The government wants to trim Whitehall – but halting recruitment will cause problems now and in the future
There has long been a view among some politicians that the civil service has little idea of how the real world works. “My daughter went into the Treasury at the age of 21 and started writing clever policies, but she’s never been at the sharp end of anything in her life,” Lord Haskins told a select committee in 2001.
He wasn’t describing me, but he might as well have been – I joined the Treasury in the same month as his daughter, in 1987. His image of fast-stream civil servants – people with a private school background and a PPE (philosophy, politics and economics) or Classics degree from Oxford – was drawn partly from reality, and partly from Yes Minister’s Bernard Woolley. It persists today.
Jonathan Portes is professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London
