Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: Civil Service People Survey, HC 575
Tuesday 7 March 2023
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 7 March 2023.
Members present: Mr William Wragg (Chair); Ronnie Cowan; Jo Gideon; Mr David Jones; John McDonnell; Damien Moore; Tom Randall; Lloyd Russell-Moyle; Karin Smyth; John Stevenson; Beth Winter.
Questions 38-81
Witnesses
I: Rhys Clyne, Senior Researcher, Institute for Government, and Alex Thomas, Programme Director, Institute for Government.
II: John Moloney, Assistant General Secretary, Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), and Amy Leversidge, Assistant General Secretary, the FDA Trade Union.
Witnesses: Rhys Clyne and Alex Thomas.
Q38 Chair: Good morning, and welcome to this public meeting of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee. Today, the Committee is continuing its inquiry into the Civil Service People Survey. The session is an opportunity to explore views on the survey among its users, including how the data are used by bodies outside Government, and how effectively the People Survey’s findings are implemented. We have two panels this morning, and I am going to ask our first to introduce themselves for the record, starting, please, with Mr Thomas.
Alex Thomas: Good morning, Chair. Thanks to the Committee for having us. My name is Alex Thomas. I am a programme director at the Institute for Government. I lead our work on the civil service and policymaking. Before that, I was a civil servant for about 17 years.
Rhys Clyne: Good morning. I am Rhys Clyne. I am a senior researcher at the Institute for Government, working on civil service reform, including our analysis of the People Survey and other workforce statistics.
Q39 Chair: An open question from me to begin, gentlemen. What is the purpose of the People Survey and how is it used across the civil service, and indeed by researchers such as you?
Alex Thomas: I will kick off with that, Rhys, and then you can come in. The purpose of the People Survey is self-evidently to understand and track the state of the civil service workforce, with a particular focus on motivation and how the workforce are feeling about issues like pay, leadership, performance management, workload and so on. It is primarily a management tool for the leadership of the civil service. The results particularly bite at deputy director level and above, and are used by those civil service leaders to help make improvements and changes to their team.
For us at the IfG, although Rhys might say more about this, it is part of a crucial set of data that allows us to understand what’s going on in the civil service, how wider developments might be affecting the civil service, how well the leadership of the civil service is doing in motivating and managing its workforce, and to inform a variety of other reports about the state of government. Rhys might want to add to that.
Rhys Clyne: Just a couple of points to add to that, and I agree with all Alex’s comments. It is, first, a way to have a standardised means to generate comparative data, and therefore to supplement some of the more qualitative methods that civil service HR, professions, functions and Departments use to understand engagement.
Q40 Chair: Is the survey’s headline employee engagement index a useful measure, would you say?
Alex Thomas: Useful, but we should understand its limits. It is useful in that it is a single measure that the civil service, and those of us who comment on and are interested in the civil service, can focus on. It provides a nice, simple, straightforward line on the health of the civil service, if you like. It is a basket of measures and is carefully statistically selected to make sure it is a representative basket, so it is useful, but, inevitably, when you have a single headline number like that, it hides the variety of factors—what’s driving that overall headline number, whether it is pay, management, leadership, workload or any number of different aspects, but also which bits of the organisation, such as particular Departments or areas in Departments, are driving the number up or down. The survey is useful, but you need to recognise its constraints.
Rhys Clyne: Yes, absolutely. To elaborate on that, essentially, the survey should be seen as a headline health check. Best practice would always be to look at the detail underneath and to understand what is driving the relative changes, both within different parts of Departments and within the parts of the survey itself.
Q41 Chair: Do the results accord with other data, qualitative and quantitative—for example, official civil service statistics and your own interviews with civil servants, or informational surveys that reach the public domain?
Rhys Clyne: Broadly, yes. Obviously, there will always be a disconnect with some of the other sorts of workforce statistics—for example, the ONS public sector employment statistics—because they are collected differently, but broadly they are in line.
In terms of the outcome and results of the survey, often they chime with our own research, but there are a couple of caveats to that. The first is the disconnect in time between the collation of results and the publication, which means that there will always be a bit of a disconnect between the results as we see them most recently published from the People Survey and other forms of research that we might be undertaking in a more rapid fashion. So, that disconnect would be narrowed the sooner the results were published afterwards.
Alex Thomas: To give a specific example of that, which is useful to think about in this context—we may come on to this shortly, I guess—people have been talking for two or three years about the state, morale and motivation of the civil service. It comes out in our research work when we talk to civil servants that some of them are feeling less valued. There is anecdotal evidence that people, particularly senior people, might be leaving the civil service in higher numbers than previously. That emerges anecdotally at the start. Then there is the staff churn, which is not part of the People Survey but a separate release, and those staff turnover numbers started ticking up. That came out about six months ago, I think, and that was another kind of indicator. We have not had the results yet, but last year’s People Survey started to show a downward tick in overall employee engagement. It may be that, if media reports are right, the results we can expect in the coming month or two will show a further downward tick. So, it plays out over time and we draw together the different evidence points, and actually the People Survey is sometimes the last indicator that comes along.
Rhys Clyne: If I may add one more point, the factors that contribute to the results of the People Survey often do not neatly align with those that play out publicly. For example, we have seen steady increases and improvements in scores related to civil servants’ relationship with their managers and access to learning and development opportunities. Obviously, that is different from some of what we have seen in the press over the last year.
Q42 Chair: What, if anything, do you think is missing from the People Survey?
Rhys Clyne: Surveys like these are always finite, and there are trade-offs associated with resource allocation and the usability of the survey. I would start by saying that it is actually quite a good spread of questions as it is, but there are areas that we, as interested outsiders, would like to see, in an ideal world. There are two areas in particular that we would like to point out. The first is optional additional questions of professions and functions. At the moment, Departments are able to opt to include up to three blocks of additional optional questions. In an ideal world, this would be a good opportunity to allow professions and/or functions to do the same, so that they can use the large sample size of the People Survey to gauge the experience of their members. That might also slightly lessen the need to run their own smaller sample surveys, as we know they do frequently.
The other area I would point to is around the experience of recruitment and induction. At the moment, the People Survey already tracks how long an individual has been in their role, where they have come from and how long they have been in the civil service. It would also be a good mechanism to understand some of the barriers associated with coming into the civil service and being inducted, which research is interested in.
Q43 John Stevenson: Just going back to the point about timings, the survey was carried out in autumn 2021 and reported in April 2022. How does that impact your analysis and the work you do, given that quite lengthy time lag?
