The shifting nature of the Public Service

Note: I originally wrote this in the spring of 2023 in the context of the Canadian Public Servant Strike, the RoboDebt Scandal in Australia and the Bullying Scandal in the UK. But I am just getting around to publishing it now as it seems as relevant now as ever.

Major shifts are happening in the relationship between the apolitical (public servants) and the political arms of government (politicians and their political staffers).

This relationship is foundational to a healthy government. Public servants have historically been the primary group responsible for providing impartial advice and implementing the day-to-day running of government. Or, put more simply: fearless advice and loyal implementation. In contrast, the political arm balances the public service’s advice with the people’s will. They are responsible for decisions and accountable to the public through elections.

The public service balances multiple inputs, including insights from consultants and advisors, to give the best advice to the political arm. The political arm then makes decisions on the path forward. Here the political arm sees the public service as the central and most trusted source of information to make decisions.

A major shift in the last decade is that information has become increasingly political, causing a distrust in any central source (sometimes referred to as a post-truth world). As a result, governments are re-organising themselves to strengthen their political muscles. You see this through the increase in size and prominence of political staffers (as documented by Dr. Jonathan Craft in his book Backrooms and Beyond: Partisan Advisers and the Politics of Policy Work in Canada). Also, through the push for greater influence of the political on the hiring of public servants. The political arm increasingly bypasses the public service and engages directly with consultants and advisors (as outlined in the recent book, the Big Con). In this model, public service shifts from being the central source of impartial advice to being one of many sources, each with its own bias.

In this model, any group claiming to be neutral in their advice is viewed as either naive or misleading. You can therefore see how politicians can be sceptical or even hostile to the public service’s insistence on being a non-partisan information source.

As a result, the political arm seeks multiple sources and then chooses which source of information they would like to follow. It also means that not only is the public service often marginalised, they are increasingly implementing policy and programme ideas they were not involved in creating (or have explicitly advised against). This loss of agency and perceived value is detrimental to those working in public service and leads to a brain drain as they leave for other places where they feel they can have more impact and agency (like consultancy).

As the cases above highlight, the idea of a neutral, apolitical public service is being challenged worldwide. This creates an existential crisis for the public service as we all try to figure out what public service should look like in an increasingly political world.

I don’t know the answer but am keen to find out.