crucial point. Back in 2020, when we wrote those four tests, we wrote that the East Kilbride office of what is now the FCDO but was DFID-ODA has struggled to maintain senior presence there because of this perception that they need to be shuttling back and forth to London. Essentially, that makes your job incredibly difficult to do from a location that isn’t London.
Q102 Karin Smyth: That is a really important point. We talked about the ONS earlier, and in my Bristol constituency the reach from Newport to Bristol and the wider area is really important. Anecdotally, I hear that a lot of people continue to work hybrid or almost totally at home, and that allows people to be drawn in, which benefits the wider area. That is a really important point: the style of working that is adopted by senior officials in these places may change. There is also the ministerial point.
You also highlighted the importance of Departments taking a methodical and co-ordinated approach to where to relocate. Are you seeing much evidence that the Government is doing that?
Alex Thomas: On Darlington, yes, although differentially, as I said a moment ago. There is then this wider question of the hubs programme more generally. My conclusion would be that there is some co-ordination, but there probably could be more.
As the Committee knows, the Government still think departmentally, but this is an opportunity—although it is not yet seized—to think more thematically and genuinely about the chronically cross-cutting policy areas that could be better addressed. Rather than talking about the DLUHC office or the DWP office, the economic campus—this is why we are perhaps slightly starry-eyed about it—is an opportunity to think about economic themes. It is the same for crime and justice, social policy and healthcare. That is very much not realised. If one of the objectives is to improve policy making, part of that is a civil service that reflects the country it serves, particularly in terms of socioeconomic background, but part of it is about breaking down some of these silos.
Jordan Urban: With my civil service workforce hat on, the other thing that these thematic campuses have the potential to do is to channel civil servants’ careers in a productive way. One of the things that the Institute for Government talks about a lot is the churn of civil servants—the rapid turnover between jobs, which often have nothing to do with each other. If you are based in, let’s say, Wolverhampton and you are part of a crime and justice cluster, you will be able to move between jobs that actually have relevance to each other, and build up a skill set in a particular area that could be beneficial to the way you make policy in the future. If you reach senior civil service level, for example, you will have more of a robust background in whichever area you are in than you potentially would do otherwise.
Alex Thomas: Churn is lower outside London, anyway, partly because there tends to be operational people and fewer policy people, but generally there is more of a frenetic churn in London.
Q103 Karin Smyth: Finally from me, have you looked at hubs anywhere else—for example, Glasgow—against those four tests?
Alex Thomas: In less detail.
Jordan Urban: Not specifically, no.
Q104 Jo Gideon: You spoke to civil servants at the Darlington campus who said that they would never have had the opportunity to work with the civil service if the civil service had not come to Darlington. What tangible impacts do you think these new recruits will make to the civil service culture and policy making?
Jordan Urban: That is a difficult question to answer partly because, as Professor Travers touched on, these things are inherently very difficult to measure. How does one decide what impact an individual person or an individual office has on the very complex process of policy making? I think that in general terms the sense is that by having a different lived experience, being based outside London, and having understood, in some cases, deprivation in a different way than exists in big cities, that will alter people’s mindsets to some extent, although we have to be careful about how much it does that.
There is also something about people with different professional backgrounds and therefore different intellectual approaches to problems, which is quite good for the civil service. For example, Darlington has people who were formerly in the police or higher education. They will have been trained almost to approach problems in different ways. It can only be good for the civil service to have different people with different approaches to the problems that it faces.
Alex Thomas: The only thing I will add to that is that it is really difficult to get to the bottom of how this is changing the way policy is made. One illustration of that was when someone said to us, “Imagine a policy-making process. As a Treasury official I might have the most radical, different perspective that it is possible to have. That goes into a submission that then goes into the organ grinder of the Treasury. That then goes to a Treasury Minister and then to a Cabinet committee. That then might pop out with a decision at the end.” So it is very hard to analyse the thread that goes into that, other than accumulated decisions over time being more reflective of different parts of the country and different parts of society.
Jordan Urban: The other thing to add is that civil servants take evidence-based policy very seriously, and the evidence is the same whether you are based in Darlington or in London. Obviously, your personal experiences might tinge or colour some of the way that you interpret that evidence, but fundamentally the evidence is the evidence.
Q105 Jo Gideon: Did you do an assessment of the types of jobs that the new recruits were doing before they joined the civil service? What do you think they would have gone on to do if the jobs had not moved to Darlington?
Jordan Urban: Nothing systematic, other than the sense that these were people who otherwise might not have been attracted to the civil service. It is fair to say that there is a mixture of people, some of whom thought, “I really want to join the civil service, but I can’t because there aren’t any good jobs in my area, and I want to stay in my area.” And there are some people who thought, “I never considered joining the civil service, but now there are jobs in my area, I might want to do that.” But we have not done any systematic analysis of which one is predominant.
Q106 Jo Gideon: Do you have any idea of how many people who work at the Darlington campus live in or near Darlington? Are there any people, for instance, commuting from London or the south-east to Darlington?