Rhys Clyne: In short, the quicker that more detail can be published, the more useable that data is to outside researchers such as us. The time lag, as it exists, does limit that usefulness. However, it is also about how you think about the purpose of the survey. As a consistent annual health check, it is nevertheless useful, but it would be more useful if they could narrow the window and it should be possible to do so. In 2018, for example, the high-level benchmark scores were published quicker in December after collation in the autumn, with a more detailed demographic breakdown published in the spring. An approach like that is more useful than waiting and publishing it all later.
Q44 John Stevenson: From your perspective, does the other evidence you look at become more important as against the survey, or is the survey still very much the benchmark?
Rhys Clyne: It entirely depends on the question being asked. The survey is the biggest and most substantial way to have a quantitative view of the engagement and experience of civil servants. But, as Alex mentioned earlier, it complements some of the other, for example, workforce size and shape statistics, which are published on a quarterly basis, or the demographic breakdowns of organisations, which are published on an annual basis. So it really depends on what we are trying to get at.
Alex Thomas: We will see relatively quickly, given the size of the workforce, if staff churn is increasing, if pay is getting out of whack or if the diversity stats in the civil service are going in one direction or the other. We can see and comment on and analyse those as bare facts, but the real value of the People Survey, even though it is quite limited—again, we may get on to wanting to see more of the data that comes out—is that it is the only real way of getting to the underlying causes and motivations and what is going on to drive some of those trends within the civil service, other than the qualitative interviews that we do as part of our research.
Q45 John Stevenson: So you see it as being very beneficial to your research and work.
Alex Thomas: Yes.
Q46 John Stevenson: Commenting on the themes that come through it, I think the Cabinet Secretary has written to all civil servants noting that some of the key theme scores had fallen between 2021 and now. Do you know what is driving that?
Alex Thomas: The short answer to “Do I know what is driving it?” is no, which is one reason why we would like to see some of the data. However, I think it is reasonable to assume that some of the context around the civil service, such as the kind of broader rhetoric around how the civil service was being debated in public, if I can put it that way, may have contributed to it. I don’t want to draw too much from that, because I think one of the things the survey reminds us of is that there are nearly half a million civil servants, quite a lot of whom are at some distance from Ministers and the very senior officials and so on. That is just a very small part of this, so the numbers there are unlikely to be really driving some of these changes, which takes me to the second point, which is about cost of living and pay and some of the quality of training, which had dipped and is now hopefully starting to rise again. Those kinds of more day-to-day conditions of civil servants are more likely, probably, to be driving the weight of numbers in the survey.
Rhys Clyne: The point about pay is certainly one of the theme scores that has stayed relatively stable over the past 10 years. That has partly been driven by a fairly sharp drop between 2020 and 2021, and then, as reports in the press suggest, a sharper drop still last year. That aligns with what we’ve seen in terms of real-terms pay cuts at individual grades of the civil service. That would certainly be one factor we would point to.
Q47 John Stevenson: Thank you. This is my final question. I understand that the Cabinet Secretary chooses to circulate results to officials prior to going public. Do you think that is acceptable? Do you understand why he is doing that?
Alex Thomas: Yes, I do think it’s acceptable, but we would like the gap to be shorter. That is the basic answer. I think it is totally reasonable. When I was a civil servant, you’d get these results and look at them in the autumn—normally November time—but they wouldn’t come out publicly until spring the following year, and I think you could completely reasonably shrink that gap. I do think it is reasonable for the civil service itself to have a bit of time to digest what those results mean before they are made public, but I think that could be a shorter number of weeks, rather than several months.
Q48 John Stevenson: So you would like to see that as one of our key recommendations.
Alex Thomas: If the Committee happened to be so wise as to recommend it.
Chair: We will seek to be wise.
Q49 Mr Jones: How easy is it for people in your position to interrogate the publicly available People Survey data, and are those data sufficiently granular for your purposes?
Rhys Clyne: On the usability point, to start with the positives, it is published in such a way that it is comparable over time, which is the biggest positive and really welcome way in which the team publishes the data annually. That said, it is published in a fairly flat form in Excel documents. The IfG is lucky enough to put the time and resource into collating, cleaning, visualising and understanding the data so that we can analyse trends over time, but it would certainly be really useful for us—and, I am sure, for other interested outsiders such as journalists—if it was presented in an interactive online comparative format. Some form of interactive web-based tool would make that comparison a lot easier, with less up-front investment of resource.
On the granularity point, again, it is fairly granular, relative to other Government data. It is welcome that we can see individual organisation scores by metric, for example, and that you can cut that by demographic group. That is certainly welcome. But there are, of course, ways in which the data could be published in a more granular form that would make our analysis better, which we would like to see. I will name a few. The most important would be to publish scores at lower than departmental level. At the moment, we can see a score for an organisation publicly. It is understandable that we are not going to be able to see down to, for example, team level, to protect anonymity, but we certainly think it would be justifiable, useful and beneficial if the scores were published at approximately a directorate level within Departments.
There are different ways you can cut that, and in doing so, Departments would have to protect anonymity and consider the performance incentives that they are creating by publishing the data, but something along the lines of senior civil service level 2, with an exemption of any reports with fewer than 250 results, would be a useful way to publish the data.
I will add a couple more points—
Q50 Mr Jones: Just to interrupt you there, do you know why that isn’t done?
Rhys Clyne: No. We would have to ask Departments. Reasons given informally in the past have included the need to protect anonymity. There are also considerations about the incentives created when you are publishing results that can accord to one person, and considerations of what level of seniority it is sensible to apply that form of accountability to.
Alex Thomas: Being slightly mischievous, I suspect that Departments find it more comfortable to talk about these things at a departmental level—you know, the general Home Office—which is exposing the permanent secretary’s responsibility for those results, which I think they would say is a fair part of a permanent secretary job. When you get down to director general or director level, that is leaving those individuals who are heading those teams a bit more publicly exposed.
Now, you can take the view that that is inappropriately exposing civil servants, or you can say it is helpful for the accountability of those civil servants. We, being outside the civil service, would lean towards the latter.
Rhys Clyne: Just to add one more point, it is obviously also on a practical level a different capability to publish results at a more granular level, so it is also a resource consideration and a time consideration.
Q51 Mr Jones: The Cabinet Office choose not to release any of the written analyses that they produce for internal consumption. Do you know why that is the case?
