Good, I hope the civil servant’s lives aren’t too disrupted by this change, but we do need to decentralise the economy away from London – the way the US has media in LA, politics in DC etc we too need to move some of the more mobile industries away from London.
I say mobile because certain industries like Banking are probably wedded to being in London in close proximity to the BOE & LSE but others, like this, should be moved.
Next, move the Commons up north to a modern building in a city up norf and turn the Palace of Westminster into a museum
Terrible idea that has been tried countless times, and always makes agencies worse without ever delivering the promised economic development for poor regions. See the ONS which moved to a town in South Wales, lost 90% of its staff and now can’t produce any reliable data on the labour market.
Talented graduates want to work in London, you are just going to further degrade our state capacity by ‘decentralising’
Great idea!
Good. Gravy train. The son of a top civil servant that I knew was arrested at St Pancras after coming back for fighting for a certain organization in the middle east. Totally disorganized in their personal life as they are in their ‘professional’ life.
I wonder if this is a consequence of how London is unaffordable for families on civil servant salaries.
This was recently cited as a reason why politicians could not be moved out of London.
This country needs investment outside of London.
Key to that is moving civil service departments to other areas. There is no reason that many are based in London which is already an extremely expensive city for workers.
Move departments out. Ensure people have great pay and benefits to keep them employed or hire new talent.
Ensure that movement departments out of London is backed by equal investment in local infrastructure e.g. moving department of health to a new city should be backed by investment in IT in the area.
This country cannot remain stable if it just becomes London as a giant city state gobbling up everything while also being so expensive it’s a playground for the ultra wealthy.
The main GOOD thing I’ve not seen in the various discussions about this is how it will reduce future churn and brain drain in the civil service.
Lots need to leave because the salaries commanded don’t go far enough in supporting a reasonable living standard in London UNLESS you come from a family with money or have a SO in a high paying private sector job. As a result, it means that those who stay are either from a somewhat privileged background (which has limitations at scale), or are young/ still single and fine with slumming it.
If you can continue your career in a LCOL area/city, whilst being able to afford a home and raise you’re children (as maybe you don’t need to commute an hour each way from an affordable area of the London commuter belt), you’ll probably stay within the CS and continue to pass your knowledge down to future intakes/ inform policy/ minimise repeated mistakes etc etc
It’s possibly why they are keen to open more senior positions out of London too (50%), so people can continue their career trajectories as they get into the family stage of life.
What they NEED to really do is double down on a few campuses outside of London, and have one department in each. For example, most of DCMS, DSIT, GCHQ etc in Manchester but no other city except London, all of Health, Treasury, Economic etc in Leeds but no other city except London.
Having Joe from DEFRA in Darlington, Sarah in Glasgow, Jane in Bristol and the rest of the gang in the London commuter belt just makes it worse. But if they were 50/50 or 60/40 split between Bristol and London ONLY, then it would probably work. Even better if 80% were in Bristol with a parliamentary operations skeleton crew in London.
UK policy has been too much London driven. I see great benefits of this if implemented in spirit:
1) At Civil servants salary, it is a great idea to move out of London from affordability perspective – it will help to generate economic activities at local level as people will need housing, food, and entertainment venues
2) civil servants living among the communities can have better understanding of the issues country is facing
Again? They’ve not even finished the last round of movement which commenced under the Tories.
Our government is way too centralised. Moving jobs out of London without also moving decision making out of London will achieve nothing.
The main thing hammering the civil service from a financial viewpoint is the pension costs. It’s about time they rebalanced salaries and pension costs.
The thing is Parliament is in London. And a huge chunk of these central government roles revolve around ministers and Parliament.
This will absolutely backfire and we’ll see the opposite move in 5-10 years when ministers are frustrated they can’t see their staff in person.
Edit: another thing is the endless crusade against WFH flies in the face of this. If the CS is increasingly spread geographically, everyone will be going into the office to just join virtual calls with people elsewhere. So why not just WFH?
Why not also look to reduce the roles ? I know so many civil servants coasting whilst “working” from home – there doesn’t seem to be any oversight in place
To preface, I think this is a great and needed policy for divesting from the current London-centric model, and I say that as a born and bred Londoner.
However, I have a few friends who worked CS (DESNAD mostly) and they cross-team and even intra-team is impossible with everyone online and almost no face to face meetings. I hope it’s more a case of entire departments rather than certain roles in departments that are relocated, as the last thing the CS needs is more inefficiency and more paralysis.
I’m sure the civil servants are thrilled at the prospect of being dragged halfway across the country (or made redundant) because of petty politics.
Again?! There was a push for the Wirral a few years back. It .. sort of happened, then didn’t. Hope this isn’t going to be the same thing
They would obviously much prefer to live in London in aggregate. Some might prefer to work elsewhere but clearly there is a majority preference. It would be one thing to set up a new government agency in say Manchester, but moving existing employees to secondary, or even tertiary cities means you will just lose most of them, and all the money time and hassle you spend training new civil servants will instantly negate any cost saving. There’s a reason companies rarely relocate across the country, even though office space would be much cheaper
18 comments
Good, I hope the civil servant’s lives aren’t too disrupted by this change, but we do need to decentralise the economy away from London – the way the US has media in LA, politics in DC etc we too need to move some of the more mobile industries away from London.