Alex Thomas: Almost all of them live in the wider geography. I don’t know how many in the town versus the suburbs versus the wider area. It was clear that about 80% of them were either recruits from that area or were people who were already working there. Only about 20% were relocators, as they call themselves. It is almost everybody around the area and a relatively small number of people who had relocated.
Jordan Urban: Yes.
Q107 Jo Gideon: Are you able to differentiate according to seniority of role?
Jordan Urban: I think more senior staff were relocators from London, but I think that is to be expected early in the endeavour, where you have these existing people who are senior civil servants and you have, to put it bluntly, more skills to be a senior civil servant based in London, than you do at the moment in Darlington. At the moment, there is a skills mismatch at that sort of level. Obviously part of the idea is that by bringing those jobs to the region, you improve the skills of the local area. Who knows what it will be like in the future? At the minute, there are probably more proportionally senior staff who are relocated from London, although certainly that is not all of them, and there are definitely staff from the local area who are at senior levels as well.
Q108 Damien Moore: Does relocating policy staff to regions outside London make a tangible difference to national policymaking? We have talked about the Darlington campus, for example. What is the difference by doing that? We have mentioned lots of the economic factors—you pull a lever, you get lots of jobs and people can move and civil servants can buy better property than in London because of the expense. Is the outcome for everybody else who is affected by those jobs different, and is it better?
Alex Thomas: It goes back to what I said a moment ago about the difficulty of finding that thread through the grinder of Government. You would expect it to be better but only in quite small, incremental ways. The theme of all of this is that this is a 10, 20 or 30-year project, with all the changes of Government challenges that that entails.
We know that the civil service is unrepresentative of the country in certain ways—socioeconomically and geographically are the two most relevant for this discussion. To have a civil service that is more representative is a good thing, and will incrementally improve policy, so I think “yes” is the answer, but it is very hard to have any tangible demonstration of that actually happening, other than outcomes being better over time.
Q109 Damien Moore: So we might see some evidence?
Alex Thomas: If it is sustained, we will. But however much work you do on it, it will be very hard to disaggregate what is specifically down to relocation. Better policymaking is important because it is more tangible, but in a way the factors that seem most important to me are the long-term health and skills of the civil service. Are we getting better civil servants, and more talented civil servants, in to advise on those policy processes and to support Ministers? Are they reflective of society? Is the civil service in good health and giving good advice? Those answers are more likely to be fruitful than trying to argue “This decision out there and here is different because of the nature of the advice that went into it.”
Jordan Urban: I think the other question is how big is the effect on policymaking. As Alex said, we would probably expect to see some level of effects, but the question is how big is it and how important is it. Obviously, the nature of such things is very hard to tell, but that is one of the key questions.
Q110 Damien Moore: So do you think the office in Darlington means that the Treasury has a better understanding of other geographic areas? Obviously, there is London and Darlington, but you are not able to recruit people from a lot of other areas in order to have a better sense of the impact of policies, for example, the south-west. I do not think it is every region against London; I think the regions themselves are very different.
Alex Thomas: I defer to Jordan, but the answer is “not automatically”. I think the Darlington experience is a disrupter, if you like, and is testing the Treasury in ways that the mandarin sitting in the office in Horse Guards is not being tested. I think its value in the broader sense lies in the disruption rather than having little Treasury offices all over the country.
Jordan Urban: I think civil servants’ experience of Darlington will be more similar to the experience they would have in other relatively deprived northern towns than it is of London. I also think that Darlington is not all of the north of England and there are very specific regional factors in every single part of the country that are different and that mean that policy needs to take them into account. I would be cautious about drawing too broadly from civil servants’ experience in Darlington, while also recognising that it is more representative of a certain type of part of the country than London.
Q111 John McDonnell: One of the benefits I think you have seen from Darlington has been people working together on particular subjects; you have suggested that net zero could be another one. From what you have seen of the Government’s regional hub plans and planned moves, do you think that is possible?
Alex Thomas: I think it is possible, but definitely not assured. That would be my brief answer to that. It is too early, really, to tell. There is an opportunity there. Like all of this, it will require sustained leadership from Ministers and civil servants. The more the Government and successive Governments are able to demonstrate that this works, the more likely it is to be embedded, I suspect. Not yet—but there is an opportunity.
Q112 John McDonnell: On that idea of getting civil servants who are working on particular subjects to co-locate, can that work in Whitehall? Why shouldn’t that work in Whitehall as well?
Jordan Urban: There is no inherent reason why that should not work in Whitehall, other than the existing structure of departmental property. That is certainly something that I think it would be worth Government looking at in the context of Darlington, given that having multiple Departments in one place seems to have been quite successful.
Alex Thomas: I would be wary—I know that we are looking at location and the estate today—of putting too much on to the estate on that. Yes, the physical location of civil servants is important. More important, in terms of the barriers to cross-departmental working, are the accounting officer structure, which puts certain kinds of financial incentives around permanent secretaries; the nature of Cabinet government; the way Secretaries of State might approach some of these problems; and the authority of No. 10. There are lots of other factors that we all know about. Location can be a facilitator, but some of these fundamental incentive structures in Government are pretty deeply embedded.