Rhys Clyne: I can’t speak to why the Cabinet Office might decide to take that position, but it would certainly be useful if more analysis of the results was published. In the past, written highlight reports of departmental scores have been published alongside the granular data, and that certainly makes outside analysis easier. Similarly, it would be useful to understand what action Departments are taking as a result of the findings, and that would be made possible with more publication of more analysis after the internal circulation of the scores.
Alex Thomas: You can understand why Departments are cautious about the vast amount of free-text response that might come out and that might identify people or leave them feeling exposed, or actually make them reticent in sharing that free-text feedback that might be very useful.
I recognise that this could be quite a considerable resource burden for the Cabinet Office and Departments, but I do think that if there were a thematic analysis of these comments, it would be very useful to see that, to supplement the other data. So even if you are not getting the “I’m hacked off because I’m fed up with my manager” kind of comment, that is put into a “Dissatisfaction with manager” box and that can then supplement the other data. But I imagine that that could be quite a resource-intensive piece of work.
Q52 Mr Jones: When you say resource intensive, do you think unreasonably so?
Alex Thomas: I think it depends if they are doing it anyway. I think it is not unreasonable, because you would hope that Departments were analysing this information anyway. In order to digest what may be many thousands or tens of thousands of free-text responses, they will need to do some kind of analysis. If they are doing that anyway for their own management purposes, which I would suggest would be good practice, is there really that much harm in releasing that?
Mr Jones: That is precisely why I raised the question. It does seem to me that provided they can guarantee anonymity, which is essentially their chief concern, that would be very useful information for researchers such as yourselves and more widely.
Q53 Damien Moore: Good morning, gentlemen. Why do you think so few civil servants believe senior managers in their organisation will act on the People Survey results?
Alex Thomas: That is a very good question and quite a difficult one to answer. I will lean on both our research and my experience as a civil servant. I think the civil service admirably puts a lot of energy and effort and attention into doing the People Survey and into encouraging people to complete it, in a way that is genuinely encouraging, rather than aggressively compliance-based. I think there is genuine interest in the results of the People Survey, both among senior managers and generally among staff, but in a way, that is the easy bit. I think it is much harder for managers to demonstrate that they are genuinely following up on the outcomes of the People Survey. Sometimes that is because the numbers are quite sticky to move. Sometimes it is because it takes time to improve the situation. Sometimes it is because people’s attention just moves on and everyone talks about it for a month after the survey results come out but then attention wanes. Sometimes it is because it is quite hard to demonstrate to a team if you are taking action, for example, on poor performance. You cannot do that in the full glare of the rest of the team. So, I think there are a variety of legitimate reasons, like poor performance or how it takes a while for the dial to move, why more junior civil servants might then get cynical about how the results are interpreted. However, the less legitimate one is, as I say, that attention just moves on.
It comes back to that point—both inside the civil service and, to an appropriate level, outside the civil service—about the heat being maintained on improving the survey results steadily year after year, which provides the incentive then for those senior leaders in the civil service to maintain the drumbeat of attention. If you look at a lot of the numbers, they are going up. I think the very big picture story is quite a positive one over the course of the last 10 years or so around the civil service. However, it is incumbent on managers to do more to show how they are responding to the survey results and to then tell that story. It may be less positive over the course of the last two years, but I think there is probably more that senior civil servants could have done to tell the story of a steadily improving morale set in the civil service.
Rhys Clyne: If I may add two points to that. First, our conversations with civil servants suggests that the public leadership on action being taken on the results is important. There is a temptation to think only of internal communications and internal processes, but the process of publishing examples of best practice that Departments are taking is valuable because it reaches different parts of the civil service and a wider audience. Secondly, specifically on the point about acting on the results, there was a 3 percentage point drop during 2020 and 2021, but in the long term we have actually seen a steady increase in that, so it is worth bearing in mind the long-term as well as the short-term trend.
Q54 Damien Moore: Do you think there is a need for a stronger central team to co-ordinate this or do you think it should just be left to individual Departments? Obviously, if best practice is there, surely that should be co-ordinated through that person rather than left in a piecemeal way. If we were to take things such as learning and development, which might be something people want, how do people know they can do that? If they do not know they can do that unless it is put quite explicitly in front of them, you are just going to get the same results, other than by a bit of luck, or fewer or more people doing the survey.
Alex Thomas: I will speak briefly and then Rhys can come in. Yes, I think there is a case for a stronger central team. I do not think it needs to be huge or take up loads of resource. However, on that authoritative team or a team that has the objective of advising and supporting civil servants in Departments, first, these are quite senior leaders in Departments who should know what their job is and should be capable anyway of motivating and leading their teams. But yes, they also need the support to do that from their own Departments and also from the centre.
I would make a distinction between a team in the Cabinet Office that is offering really strongly promoting best practice and the accountability line. I do not think you need a team in the Cabinet Office that is checking up on individuals in Departments and saying, “Have you done x, y or z on the People Survey results?” The right way for that chain to work is up through a Department, through the permanent secretary and then to the head of the civil service as the permanent secretary’s manager. The accountability line needs to be that way, but absolutely, if there is a team in the Cabinet Office that is helping Departments do that, all to the good.
Rhys Clyne: Just to add to that, I think it is important to consider whether we are thinking about the responsibilities of managing and delivering the survey, and the responsibilities that Alex mentions about promoting best practice and convening Departments. Our understanding is that the central team managing the survey is a relatively small one, so there is obviously going to be the risk that the pressing need to effectively deliver the survey crowds out some of the convening and sharing of best practice responsibilities that are equally important. That is where the justification for a stronger central team lies. However, it is also important in that to clarify the relative responsibilities of that central team alongside civil service HR and the functional teams, because they should have a role in that convening of Departments’ sharing of best practice as well.
Chair: Mr Thomas and Mr Clyne, it has been a fairly brief session this morning. You have answered the questions very concisely, which we are always grateful for of any witness. I thank you both for appearing this morning.
Witnesses: John Moloney and Amy Leversidge.
Chair: Good morning, and welcome back to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee for our second panel this morning on the subject matter of the People Survey. Will the members of the second panel introduce themselves for the record, starting with Mr Moloney?
John Moloney: I am John Moloney. I was elected as the assistant general secretary of the PCS in 2019. Before that, I spent over 30 years in the civil service, so I have had first-hand experience of not only doing the People Survey, but the outcomes. Last but not least, my current duties cover bargaining and health and safety, which encompasses some aspects of the People Survey.
