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Was Mark Drakeford right to keep down the number of civil servants, asks former Labour Minister

10 Dec 2024 8 minute read
Lee Waters MS by Senedd Cymru Welsh Parliament

Martin Shipton

Former First Minister Mark Drakeford’s decision to restrict the number of civil servants employed to roll out Welsh Government policies has been questioned in a podcast produced by one of his former ministers.

Llanelli Labour MS Lee Waters served as Deputy Economy and Transport Minister under Mr Drakeford.

In the latest episode of his podcast series The Fifth Floor, Mr Waters focusses on the challenges faced by ministers trying to get the Welsh Government’s agenda delivered.

He reveals how both the UK and Scottish governments have increased their quota of civil servants by far higher percentages than the Welsh Government.

Recruitment freeze

Lesley Griffiths was the Minister for Rural Affairs at the time of Brexit. By then the Welsh Government had been living with an austerity recruitment freeze for a number of years. Many experienced civil servants had left through several rounds of voluntary redundancies.

But when the process of leaving the EU was triggered, Ms Griffiths’ Whitehall counterparts in the Department of Rural Affairs (DEFRA) started hiring lots of new staff to deal with all the regulations flowing back from Brussels.

She tells the podcast: “I think they took on 1,500 new civil servants to cope with Brexit, whereas I think I had five. I think in the end I had about 90 over the period of time I was in Rural Affairs. The number was capped. We do not have the capacity.”

Brexit

Mr Waters says: “Within a year of Brexit, civil service numbers in DEFRA started rising steadily. In September 2017 their headcount stood at just over 6,000 people. By May 2024 that had risen by 111% to over 13,000 people.

“In the same period the Scottish Government boosted its [overall] capacity by 70%, from nearly 16,000 civil servants to more than 26,500. But in Wales, only 800 extra people were taken on.

“The figures are stark. But the choice was conscious. I asked [former First Minister] Mark Drakeford if he was right to continue to constrain the size of the Welsh civil service when Brexit and then Covid hit, at a time when governments in England and Scotland expanded.”

‘New responsibilities’

Mr Drakeford tells the podcast: “I think there are a number of reasons. The first, which is obvious, is that we’re not comparing like with like. Scotland has taken on a whole range of new responsibilities, including the welfare field that we don’t have in Wales, and the Whitehall expansion is essentially driven by the disaster of Brexit and the enormous growth in the number of people who had to be employed to deal with every disaster, every stone you uncovered.

“We did make some modest temporary increase in Welsh Government staff to deal with Brexit pressures here, but we didn’t face the same level of demand on us.

“More generally, when I first became the Finance Minister, we were already five years into austerity and the impact on all our public services was very apparent. Local government particularly was losing staff in large numbers, and it became a principle for me very early on that in an age of austerity, when you are having to ask other major public sector bodies to manage with less money, that you couldn’t treat yourselves any more favourably than you were treating them. I explored that principle with the then First Minister, Carwyn Jones, who agreed with it, and I’ve continued with it the whole time I’ve been able to.

“I think it is simply a matter of fairness. It is always easy to persuade yourself that you are a special case, that while everybody else has to manage with less, you can only manage with more. And I just thought that was an untenable argument to try to make in an era when year after year we were having to ask our colleagues right across that vast range of things that the Welsh Government tries to fund, that while they were going to have to bear the burden of austerity, we were to insulate ourselves from it.

“So, it has had an impact, of course, on the Welsh Government, and on our capacity to do some of the things we would want to do, but that impact is no greater and probably a bit less than other organisations have had to cope with as well.”

‘Ambitious’

Ellen Donovan has sat as a non-executive member of the Welsh Government Management Board, which advises the Permanent Secretary [Wales’ top civil servant] on strategic issues relating to how the civil service delivers the government’s agenda. She tells the podcast: “The fact is that we’ve got a very ambitious government, with an ambitious programme for government.

“But if you were to drill down to those priorities, sometimes you’d have one person or half a person driving that priority. It then comes down to a question of how ambitious are we able to be. You can be as ambitious as you want to be, but if you haven’t got the resource behind it to deliver against those, then they’re empty priorities. For us as the Welsh Government board, I think we felt the challenges and constantly supported the organisation to reprioritise to deliver against those priorities.

