Reform should avoid 'mass firings'

Here is a better alternative

Zia Yusuf is styling himself as an Elon Musk figure within the coming Reform government - the first part of this plan is to implement DOGE-esque efficiencies into local councils (where Reform are taking control) before transferring this approach to the national public sector once in power.

To that effect, he has begun taking aim at the civil service, pointing out that they are constantly taking sick days and saying that a Reform government will fire the majority of the civil service; ‘enough talk of hiring’. Whilst the instinct here is laudable - a mass firing - there is a better way of presenting it, with a new model of public sector staff management which borrows from best practice in firms across Silicon Valley where Zia draws inspiration from.

Before we get to what that policy is, we will briefly discuss ‘policy’ and ‘management’ within institutions. ‘Policy’, as Dominic Cummings has expanded on at length, is vastly overrated within Westminster and public sector institutions (such as the Civil Service). Implementation is, as the Banyard Bandit elides, far more important - but even more important than that is Executive bravery. Sunak did not fail to solve illegal immigration for lack of policy ideas, or ‘state capacity’, it failed because he was not willing to tear up the ECHR and press on with deportations no matter what.

Policy can matter politically when it opens you to attack - as the Conservatives found during the 2017 election (dementia tax etc). But what is more important about policy is how it can be used to signal intention, e.g Net Zero immigration. Policies therefore should be simple enough to be explained in one bullet point. If parties won on how detailed their policy proposals are, then UKIP would have won a majority in 2015. This, apart from anything, is why ‘management’ only features policy wise when simplistic calls to action like ‘sack all NHS managers and fund the frontline’ can be employed. It is difficult to compress anything more literate about such a complex issue into a retail policy officer.

That brings us to ‘management’ itself, in all parts of the public sector. Every single SpAD (including Cummings) who has served in Government and couldn’t find a cushy private sector job to follow has written blog posts about how hard it is to ‘get a grip’ of the system, mostly due to their frustrations within Ministerial Departments that they were assigned to.

There tends to be a certain narrowness of vision which comes through in their ideas - think about how much Cummings has written about the physical estate inside both the Cabinet Office and No.10. To get the system to function properly requires a policy which affects all layers of management across the public sector - from the Rolls Royce Mandarins in Defence, to the NHS ‘fatcat’ executives, to the forty five year old woman managing two reports in a JobCentre in Doncaster.

The key thing to understand about Britain’s public sector at a system-wide level is that nobody can ever get fired and everybody gets promoted eventually. Promotions in all aspects of the State - the civil service, the NHS, tends to come with managerial responsibilities. There is currently no mechanism to remove useless people who obstruct progress and change. The last time that anybody seriously attempted to reform the civil service - during the Maude coalition era reforms - headcount reductions were used as a tool to reduce the quantity of bad apples, which did lead to some improvement in functions.

‘Mass firings’ which target bad apples cannot be conducted on such a massive organism by a single team in the centre. It is entirely viable, of course, to simply dismiss every single employee in the public sector who has ‘diversity’ in their job title but, for the most part, a centralised DOGE type unit will not have any information that can tell them who, of a team of 15 in an office in Doncaster, are the duffers. Accurate performance reviews do not exist in the public sector, partly because managers are worried that they will be accused of bullying if they are honest.

Reform should consider exactly how it wants to ‘get a grip’ of the system without engendering a DOGE-like backlash when critical functions of the state are damaged by crude instruments like mass firings. The ‘move fast and break things’ mindset of Musk, also advocated for by Cummings, is appropriate to small technology startups, not massive organisations like, say, the NHS. To take an example, you cannot carry out a ‘Kaizen Blitz’, where you shut down operations for a day to focus on improving processes rapidly, in a Hospital - or lots of people die. This is not just intransigence but hard reality.

DOGE did not work in the long run, neither for its stated goal or to the advantage of Elon Musk. Mass firings were carried out but the administration had to rehire many of these employees when they found out they had important jobs like drug approvals. All the fun was put a stop to within months by Susie Wiles, a sort of American Carrie Johnson, who told the tech bluffer and his team of geeks where to go.

Reform should not shred it’s own political project - which should be deportations - by vandalising the civil service and risking a series of critical system failures. Instead, inspiration should be drawn from successful performance management in large Silicon Valley institutions with massive employee counts.

In the 1980s, the CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch, introduced a new practice in performance management - the ‘vitality model’. In the simplest terms possible, the vitality model separates a workforce into three sections - the top 20% who exceed expectations, the 70% in the middle who are ‘adequate’, and the bottom 10% (according roughly to the Pareto principle or ‘80/20’ rule). The model calculates who falls into each category by forcing employees to rank eachother according to the quality of their work. The intention is then to fire the bottom 10% of the workforce at regular intervals (yearly) whilst rewarding the top 20% with extra bonuses, thus introducing very strong incentives for good performance.

Versions of Jack Welch’s model have been used in most successful Silicon Valley firms including Microsoft and Amazon, although there has been occasional sallies of Woke against it - as with any attempt to use objective performance metrics forced ranking consistently favours White men. Many Fortune 500 firms now practice forced ranking covertly for this reason.

During the Coalition era (2010-15), Francis Maude attempted to introduce a softer version of forced ranking into the civil service - it was then found that disabled civil servants accounted for 30% of poor performers despite making up only 8.8% of staff - BME individuals managed to comprise 19% of poor performers whilst being only 10.1% of staff. This data, alongside complaints from the trade unions, was used to scupper the policy. At around the same time, thanks to Theresa May, the number of civil servants in Britain soared; rising from 385,000 in 2015 to 516,000 by 2021. The civil service fast stream also abolished mathematical testing to encourage more BME candidates in 2016.

With that context out of the way, here is how Zia Yusuf could present ‘the vitality model’ as a policy announcement:

‘The public sector is a bloated mess which desperately needs private sector discipline. We will introduce a performance system which roots out useless/woke from home civil servants and encourages strong talent. In the first year of a Reform government, we will sack the worst performing five percent of employees across all parts of the public sector - including in Schools, the NHS and the civil service.’

And for a 2029 Manifesto pledge:

· Bring private-sector discipline to the public sector – in our first year, remove the lowest-performing 5% of staff in the NHS, schools and the civil service.