Amy Leversidge: I am Amy Leversidge, assistant general secretary at the FDA union.
Q55 Karin Smyth: We asked our first panel about the usefulness of the survey, so I will ask you the same question. Is the employer engagement index a useful measure? I will start with you, Ms Leversidge.
Amy Leversidge: I think the survey itself is a useful indication of how civil servants are feeling, and it is obviously useful that the data is collected over a significant period of time and we can compare back. For me, the key point is what is done with the data, and that is where the civil service falls down, in that actions do not follow what our members have put in the survey and we do not see results from it.
I will give you a real-world example of something that has happened in the last month or so. We are currently in discussions around the pay remit guidance for the next year, and we know that the pay satisfaction on last year’s survey has significantly gone down. We have asked to have more information that came out as a result of the People Survey to inform our discussions when we are talking about the pay remit guidance, but we are not allowed to do that yet, so the timing is completely off. They said they cannot release the data or give us any more data than the headline figure, but that would help to inform our pay remit discussions that we are having right now. The next time we will be discussing the pay remit will not be until next year, so it seems really odd that the People Survey is collected for the sake of collecting the People Survey, but then they do not use the earliest opportunity to act on that data. The People Survey is useful as an indicator of how civil servants are feeling, but it would be far more use if they actually used it at the appropriate points.
Q56 Karin Smyth: Is there any sense that taking the clock back, if you like, would help with that? In your view, is there any sense of willingness or acknowledgement that that might be a helpful thing to do?
Amy Leversidge: When we had a meeting recently on the People Survey, we were given some of the headline data for this year, which we have been told is completely confidential and we can’t share it at the moment. I asked in that meeting whether we could have more information about pay, specifically for now, because we are having the pay remit conversations at the moment. We were told, “No,” and that it wouldn’t be useful.
Karin Smyth: Mr Moloney, is it useful?
John Moloney: First of all, to answer your direct question about the engagement index, that is not particularly helpful, certainly for the unions. Two other indices are collected via the People Survey, which are helpful. One is called the proxy stress index. The higher the number, the more stressful the environment, so obviously that is useful, at least for the unions. There is another index called PERMA. I can’t remember precisely what it stands for, but according to the way they define it in the technical note, it is about how “flourishing” the environment is. Clearly, that is a useful indicator, depending on the workforce and workplace, of the extent to which the people or the environment are flourishing.
Coming back to the main thing that Amy said, in a strict sense, as unions we literally cannot see the point of collecting all this data. First of all, it is delayed frequently. It is delayed not for technical reasons, but for political reasons. We are told frequently that Ministers are checking it. In our opinion, it seems that the main thing the survey generates is spin on what it actually says. You always get narrative associated with the survey being issued. In other words, Departments always issue it saying, “This is up; this is down,” and they accentuate the positive. In our opinion, they don’t concentrate on the important thing, which is the negative.
While we think the data is very useful, PCS cannot see any technical reason why it can’t be issued early in the year. We would like that. As I understand it, all the correlation is done very early in the year. It should be published as a neutral set of indices and numbers. People could then interpret them as they wish. Obviously, unions, Ministers and what have you will do so. But at least you and we would have that data at the very beginning. It would inform the pay negotiations, but because it can be drilled down to quite a low level and is kept anonymous, it gives very good information about bullying, safety and so on. It could be a very useful set of data, but unfortunately at the moment we don’t see that it is.
Q57 Karin Smyth: Just so we are clear, once the data is all there and out on spreadsheets and whatever, is that the point at which you see it but it is confidential? Have you seen that technical data, as you have described it?
Amy Leversidge: We have seen a sort of slide deck with really high-level figures. We know the top numbers, but we do not know anything between them, which is a frustrating position to be in because you want to understand the information a lot more.
Q58 Karin Smyth: Mr Moloney, you said there is a time at which the technical data is ready, but it is delayed for political reasons, not technical reasons. Is that time gap for it to be signed off by Ministers?
John Moloney: That is our understanding. In the past we have been told that it goes to 10 Downing Street. We have been told that at least once it had to be signed off by the Prime Minister. We just see it as technical data, and therefore we don’t understand why there has to be that sign-off.
Q59 Karin Smyth: Do you think the employee index would be a useful measure if it was put out at the right time?
John Moloney: And allied with the other indices.
Q60 Karin Smyth: PCS has said that the focus on the employee engagement index crowds out other things—and that is still your view.
John Moloney: That is correct. As I said, if it was issued early, we could do it in a more measured manner. I will give a quick example of how delays can happen. In 2015, surveys of 2015 and 2016 both came out in the same month, because one had been so delayed and one had been expedited. We think a fixed date could be given every year. Issue it, and then we could discuss it, and it could drive pay talks, and myriad other talks.
Karin Smyth: And issue the engagement survey with the other information—that would give a fuller picture.
John Moloney: Yes.
Q61 Tom Randall: A short question from me. To what extent are your trade unions engaged, if they are, in the design of the survey?
Amy Leversidge: We are not as engaged in the design of the survey as we would like to be. We would like to see additions to a number of questions, and fixes made. It is difficult to progress those fixes.
It sometimes seems that, with the People Survey, the commitment is to keep the consistency of the questions over a number of years. I understand the importance of doing that, because we can see trends over a number of years, although it does not tend to break down information like that and could do a lot more to show the trends.
It feels some fixes could be made, and we could add in questions that reflect the current way of working, and more topical questions. To give you an example, there is one small issue we have with the fast stream members. Every year they all say to us, “We don’t know where we are supposed to be, which box we are supposed to tick for where we work,” because they are all on placements.
They say, “Do I do this for the placement I am at now?” That would mask other bits because they are employed by the Cabinet Office; their pay negotiations and things like that are with the Cabinet Office, so it gets lost. That is a really simple fix that could be done. It is almost impossible to get those things changed, or to get some proper guidance around that.
Tom Randall: What is your experience, Mr Moloney?
John Moloney: I asked before I came here when was the last time the unions were consulted on questions. Apparently, it was either 2017 or 2018. The person I talked to was not 100% sure. Certainly, since then, we have not been consulted. As Amy said, we would clearly like to be consulted. We fully understand that for consistency purpose and time series purposes lots of questions have to remain the same.
Nevertheless, as you probably know, in the history of the survey, auxiliary questions have been added gradually over the years. If we could persuade the technical team that the questions we would like to pose were valid questions that would draw out statistical inferences, we would clearly like to influence those sorts of questions.