I say mobile because certain industries like Banking are probably wedded to being in London in close proximity to the BOE & LSE but others, like this, should be moved.
Next, move the Commons up north to a modern building in a city up norf and turn the Palace of Westminster into a museum
Terrible idea that has been tried countless times, and always makes agencies worse without ever delivering the promised economic development for poor regions. See the ONS which moved to a town in South Wales, lost 90% of its staff and now can’t produce any reliable data on the labour market.
Talented graduates want to work in London, you are just going to further degrade our state capacity by ‘decentralising’
Great idea!
Good. Gravy train. The son of a top civil servant that I knew was arrested at St Pancras after coming back for fighting for a certain organization in the middle east. Totally disorganized in their personal life as they are in their ‘professional’ life.
I wonder if this is a consequence of how London is unaffordable for families on civil servant salaries.
This was recently cited as a reason why politicians could not be moved out of London.
This country needs investment outside of London.
Key to that is moving civil service departments to other areas. There is no reason that many are based in London which is already an extremely expensive city for workers.
Move departments out. Ensure people have great pay and benefits to keep them employed or hire new talent.
Ensure that movement departments out of London is backed by equal investment in local infrastructure e.g. moving department of health to a new city should be backed by investment in IT in the area.
This country cannot remain stable if it just becomes London as a giant city state gobbling up everything while also being so expensive it’s a playground for the ultra wealthy.
The main GOOD thing I’ve not seen in the various discussions about this is how it will reduce future churn and brain drain in the civil service.
Lots need to leave because the salaries commanded don’t go far enough in supporting a reasonable living standard in London UNLESS you come from a family with money or have a SO in a high paying private sector job. As a result, it means that those who stay are either from a somewhat privileged background (which has limitations at scale), or are young/ still single and fine with slumming it.
If you can continue your career in a LCOL area/city, whilst being able to afford a home and raise you’re children (as maybe you don’t need to commute an hour each way from an affordable area of the London commuter belt), you’ll probably stay within the CS and continue to pass your knowledge down to future intakes/ inform policy/ minimise repeated mistakes etc etc
It’s possibly why they are keen to open more senior positions out of London too (50%), so people can continue their career trajectories as they get into the family stage of life.
What they NEED to really do is double down on a few campuses outside of London, and have one department in each. For example, most of DCMS, DSIT, GCHQ etc in Manchester but no other city except London, all of Health, Treasury, Economic etc in Leeds but no other city except London.
Having Joe from DEFRA in Darlington, Sarah in Glasgow, Jane in Bristol and the rest of the gang in the London commuter belt just makes it worse. But if they were 50/50 or 60/40 split between Bristol and London ONLY, then it would probably work. Even better if 80% were in Bristol with a parliamentary operations skeleton crew in London.
UK policy has been too much London driven. I see great benefits of this if implemented in spirit:
1) At Civil servants salary, it is a great idea to move out of London from affordability perspective – it will help to generate economic activities at local level as people will need housing, food, and entertainment venues
2) civil servants living among the communities can have better understanding of the issues country is facing
Again? They’ve not even finished the last round of movement which commenced under the Tories.
Our government is way too centralised. Moving jobs out of London without also moving decision making out of London will achieve nothing.
The main thing hammering the civil service from a financial viewpoint is the pension costs. It’s about time they rebalanced salaries and pension costs.
The thing is Parliament is in London. And a huge chunk of these central government roles revolve around ministers and Parliament.
This will absolutely backfire and we’ll see the opposite move in 5-10 years when ministers are frustrated they can’t see their staff in person.
Edit: another thing is the endless crusade against WFH flies in the face of this. If the CS is increasingly spread geographically, everyone will be going into the office to just join virtual calls with people elsewhere. So why not just WFH?
Why not also look to reduce the roles ? I know so many civil servants coasting whilst “working” from home – there doesn’t seem to be any oversight in place
To preface, I think this is a great and needed policy for divesting from the current London-centric model, and I say that as a born and bred Londoner.
However, I have a few friends who worked CS (DESNAD mostly) and they cross-team and even intra-team is impossible with everyone online and almost no face to face meetings. I hope it’s more a case of entire departments rather than certain roles in departments that are relocated, as the last thing the CS needs is more inefficiency and more paralysis.
I’m sure the civil servants are thrilled at the prospect of being dragged halfway across the country (or made redundant) because of petty politics.
Again?! There was a push for the Wirral a few years back. It .. sort of happened, then didn’t. Hope this isn’t going to be the same thing
They would obviously much prefer to live in London in aggregate. Some might prefer to work elsewhere but clearly there is a majority preference. It would be one thing to set up a new government agency in say Manchester, but moving existing employees to secondary, or even tertiary cities means you will just lose most of them, and all the money time and hassle you spend training new civil servants will instantly negate any cost saving. There’s a reason companies rarely relocate across the country, even though office space would be much cheaper
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