Whitehall
Sketch
Brexit
in the hands of the unbelievers
Britain’s civil
servants never wanted to leave the EU. Now it’s up to them to make
it happen.
By
Robert Colvile
8/2/16, 5:28 AM CET
LONDON — When
voters in the United Kingdom chose to leave the European Union,
Britain’s civil servants reacted with shock and disbelief. This was
no surprise. After all, as highly educated, affluent technocrats,
they pretty much check off every stereotype of a Remain supporter.
Reality is slowly
setting in. As ministers head off on their summer holidays, staff in
Whitehall are starting to accept that the next portion of their
careers will be dominated by the implementation of a decision with
which they thoroughly disagreed.
Being professionals,
the question is not whether they will do it, but whether they can.
Even as they knuckle down, a large question mark looms over whether a
government machine shorn of so much of its former capability — and
with a patchy record on major projects — will be able to cope with
such significant strain.
So far, the focus
has been on trade, a field in which Britain has perhaps two dozen
trained negotiators, lined up against the 600 acting on behalf of the
EU. Using this vestigial capacity to negotiate the myriad of trade
deals that may be required will be like “trying to bail an Olympic
swimming pool with a thimble,” according to one former trade
adviser.
The salary of
any civil servant earning more than the prime minister must be
publicly disclosed. Senior trade negotiators in Brussels already earn
well above that amount.
Hundreds of trade
negotiators are already being recruited, alongside experts from the
private sector. New Zealand has offered to loan and train staff, and
there are suggestions that Australia and Canada might offer similar
assistance. But it will still be difficult to find enough qualified
experts, given the number of simultaneous deals that could be
required. “This is complicated, incredibly technical work,” said
one insider. “It isn’t like finding 300 tax collectors, it’s
like finding 300 nuclear physicists.”
The draft of the
trade agreement between Canada and the EU, for example, is 1,600
pages of impossibly dense technical verbiage, including obscure
clauses relating to reindeer husbandry and the Saskatchewan Liquor
and Gaming Authority.
One obvious place to
look for experts is Brussels, in the form of Britons currently
working for the EU. But luring them back to the U.K. will be tricky.
As part of an effort
to cap Whitehall pay, the salary of any civil servant earning more
than the prime minister must be publicly disclosed. Senior trade
negotiators in Brussels already earn well above that amount — with
far less scrutiny, accountability and pressure than they would face
on Team Brexit. Even if their career prospects in Brussels have
dimmed, how many can be lured back to fight for a cause they
personally despise?
* * *
In the short term at
least, there is also the problem of internal politics: the rupture
caused by the creation of two new departments, for Brexit and for
international trade, will inevitably result in Whitehall infighting.
Jill Rutter, program
director at the Institute for Government, says the think tank
cautioned against carving out completely new ministries. “If you’re
really a department, you have to do lots of things that distract from
your core business, like setting up your own finance system, HR
system, producing an annual report, defining terms and conditions for
employees. If it’s not going to last for that long, it’s
potentially quite a big distraction.”
To be fair, the
Brexit department appears not to have had many problems recruiting
top-flight staff: In particular, its new head, Oliver Robbins, is
regarded as one of Whitehall’s rising stars.
But at a lower
level, many within the Foreign Office unit that deals with the
technicalities of EU membership — the European Union Division
Internal — are alarmed at the thought of being hived off to the new
body. These are generally staff from domestic departments who have
been brought over to the Foreign Office because of their in-depth
policy expertise — but then often move on to pursue a diplomatic
career elsewhere within the Foreign Office. That door has been shut
in their face.
And it’s not only
the Brexit department that will feel the demands of EU renegotiation.
At a speech to the Institute for Government, Amyas Morse, head of the
National Audit Office, warned that the civil service is already
“over-committed” and would have to abandon projects that were not
“mission-critical.”