Q62 Tom Randall: What sort of question? Have you any examples that you would like to include?
John Moloney: There are numerous questions already that cover health and safety, welfare, mental wellbeing and so on. We think we could ask a series of slightly different questions about mental wellbeing that would be useful for our purposes.
There are also elements about pay. There is a global question, “Are you satisfied with pay? Are you going to leave?” We think certain things could be drilled down. For instance, is it a lack of progression? Is it the quantum? Is it the fact that you do not get a bonus? We could drill down there. There is a series of questions that are auxiliary—we would not change the primary questions—that we think would be useful for us and for the Cabinet Office and Departments.
Amy Leversidge: I agree that the questions on pay are very broad. They do not drill down into non-consolidated bonuses, pay progression and things like that. That seems to be a way that the civil service could measure whether the things it is doing are successful or not, and whether that matches up with the engagement score. That would get to some issues around that.
In pay discussions, we do not tend to match it up by thinking, “Is there a relationship where we have had a business case in a Department and better satisfaction scores on pay and things like that?” We would definitely like to see a lot more around pay and working hours. There is one question on workload, but working hours are a massive issue for civil servants at the moment, as is being on call and the changing dynamic of work; we would like to see more questions there.
We would also like to see questions around people’s experience of recruitment and induction and things like that, which was similar to what was said by the previous panel. There is one particular point that the FDA would be very interested to see on the bullying question. The question asks who you have been bullied by, but there is no option for Ministers.
Tom Randall: Thank you.
Q63 Jo Gideon: My question is to both of you. Why do you think so few civil servants believe that senior managers and their organisations will act on the People Survey results?
John Moloney: I remember when I was a civil servant that there was deep cynicism that anything would be done from the People Survey. Certainly, in the areas I was in, once the People Survey had been done, there was always a flurry of initiatives, but they died a death. It seemed that, every year, the civil service relived the experience. We argue that the database can be useful, but it should drive medium and long-term initiatives around bullying, harassment, welfare and so on. The reason is that it is the lived experience.
In some areas, the survey just gets published and literally nothing happens, or there is an initiative for a few months and then that dies a death. It is like a lot of things in the civil service. The civil service is full of initiatives that die, whereas, obviously, what we would like to see is long-term initiatives on, if you like, harassment that drill down—push down—year after year.
Also, and I shall finish on this, there is no feedback for the People Survey: if you fill in a score and you get x—not you personally, but the organisation—next year what they do not say is, “We have done x, y, z and therefore that means that that score is now lower, and then, next year, we will go even lower.” In other words, they do not use it to steer their policies or to measure their own homework.
Amy Leversidge: I think it is quite patchy—the engagement that we get in Departments after the scores of the People Survey have been released and the action plans have been put into place. Some of our national offices tell us they get heavily involved in the action plans and can see them; in others, they do not even see the action plans. It is quite patchy at Department level. This comes to a central point of the civil service: some Departments would not have the power to really make a difference to their score on, for example, pay. They do not have the power to think, “Right, we really have to address our pay.” They can only do so within the constraints of the remit guidance.
There are also things, particularly in this past year, that have driven lower scores that are completely out of the Departments’ control. For example, the fact that people were filling out the survey in the autumn, when there had been the announcement about reducing the civil service by 91,000, would have had a massive impact on people’s morale and motivation. That is completely out of the Departments’ control. How can they address that when that is coming from the centre? Obviously, we are seeing lots of negative comments in the press and the media, which, again, will be driving real feelings of morale and motivation. Those things are out of the Departments’ control. What we tend to see are action plans that focus on the softer side, whereas there is no action on the things that are really driving the difficulties, which tend to come from the centre.
Q64 Beth Winter: There is an issue with the timing of the data that is released. Do you get any raw data that you can analyse independently?
John Moloney: We don’t. Actually, yesterday we were given the headline scores. We are told that it is absolutely confidential. I queried whether, if I was asked a question about it here, I could answer it, and they said no, but they say that they will issue it at the end of this month. We have asked whether we can have bespoke reports, and they are looking into that request now. We do not get the raw data; we get the refined data.
The technical team are very helpful; they want to help. As Amy says, once we have the technical data, we can present a whole series of policy asks to the civil service. At the end of the day, Departments must have either the power to do these things—frequently, as Amy says, they do not—or the long-term will to change things, and unfortunately in our opinion the civil service does that infrequently. There are some things that the civil service has done year after year, but frequently they have an initiative that lives for a year and then dies for a year. We do not see the raw data, but we do see useful data.
Q65 Beth Winter: On your consultation with your members, you do surveys. How can that correlate with the People Survey data? Obviously, you will want to access the People Survey data to see whether it confirms what your members are raising, or you may want to raise issues—you mentioned bullying and harassment. Do those conversations happen at all? You are in direct contact with your members.
Amy Leversidge: We see the headline figures, and that is what we have seen for this year. We then see the same data that everyone else will see—the raw data online, as the Institute for Government said earlier. Then there is lots of data that they put out, but it ends up being quite resource-intensive to try to analyse that yourself. It is not presented in a helpful way; it is presented in a way that allows you to do the analysis if you have the time and resources to do so. It is not always easy to compare things with the surveys that we do, and we find that there is a bit of a difference, but I think that that is a difference between people who are responding to the People Survey and people who are responding to us. I think that people are more likely to tell us how they really feel in a less diplomatic way than they might tell the People Survey. I think we tend to get a more negative picture.
Q66 Beth Winter: When issues are raised, are you consulted by the civil service about them, and are you consulted on how to respond to them as unions? If there is stuff that comes out of the People Survey, are you consulted about what actions should be taken?
John Moloney: In my experience, certainly not at the Cabinet Office level. The Cabinet Office level just tends to say, “Here is the technical team,” and it presents the findings. We could—and we do—then raise issues. To come back to the timing issue, this year the surveys will come out at the end of March, hopefully, but some years they do not come out until November for the previous November. In that case, they are in one sense completely useless, because the civil service says, “Well, that was a year ago; you can’t rely on that.” At a departmental level, there are some discussions, but it is very patchy. Again, it comes back to a central theme, which, hopefully, colleagues, you will think about: what is it used for and what does it drive? At the moment, as I said, it seems to be a data exercise in itself, albeit that the data could, if used as a foundation for policy formation and policy monitoring, be very useful.