Jordan Urban: I think that there is something a bit different about establishing a new office with that way of working, rather than trying to change the embedded ways of working that civil servants are used to in London. I think part of the reason why the Darlington model has worked, and part of the reason why it is so collaborative between Departments, is the large proportion of new entrants to the civil service. The entrenched departmental fights and turf wars do not really mean anything to them; it is not part of the language they speak, if that makes sense. That might be different in Whitehall.
Q113 John McDonnell: Did they do that over Brexit? Did they bring people together?
Alex Thomas: Yes, in part, I would say. I worked on various aspects of Brexit when I was a civil servant. Within Departments, there were definitely war rooms and individuals were brought together from very different teams in Departments. Also, particularly around the border—
Q114 John McDonnell: And located together.
Alex Thomas: Located together to some extent in Departments. Around the border, there was cross-Government working and bringing people together, but to your challenge, which is a very good one, people were less located together; it was more the regular drumbeat of meetings. Whitehall loves a meeting.
John McDonnell: Let’s leave it there.
Chair: Indeed. Our final question for this panel goes to David Jones.
Q115 Mr Jones: I would like to return to the issue of hybrid working, which I raised with Professor Travers. As you will be aware, the Public Accounts Committee recently expressed some scepticism about the expansion of the Government’s hubs programme, saying that hybrid working made it less clear how much demand there would be for office space in the future. Do you think that there is a possibility that hybrid working might turn some of these hubs into white elephants?
Alex Thomas: There is definitely a possibility, and we do not know exactly how the world of work will develop. I think there will always be a demand and a need for people to get together and have creative conversations, but I would agree with some of the concerns that the Public Accounts Committee expressed around being locked into very long leases. Whatever the value for money might seem at the start, once you are locked into a 25-year lease, that could be very difficult. So yes, that is a concern. I think the answer to it has to be flexibility. These things can move quickly, but not as quickly as during the pandemic. Over the course of three or five years, the Government need to be flexible to adapt the property base as required.
I think there is also a bit of an assumption that lots of civil servants continue to work from home. Clearly, many do. I was struck by the evidence that the Cabinet Office submitted to this inquiry: pre-covid, 66% of civil servants were in the office at any one time—occupying desks. If you look across the latest central departmental returns, the numbers now are there or there abouts for many Departments. There are some below it; the Foreign Office in particular is hovering around 49% or 50%. But the MOD is at 93%. The Treasury is at 75%. DEFRA is at 74%.
There is the assumption that lots of civil servants are now working very differently from how they were before the beginning of 2020, but let’s wait and see; I wouldn’t just assume that that is how civil servants are going to work.
Jordan Urban: Absolutely. One of the interesting things about working from home and hybrid working is that that has been baked into the civil service’s assumptions about how it will work for a number of years now; it was something that came out in particular off the back of the 2012 civil service reform plan. So, like Alex, I think that hybrid working and the growth of working from home represent some level of shift post covid, but actually, in the case of the civil service, it’s a bit less of a shift than for most of the wider economy.
Q116 Mr Jones: You suggested in your written submission to the Committee that you could increase demand for working in the office by adopting the latest thinking on office design. Could you expand on that?
Jordan Urban: We don’t have any specific recommendations, but there is good evidence that, for example—these are quite technical, building-related things, but something like air quality in buildings improves the way people work; it means that people get sick less often. Sports teams in particular, when they are thinking about their training grounds for example, think very carefully about the way people flow through the building—basically, the path they take and the people they interact with, and how that can be healthy or not or useful or not, as the case may be. We are not experts in that, but we think that the civil service should be thinking about these state-of-the-art things. I don’t know whether they are or not; I haven’t seen any public evidence that they are.
Mr Jones: Thank you.
Chair: We have a quick supplementary question from Jo Gideon.
Q117 Jo Gideon: I was very interested to hear your thoughts on the horizontal working of thematic campuses. You said that this probably wouldn’t work in Whitehall. Can you just unpack the tension that might arise between the regional hubs working on themes, and the Minister and the senior civil servants in London working in, shall we say, departmental silos?
Alex Thomas: That is a really interesting point. To be clear, I hope I wasn’t saying that Whitehall could not physically work like this; I do think there is a real value to doing that, and it does sometimes happen—there are joint units and things like that. My point there was more that there are some quite deeply entrenched incentives in the British system of government, particularly the accounting officer role around the Department, that mean that, in the end, budgets are managed Department by Department, which is one of the obstacles to genuinely creating cross-cutting teams, so it is a separate question from the location, if you like. But you are right that you could have a hub that is working on, say, net zero in a particular part of the country and going great guns and making links at that level across a series of Departments—with net zero, it would be most of Government in a way—and that then hits the buffers of the overall accountability and other arrangements that exist in the British system.
I think what you need as part of the commitment to setting up a cross-cutting hub like that is a clear channel of escalation and, ultimately, a political commitment from the Prime Minister to knock heads together at Cabinet level to resolve disputes or areas of tension. Like so many things in the British system, it all comes back to the office of the Prime Minister and how well the centre can set a direction and then knock heads together and hold Departments to account for delivering it.
Chair: I thank both members of our second panel: Alex Thomas and Jordan Urban. Thank you very much for your time and for sharing your expertise and research.