“You’re already
running two programs,” said one Whitehall insider. “There’s the
‘business as usual’ program and the ‘change’ program
contained in the Tory manifesto. Now, on top of that, you’ve got
the biggest, most seismic change program in peacetime history. How
are you going to do a seven-day NHS, 3 million apprenticeships,
pensions reform, youth and childcare and prison reform, rolling out
academies, cutting the deficit and Brexit, all at the same time?”
And that’s without
taking into account any additional priorities set out by Theresa May
and her new team of ministers.
Bob Kerslake, the
former joint head of the Civil Service, already claimed that to cope
with the added work, the government will need to halt planned
Whitehall job cuts: Manpower has shrunk by a fifth since 2010, to the
lowest levels since World War II.
* * *
At the moment,
however, the cuts are set to continue: The business department, for
example, is supposed to lose up to 40 percent of its headcount by
2020. “I think that’s pie in the sky, given the amount of stuff
that’s got to go on,” said one civil servant. “That Steve
Hilton [Cameron’s former strategy director] idea of being able to
fit the whole government in Somerset House — to me, that’s dead
in the water.”
For Rutter of the
Institute for Government, it is a question of working out how to
prioritize resources. “Some departments will be very unaffected by
Brexit,” she said. “But some will be profoundly affected. At my
old department, Defra [which covers the environment and the
countryside], all its policy agenda is affected. For example, it
currently does very little legislation of its own — it’s all
about bringing through EU directives.”
Agriculture is a
good example of one of the likely consequences of Brexit: more
British bureaucracy. In the popular imagination, the money Britain
sends to the European Union — the mythical £350 million a week —
is simply a sunk cost, used to pay for jacuzzis in Brussels and
Strasbourg or hand-outs to avant-garde theater troupes in Riga and
Nicosia. In fact, much of it comes back to Britain, in the form of
grants for the regions and in particular for the agricultural system.
More pertinently,
some of the spending that remains in the EU is used for shared
services. In the same way that councils might outsource a particular
specialized function to save money, or pool services to get the
benefits of scale, Britain signed up to all manner of pan-European
agencies: the European Medicines Agency, the Unified Patent Court,
and several dozen more.
Yes, some of these
overlap with existing British institutions. But others do not. In
each case, there will be the question of whether Britain should
remain part of the existing system, or set up its own, more expensive
alternative — which means swelling the size of the state.
“Down the line, we
may well need to start setting up big new administrative systems,”
said Rutter. “For example, for registering migrants or bringing in
checks at the border. What you really need to do — and what the
Brexit department will be doing — is working out where the pressure
will fall, and what your options are for dealing with that.”
The more Britain
strikes out into the unknown, the greater the pressures on
government.
Much of what happens
will, inevitably, depend on the kind deal the U.K. negotiates with
the EU.
A post-Brexit
relationship could end up sticking closely to the status quo, simply
due to bureaucratic inertia. “Under the maximal form of withdrawal,
civil servants would painstakingly have to copy, or scrap, 12,295 EU
regulations,” the Economist recently pointed out. “They have
already started to map out every British law that derives from the
EU.” All other things being equal, they will surely keep as much of
that corpus as they can.
The closer the
Brexit deal is to existing arrangements (in particular, over
membership in the single market), the less dislocation there will be
for civil servants, and for Whitehall as a whole; it’s easier to
copy and paste an existing law than write a new one from scratch. The
more Britain strikes out into the unknown, the greater the pressures
on government — and the need for more manpower — will become.
Many of those who
campaigned for Brexit did so in the hope for precisely such a leap
into the unknown. In some cases, they wanted to sacrifice membership
in the free market in exchange for limiting free movement. In others,
they wanted to restore parliamentary sovereignty and sweep away
intrusive European regulation. Indeed, these people tend to be most
skeptical of government’s ability to deliver, and the keenest to
see it cut down to size.
Even as Brexit
voters rejoice at being liberated from the bureaucrats of Brussels,
they may find that power has simply been handed to the bureaucrats of
Britain.
Robert Colvile is a
regular contributor at POLITICO.
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