Amy Leversidge: As I said earlier, we have a really patchy picture across our national offices that deal with all the different Departments. There are some Departments that will engage and say, “These are the results and these are action plans that we are putting into place.” How much engagement there is on the content of those action plans will, again, be different in different Departments. There will be some where you get the results and that is that; they do not necessarily act on it. It comes back to the earlier point: Departments could have some control over the softer things, but the meaty issues that will make the difference to overall engagement, such as pay or the way the civil service is viewed, are driven from the centre. There is no way that Departments would actually be able to put anything in an action plan that could drive that.
Q67 Ronnie Cowan: I want to look at bullying, harassment and discrimination. You have both been critical of the People Survey in the past, but do you believe that it now provides a reliable assessment of the realities surrounding those topics, and to what degree do you think this reflects the lived experience of your members in the Cabinet Office?
John Moloney: In the Cabinet Office per se—I will be blunt—we have tremendous problems with discrimination. The Cabinet Office has carried out a report, after a lot of union pressure last year, on levels of racial and sexual discrimination in the Cabinet Office. Unfortunately, a lot of these reports are issued, and then the action that is necessary tends to die a death. There is that report, but also the People Survey. Again, there will be a flurry, but as far as we can see, in the Cabinet Office, there is no long-term commitment to tackle bullying and discrimination.
I will give you a quick example. You talked about lived experience. If somebody makes a complaint in the Cabinet Office, it can take up to a year before the complaint is actually heard. If you do not like the result and appeal, it could be another five, six or seven months, so it could be up to 18 months before you are finally finished. In the Cabinet Office, not only is there no speedy complaint handling; at the end of it, people say to the person who has made the complaint, “Do you think the complaint was handled properly?” Very rarely do the civil service and the Cabinet Office say, “Yes, this person has been discriminated against.” What they usually try to do is say to the person, “Do you want mediation?”.
The PCS position—I will finish on this—is that if I say, “You racially discriminated against me”, I do not understand why I should be asked whether I want mediation review. I do not think that is the sort of thing where you can have mediation. If we had a bad relationship, yes, but I think discriminations should not be the subject of mediation. Unfortunately, in the Cabinet Office there is a tendency to say, “Can you mediate?” Unfortunately, our lived experience in the Cabinet Office is that the People Survey will not do anything and that, in many ways, it is masking a very real problem in the Cabinet Office.
Amy Leversidge: I will come in with a point that goes wider than just the Cabinet Office. As I said earlier, the People Survey does not pick up on ministerial bullying. It is about civil service bullying, which is an important issue, but it is a different issue because there are processes whereby people can put in a complaint against a civil servant, who can therefore be dismissed from employment. I completely agree with John that most of the processes across the board—the Cabinet Office is probably one of the worst offenders—are not timely or prompt in the way that they deal with investigations, and there are lots of improvements that can be made. We do, however, have a significant problem with ministerial behaviours, because we have no effective process to deal with bullying by Ministers.
We have just recently written a letter to the Health and Safety Executive to say that we would like them to investigate this situation, because we do not believe that the Prime Minister is doing everything reasonably practical to address these concerns. Under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act, you are supposed to, as an employer, put in place everything that is reasonably practical to ensure a safe working environment. We do not think that is happening right now, because we have an independent process, as you will all know, in Parliament to deal with bullying and harassment, and we also have the same in the Scottish Government, but we do not have that in Whitehall Departments. We have recently done quite a big report as part of our referral to the Health and Safety Executive, and we found that one in six senior civil servants had witnessed unacceptable behaviours by a Minister in the past year. The vast majority do not feel confident that that will be dealt with fairly, which has real implications.
Across the board, 35% of senior civil servants said that they did not feel confident enough to speak truth to power. Among those who had witnessed bullying, that rose to 49%. You can see that that has an impact on the advice that the Ministers are getting and the function of the civil service, so it has real implications in terms of the culture of the workplace as a whole. Culture starts from the top, and if people see that the Minister can act with impunity and that there are no consequences for behaviour, that filters down. That is a big thing, and it is not picked up at all by the People Survey—you would not get any of that information from it—so it is important that that is padded into it. Again, we can have an action plan in the Department to say that we have bad bullying and harassment, but we can only do that for the civil servants; we cannot do anything about the Minister, because that is only the Prime Minister’s responsibility.
Q68 Ronnie Cowan: What do you mean when you say “bullying”? What sort of behaviour are we looking at here?
Amy Leversidge: We have done a report, which I can send to the Committee, if that would be interesting. It details quite significant behaviours across the board. Obviously, there is a live complaint at the moment against Dominic Raab. There have been complaints against other Ministers over the years. It is the same type of bullying that we might see in any other workplace, but the difference with a Minister is that the power dynamic is completely different, and you have no means of raising the complaint. Only the Prime Minister, under the ministerial code, can instigate a complaint and will determine what happens at the end of it.
Q69 Ronnie Cowan: It is interesting that you said initially that it is the same type of bullying that you see in any other workplace, but in my experience it is not, because of—as you then said—the power dynamic in politics, particularly the higher up the tree we go. That is completely different from anything I have ever seen outside politics.
Moving forward, Alex Chisholm has said that a programme of work is under way to tackle particularly high levels of bullying, harassment and discrimination. Have your members reported that work as bringing about any sort of improvement?
John Moloney: May I answer that, at least initially? The civil service has started a new initiative, but from the information given to us, it seems that it is more a review of what has happened in the past. They are saying that, on the basis of that review, they will instigate actions, so it is not strictly a strand to say, “We’re going to tackle bullying and harassment now”, but is more reflective of what has worked and what has not. We are being consulted on it, but coming back to what Amy said, our experience is that if you make a complaint, it can take six, seven or eight months, or one year. One case I did took two years before it was resolved.
Anybody would recognise that if people make a complaint about racial discrimination, bullying or whatever, and it takes that long, clearly they give up or become very bitter. What we want is a very simple thing for the civil service to do: guaranteed outcomes, in the sense that from when you put the complaint in, within one month you get a hearing. Few of the complaints I have ever dealt with—I was an active representative myself—are complex. You just need to talk to people, and there is little documentation, because usually it is about interpersonal things. You could therefore have the interviews in one month and a decision in the second month. If that at least was guaranteed across the civil service, people would know that the instant they were bullied, they could put a complaint in.