“From the 2021 election onwards, there was a real focus, partly driven by the First Minister, on the programme for government. We spent a lot of time going through the key priorities, and we’d try and provide scrutiny on what the organisation was doing to try and improve that.

“The top level of the civil service felt that struggle and probably dealt with it in the best way possible.”

‘Frustration’

Mr Waters tells the podcast: “There’s a clear frustration from some in the senior civil service that they’re being asked to keep staff numbers down while also delivering more. The head count of the Welsh Government civil service has been pretty flat for the last decade. The data has not been widely shared, but in an answer to a written question I tabled, the Permanent Secretary, Sir Andrew Goodall confirmed the numbers.

“And when set alongside the data on staff numbers in other Whitehall departments, and in the Scottish Government, they are stark. Between 2017 and 2024, the Department for Education in England has increased the number of its civil servants by 53%. Over the same period the Scottish Government grew by a remarkable 70%. But overall the Welsh Government staff numbers went up by only 17% across the whole range of its responsibilities.”

Mr Waters showed the figures to Owain Lloyd, who recently stepped down as the Welsh Government’s Director of Education and Welsh Language. Mr Lloyd tells the podcast: “That was part of the enormous challenge that I had to deal with and my predecessors had to deal with. It’s showing the increases are minute over time, but when you think about the agenda, particularly since 2017, 2018 – a new curriculum, a new ALN (Additional Learning Needs) system, then the pandemic. I came back at a time when you had a change not just of Director – there was a change of Minister.

“So Jeremy Miles had taken over from Kirsty Williams, with a programme for government that then included a myriad of new stuff, for example free school meals in primary schools. Let’s roll that out, let’s drive forward with the community schools agenda. Let’s drive forward with the national music service. On top of implementing the new curriculum and ALN, on top of dealing with the effects of the pandemic, and with a staffing structure which shows a tiny increase in capacity and capability. It’s an impossible task, because in effect what I had to do, for example, once the Cooperation Agreement [between the Welsh Government and Plaid Cymru] was signed, all of a sudden we were rolling out free school meals to every primary school.

“To do that, I had to build capacity internally and effectively had to move a team of staff to do that, which takes away from some of the core work we needed for instance to do around the curriculum and ALN. So there were really difficult choices on that, and I think if you look internally where morale and stress levels are, I think it’s an obvious thing that we didn’t see the equivalent increase in staffing capacity and capability to deal with that expanding agenda.”

‘Ethically correct’

Mr Waters tells the podcast: “As First Minister, Mark Drakeford was in his words ‘completely convinced’ that constraining the size of the Welsh Government civil service was, as he puts it ‘politically and ethically correct’. It’s a position he continues to hold as Finance Secretary. But many of his ministers could see the impact on their ability to deliver on key priorities.”

Former Counsel General Mick Antoniw says: “The Welsh Government is a £21bn-£22bn business. What company running that business would say we’re not going to fund the management we need to ensure that business is operated and developed properly. It is a balance – you don’t want an open pit of money continually pouring in for more civil servants – and that is an easy road to go down. So you have to ensure that decisions you take and the resources that you put in will actually deliver for the people of Wales.”

Lee Waters’ podcast The Fifth Floor: Constraints (The Civil Service – part one) can be accessed via Apple and Spotify.


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Adrian
Adrian
2 days ago

We need more high paying jobs in Wales.. we could encourage and build conditions for them to be created by business or we could impose 20mph and employ more civil service management… thanks Lee for your input on everything 👍

hdavies15
hdavies15
2 days ago
Reply to  Adrian

Nice to read that Drakeford was to some extent regarded as tight fisted by others who wanted to go ahead and fill the country with public servants. That’s more the kind of socialism I grew up with where every £ of public funds was accounted for.

Humphrey
Humphrey
1 day ago
Reply to  Adrian

The idea that driving slightly slower is a barrier to more high paying jobs in Wales is absurd. Presumably with that embarrassing assertion you’re really hoping to divert attention from the awkward fact that your Brexit white elephant vanity project was always going to massively increase the size of the civil service. Duplicating all the government functions previously done cheaply on behalf of all member states in Brussels needs more people. That’s obvious, isn’t it. Those demanding to go back to pre-2019 numbers are essentially calling for Brexit to be reversed.

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