Don’t let Jacob Rees-Mogg kill the civil service fast stream

Given fashionable assumptions that the civil service is a bloated blob, any measure that improves its effectiveness is surely a good thing.

Such as, for example, luring the brightest graduates from the top universities to embed the next generation of permanent secretaries. But in its wisdom, the government — or Jacob Rees-Mogg to be precise — is planning on scrapping the one scheme that is aimed at restocking civil servant ranks each year with fresh blood.

The famous (among the aspirational classes at least) civil service fast stream is to be another casualty of Rees-Mogg’s war on Whitehall which, as minister in charge of government efficiency, he has taken on as a personal crusade.

In his drive to trim departments, he has vowed to reduce the workforce by 91,000, to bring it back to pre-Brexit levels.

This will not only include a recruitment freeze, but the end — for now anyway — of the fast track that for years has propelled an apparently elite intake up the civil service ladder fast, as it says on the tin. (A government source confirmed that the scheme would be part of the hiring freeze from the 2023-2024 intake onwards, Politics Home reported).

There is no doubt that the fast stream has kudos, and that those recruited through this channel are seen as high fliers when they arrive. 

The selection process is notoriously tough, with a success rate of 1.8 per cent in 2021 from around 60,000 applicants. In some categories — there are several — selection is even more competitive: just 0.2 per cent of more than 16,000 applicants made it into the Diplomatic Service last year.

Contrary to perceptions, Oxbridge candidates are not prioritised; the procedure is indeed “blind”, certainly in its early stages. Contenders must first navigate an online multiple-choice test that is like the Becher’s Brook of graduate schemes, with many falling at this hurdle.

It doesn’t matter how many A-star A-levels you have, or first-class degrees; whatever the test is looking for, it is not your academic record and certainly not your background. The interview process only kicks in with those who are successful in the online ordeal. 

Is this the best way to attract excellence into government? Graduate schemes in other professions, such as Teach First, have targeted Russell Group graduates with good degrees and managed to both make teaching more appealing as a career and dramatically increase the calibre of teachers in underachieving schools, where the recruits are deployed.

But in the selection of Teach First recruits, the initial screening is based on academic qualifications, and so is less “blind” than the civil service programme, and therefore less arbitrary than the fast stream and perhaps less hit and miss. 

And here I must confess a parental bias. My daughter, now a civil servant, flunked the first fast stream assessment which, from what I understand, seems to favour those who perform well in situational tests. This may produce a steady annual crop of competent drones but also risks missing out on real stars (I said I was biased).

The British civil service prides itself on its army of generalists, but the in-built filters can fail to pick up exceptional specialists, who are then potentially lost for good to the private sector.

Dominic Cummings, when still advising Number 10, prompted outrage by calling for more “weirdos and misfits with odd skills…true wild cards, artists, people who never went to university” to apply for government jobs. “If you want to figure out what characters around Putin might do, or how international criminal gangs might exploit holes in our border security, you don’t want more Oxbridge English graduates,” he suggested.

While putting loose cannon Cummings in charge of civil service reform was never going to be a good idea, there was some merit in his swipe against the current system. There is a well-documented lack of expertise in crucial areas, such as foreign language fluency, which affects operational efficiency and Britain’s capacity to deal with global threats. 

The number of fluent Russian speakers in the Foreign Office fell by a quarter in the years before the invasion of Ukraine. And only a third of British diplomats stationed in Arab countries can speak Arabic, a study in 2018 revealed. By comparison, 64 per cent of American diplomats in the region can speak the language. 

Cummings identified other personnel, such as data scientists and software developers, who slip through the recruitment net. He was accused by the civil service union of misunderstanding the institution.

But Rees-Mogg, tasked with its reform, misunderstands it more. His sledgehammer approach — which involves stalking Whitehall buildings and leaving “sorry you were out” notes on desks to end working from home culture — reveals his disdain, bordering on contempt, for civil servants.

There may well be red tape that needs urgent pruning, but as an out of touch grandee, Rees-Mogg has no grasp of how departments are run. For all the time-servers, there are slick teams of dynamic managers and a cadre of hard-working and ambitious graduates.

Holding on to the talent and populating departments with the ablest youngsters will require refinement of the existing format. But ditching the fast stream altogether in an attack on the whole civil service is a throwing-the-baby-out-with-the bathwater strategy that will rob the government of the country’s best young brains.