Also, in the survey, a very small number of people claim that they have been physically assaulted. That is in the highways and byways, if you drill deep into the data. It is very small numbers, but nevertheless it is alarming that people report they have actually been physically attacked. I don’t know what they did as a result—did they make a complaint?—but I do know that, generally, what happens depends on the hierarchy, to go back to that point.
When someone is bullied by someone higher up, the tendency is to say to the person lower down—this is all my experience and PCS experience—that the person being bullied should move. Very rarely do they say to the person who in our opinion is bullying—if they are sufficiently high up the hierarchy—that they should be moved, and very rarely do they suspend people at a high level. Frequently, if our members create a problem, one of the first things that many managers do is say, “We’ll suspend you for the time being, while we investigate”, and so on, but that is not reciprocal for higher grades.
Amy has outlined the problems with Ministers, certainly for PCS. While some of our members interact with Ministers, most of them interact with other civil servants, so for us, although it is important to get a proper independent system regarding bullying complaints against Ministers, if we are looking at the totality of bullying, we have to address it where it is—the vast bulk of it is in the lower grades; lower-grade staff tend to be bullied by higher-grade staff—and get proper systems in place with independent investigation and swift justice.
Amy Leversidge: We had many comments on our research on ministerial bullying. People said that they had done so much work to improve things. They had put in action plans on bullying and harassment in the Department—civil service on civil service bullying—and the fact that Ministers are basically given impunity and can behave in the way that they do undermines that work, because he is allowing a culture to thrive.
Q70 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: Do you think the results of the survey estimate accurately the level of bullying, or are people still not accurately inputting that into the survey?
John Moloney: First of all, there is a non-responsive rate that varies year to year, but I think it is roughly about 25%. Scientifically, we don’t know what those 25% of people would report. They could be the most bullied people, but don’t report. For what it’s worth, PCS does accept that it gives a broadly right picture based on the casework that we get back. The figures for some grades are up to 35%, and for certain grades they are even higher. DVSA, an agency in the Department for Transport, is notorious for bullying, harassment and discrimination. We accept it in broad terms, but as I said, we don’t know the non-respondents’ rate scientifically, and the civil service cannot address that because it is an anonymous survey. They cannot go to somebody and say, “We know you didn’t fill in the survey. What is your real opinion?” But we think it is roughly right.
Q71 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: Amy mentioned that there is an option to put who has bullied you. Is that data ever used to do investigations into bullying, harassment or racism in Departments? Or is it still just of statistical interest, with no action coming from it? If you say, “My manager in this Department”, you can identify who that is—maybe not one person, but you could identify three or four people who that could be. Is there any action that comes out of that? If not, would you like to see some action?
John Moloney: It is certainly not used in that way. It is confidential, and that is marketed very heavily. If I put in that I was bullied by you, for instance, if you are my line manager, I might be very aggrieved if all of a sudden somebody knocks on my door and says, “You put in a complaint of bullying.” We would not want it to be used there, but it can be used to drill down. The lowest unit is about 10 staff. The civil service can know very accurately the areas where bullying is taking place and can address those areas. It doesn’t. It has broad-brush approaches and says, “For everybody, bullying is a problem.” They should not only put in fast justice, but in those areas where bullying is consistent—they can track it, year after year—it should be tackled specifically. In that sense, it could be used. It should be used as a targeting mechanism, but for work areas, not for individuals.
Amy Leversidge: I agree. I don’t think it would be appropriate to start to drill down and think, “Has this person put in a complaint?”, because some of those things might be confidential anyway. Where it is useful is to understand the nature of bullying. It asks, “Is this by a manager? Is this peer on peer? Is this a contractor?” and things like that. You could work out how big a particular problem is in a particular area that we need to address as a Department. That is where it would be really helpful, because how you would deal with an employee and how you could deal with a contractor is different.
Q72 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: We have received reports previously that there are high levels of really acute mental health crises, including suicides, in some Departments. Is data like that collected adequately?
John Moloney: Our experience in PCS is that it is not. For instance, in the Cabinet Office there was a spate of people threatening to commit suicide who then didn’t commit suicide. In our opinion, the Cabinet Office as an origination never tackled that properly. In our experience, it tended to say to the person, “We are very concerned. What help would you like us to give you?”, rather than immediately intervening and saying, “Sit down. This is really dreadful,” and then digging deep to find out why that was happening.
In the wider civil service, no accurate figures are kept at all. I don’t think there is any data kept on potential suicides. Thankfully, the numbers are very, very small. Nevertheless, in my career, I have come across on a fairly regular basis people either threatening self-harm or suicide, or unfortunately attempting suicide. Those figures could be kept, but they are not. They should be kept.
Amy Leversidge: I think that is a very difficult thing for the People Survey to measure. The People Survey is one tool, and when you are getting into questions of that sensitivity you need to be really careful that they are dealt with sensitively. I don’t think you can really capture that information accurately on a survey. It is for HR to develop other methods to capture it if there are real crises going on with individuals.
As John says, probably every trade unionist—not just in the civil service, but unfortunately across every workforce—has had to deal with members who are in crisis. The first port of call is always the HR department, which can try to give that person the support they need. I don’t think you can accurately capture that on a survey, especially given the time lag and things like that. It then creates ethical problems: someone has told you something really serious and you have to act on it, and you then have issues of confidentiality.
There are definitely rising concerns around mental health issues in the civil service. They definitely need to be dealt with, but I don’t think it is for the People Survey.
Q73 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: It is another function.
Amy Leversidge: Yes.
Q74 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: I just want to ask one final thing. You wrote to us about racism in the Cabinet Office, and you have withdrawn from some of the reviews that are happening there. We have had other individuals contact us too. Looking beyond the individual issues, are there particular problems around racism or other forms of discrimination that the Cabinet Office is not adequately addressing?
John Moloney: We don’t think it is addressing them at all. We have presented a wealth of information to this Committee and elsewhere in which we statistically used not only the People Survey—by the way, I am not saying that it should ever be used to capture suicides—
Q75 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: I wasn’t suggesting that.
John Moloney: It should be a separate thing. We used the People Survey and the Cabinet Office’s own pulse surveys—it does individual surveys—and we collected anonymous feedback. There is a real problem: as far as we can see, it is not being tackled.
You asked what can be done about it and whether it is a real problem. In our opinion, it continues to be a problem, but unfortunately we don’t think the Cabinet Office is seriously addressing it.
Q76 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: What could it do to seriously address it? Can it be done in-house, or does someone external need to come in to sort this out?
John Moloney: The PCS position is that we want an external investigation of the Cabinet Office. The investigation it undertook had external consultants, but it was mainly driven by the civil service. We think the Cabinet Office should be open and say, “Look, this is a real problem. We will have an external investigator carry out a root-and-branch investigation to get to the root causes and then make recommendations.”
Doing it in-house always leads to the problem of, “I am a grade X”—the Cabinet Office has every grade under the sun—“and I will hand it to a more senior person.” Don’t forget that the heads of the civil service are in the Cabinet Office. People then start thinking, “What is the message handling for this?”, rather than, “Let’s tackle the problem.” Yes, PCS would want an external investigation into the Cabinet Office.
Q77 Karin Smyth: I just want to clarify this issue about the difference between the ministerial situation and others. I slightly disagree with my friend Ronnie Cowan that this is worse outside politics. We have seen some terrible cases inside the trade unions and uses of non-disclosure agreements and so on. Is it your point, Ms Leversidge—I take the point that it occurs at all levels—that there is a material difference between a Minister and any other power relationship, such as general secretary or head of Department?
Amy Leversidge: You will have those power dynamics, and that is essentially what bullying is. It is exploiting your powerful position in any number of ways. The difference with a Minister is that they are not employed, so they will not be dismissed from their employment. It is only the Prime Minister who can make a decision about who is in their Cabinet.
Karin Smyth: I just wanted to clarify that. Thank you, Chair.
Chair: The final questions are from John McDonnell.
Q78 John McDonnell: You have answered most of these by implication but let me run through them for the record anyway. We know that officials managing Departments consider the People Survey, but they consider it along with other sources of data, such as the internal pulse surveys, performance information on absences and sickness, and so on.
The formal question, just for the record, is: do you believe that the People Survey alone provides results that are truly representative of the experience of the civil service community? Alongside that, why do you think the civil service chooses to publish the People Survey rather than the results of, for example, the bespoke pulse surveys and other information?
Amy Leversidge: I think the People Survey is a really good measure. One of the biggest strengths of the People Survey is the length of time it has been collected over, and that we can look back. I do not think you can ever just rely on one measure. I think you have to look across the board at all different measures—pulse surveys, as you say, but also other information like recruitment and retention issues.
There is also the intelligence that trade unions are giving through our surveys and our conversations with members—be that on an individual level, such as through our casework, or collectively, such as what is coming out at branch meetings—and all other manner of data, such as turnover figures and things like that. I think that gives you a wide-ranging picture.
You touched on this a bit in the last session, but I think it would be really beneficial for us to see some of the more qualitative information in the People Survey. I understand, from an analytical point of view, that that will be really difficult to share in an anonymised way, but that qualitative information would be really helpful, and the People Survey could be followed up with more qualitative information to drill down and find out a better picture. There are lots of improvements that could be made to the People Survey, but it gives us a very good snapshot over time, but it needs to be added in as a whole picture.
Q79 John McDonnell: Do you want it all published?
Amy Leversidge: You would have to, with the comments and things like that, figure out a way that you could do that anonymously. What you would not want is for people to self-censor because they do not want their comments published, but I think it would be really useful to understand what is driving some of those answers. Like I say, with this year’s, I wonder whether a lot of the reduction in satisfaction scores is being driven by comments at the centre rather than at Department level, so I think that would be really helpful.
John Moloney: I think the People Survey, along with other data, should be an integrated whole. The People Survey generating in particular long-term trends is very useful. It produces a wealth of information. Take health and safety; it drills down into a whole series of questions about mental wellbeing, which is very useful. Again, coming back to this targeting, it allows us to say, “That particular workplace seems to be very stressful. What are we going to do to change it?”
What you could do is integrate the sickness absence—not on an individual level, but on an aggregate level—along with the People Survey to see, “Well, are they overlapping in the same workplaces?” You could overlap other equality data, such as promotion.
I have to be honest: while everybody thinks the civil service is this wonderful machine that collects everything, it doesn’t. Recently, we discovered that the DWP doesn’t know, in terms of race, what percentage of its internal candidates are being promoted. It does not collect that data because it does not integrate that data. Even though it has the public sector equality duty, it cannot comply with it, because it doesn’t collect data to do it. That is quite common in a lot of Departments, because it is too burdensome for them to collect or integrate the data.
There are real problems with data collection in the civil service, but what we have should all be brought together—one overlaps the other. Coming back to workplaces, if I see that workplace A has terrible engagement scores or whatever and, on top of that, it has a high sickness level and the proxy stress index indicates real problems, I have got a plan. I know that that is the area to tackle, rather than having broadbrush initiatives that address everybody as though they have the same problem when, in fact, we all know it is concentrated in certain grades and places.
Q80 John McDonnell: I have a final question on that. The publication data is important, but—and this is something you commented on earlier—how much of the action programmes to address those particular issues that are thrown up is actually published, and therefore monitorable?
Amy Leversidge: I don’t know how far it is actually published. It is probably somewhere on the staff intranet. I think it is not necessarily the publication that would make the difference; it is actually making the difference that will make the difference, if that makes sense.
We get a lot of information given to us, but it is then actually seeing the results of that information. Sometimes, “We have published a plan” is seen as a proxy for, “We have done something”, and that is not actually doing anything that will tangibly make a difference to the results.
I would much rather we worked together as trade unions and the employer, at each Department level, to really work through those issues and get to the bottom of them—to drill down and find the underlying causes driving some of the results in the People Survey—and work together to put in place actual solutions. Publishing something is not in and of itself a solution.
Q81 John McDonnell: It sometimes helps to shape political decision making.
John Moloney: I think the real problem with action planning, certainly around HR problems in the civil service, is that there is no metric by which they measure success. For instance, on harassment discrimination, the new initiative does not actually link back to the People Survey. It does not say, “We will measure success if we knock 2% off the People Survey”, or, “Each grade is at least the same in terms of reporting bullying and discrimination.”
What tends to happen—I think they should be publicly published. There is no harm in it. I think—and this might sound very sharp, possibly, as a last wording—that when it is published, most people will actually see how vapid they are. They are full of good words but, as I say, they very rarely have metrics by which to judge themselves. Rarely does the civil service say, “Yes, we did that initiative last year, and it failed.” Very rarely have I ever seen the civil service say that. That is a different culture thing but, as I said, there are no metrics in a lot of these plans, but they should be published anyway.
Chair: May I thank our second panel and both of its members very much indeed for sharing their insights on a very serious topic? We are grateful for your time this morning.