Dame Antonia Romeo delivers the Cabinet Secretary’s Annual Lecture at the London School of Economics
Thank you, Larry, for that introduction, and to the whole team at LSE for hosting us this evening. It’s great to be back! And thank you all for coming to the Cabinet Secretary annual lecture, and a particular thank you to the Prime Minister and the First Secretary of State. I know how busy you are: the whole Civil Service and I very much appreciate it.
On my first day in the Civil Service, 26 years ago last month, I was shown to my office in the Lord Chancellor’s department.
I was a ‘Grade 7’ at the time, in year-2000 terminology, which at that time entitled me to a whole office to myself. It even had a meeting table and six chairs, with arms.
On my second day in the Civil Service, the facilities team came to apologise. They had mistaken my seniority, believing me to be the more senior ‘Grade 6’.
By the time I left for the evening, those six chairs with arms had been replaced by four chairs, without arms, commensurate with my lower status.
This story is not to criticise the Civil Service of the time. It encapsulates the era in which we operated:
Rigorous discipline and transparent traditions meant everyone knew precisely where they stood, down to the office furniture.
But also the rigidity of the bureaucracy, and the attention to hierarchy and process.
Probably no one intended energy and resources to be spent literally reorganising the furniture. Yet somehow this was the result of a set of rules designed to achieve something else.
Back in 2000, I graduated from LSE with an MSc in economics, and had no real idea of what to do with it.
Three months later I walked into the Department on a one-year temporary economist contract, on what my father - a physics professor - said was the proudest day of his life.
I soon became addicted to the complexity of the issues, and the powerful sense of purpose in working for the country.
My time at LSE showed me why it is a leading university in the UK, and a magnet for top students globally.
And it turned out that studying industrial economics and game theory here under John Sutton was a fantastic basis for a career in public policy, describing the way humans and organisations behave under different incentives and conditions.
Almost every problem the state faces involves setting incentives and systems to impact behaviour.
Like hundreds of thousands of civil servants, I have found tackling these issues for the benefit of the citizen to be incredibly rewarding.
The Civil Service has changed hugely in the 26 years since my first day.
It remains a remarkable institution. Every day, every single person in the country depends on our work.
Being educated, finding a job, staying safe, paying taxes, travelling to work.
That purpose, that impact, is what personally motivates me and, I know hundreds of thousands of others, to do these jobs.
And I recognise the privilege and responsibility which comes from leading the people who are doing the work.
I have seen that work at close quarters: on the wings in prisons, at ports at the border, at the operational front line across the country and around the world.
No one is prouder of the Civil Service than I am. But few are more determined that it needs to change.
Tonight, I am going to talk about ‘Rewiring the state and the Future Civil Service’.
I’ll set out where the Service stands today, with the strengths and values that we must preserve.
Why now is an unprecedented moment for change.
And the major transformation and modernisation we have begun, to meet this moment.
The Civil Service of tomorrow must look very different from the Service of today. I will come on to why.
But while I believe we cannot and should not settle for the status quo, I also believe it is essential to preserve and protect the best traditions of the Civil Service and the values set out in the Code that we uphold.
In looking towards the future, we need to consider the past.
The Civil Service has been in continual transition over the one hundred and seventy two years since it was first established and codified in a report by Northcote and Trevelyan, published in 1854, and now widely considered the founding document of the permanent, impartial Civil Service.
Commissioned by Gladstone when he was Chancellor, the report was born from the realisation that the old, amateurish ways, based on patronage, could no longer govern a rapidly modernising world.
That relying on personal connections was a failing strategy, and one which did not attract the best people into public service.
Northcote and Trevelyan made 3 principal recommendations:
The Cabinet Office itself was not created until 1916. It was set up by Lloyd George, as Prime Minister, to bring order to the war effort, led by Maurice Hankey as the first Cabinet Secretary.
It was responsible for improving cross-government alignment, communication and delivery of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet’s policies.
The Haldane ‘Machinery of Government’ committee of 1918 established departments organised by the services they provided, and a new focus on evidence informing policy.
A 1943 Court of Appeal case established the Carltona principle - that there is no distinction between the decisions of officials and Ministers.
Civil servants have no separate legal personality from the Minister.
This remains the core principle under which the Civil Service operates today.
Since then, a series of committees, reports, and initiatives have defined and enshrined the role of the Service. All 14 of my predecessors have shaped that development.
The changes I’ll come on to describe are only possible because of the leadership and vision of those 14 extraordinary Cabinet Secretaries who came before, some of whom are here tonight.
The 1996 Civil Service Code, introduced under Robin Butler and updated under Richard Wilson, first codified our core values of: impartiality, objectivity, honesty, and integrity.
These values are not an end in themselves.
The legitimacy of an impartial Civil Service can come only from its effectiveness.
The values were later enshrined in statute, by the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act of 2010, under Gus O’Donnell’s tenure, building on work started by Andrew Turnbull.
This also put merit-based recruitment and fair and open competition, Northcote-Trevelyan’s central recommendations, on a legislative footing.
These reforms have meant the Civil Service has been consistently the most admired Civil Service in the world.
Some 50 countries have civil services modelled on our own.
But we rightly need to prove ourselves and our value to successive administrations. We serve Ministers and we deliver their agenda.
Like my predecessors in tackling the challenges of their own time, my job is to make the Civil Service as effective as it can possibly be to do this.
The transformation programme we have started is therefore aimed at building: a modern world-class organisation, famous for excellence in delivery and the use of technology and AI, and trusted by Ministers and the people we serve.
The Prime Minister has set the Government the task of delivering a radical shift in the powers, resources and accountability across the state, from central to regional and local government.
This will lead to a leaner and more strategic Civil Service, focused on the challenges that can best be dealt with at the national level.
What the Civil Service can uniquely do, it should do exceptionally well.
When we speak of the Civil Service today, we are describing an enormous, complex ecosystem of more than half-a-million people across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and around the world, dedicated to public service.
Bigger than any single private sector footprint in this country.
The weight of the Service is now found in frontline delivery - in courts, job centres, prisons, tax offices, military bases, at our borders.
Traditional ‘policymakers’ make up just 7% of our people, with the lion’s share being operational delivery (at 55%), alongside digital and data professionals, scientists, and, yes, economists, to name just a few.
Some are capabilities that didn’t exist two decades ago.
80% of our people are based outside of London.
We are united by a common purpose and unwavering values.
Civil servants do some of the hardest jobs in the country, and they do them because they are hard not in spite of them being hard.
It is this ethos that makes the Civil Service much more than the sum of its parts.
But we are no longer unequivocally considered to be the best in the world.
Indeed, in a Blavatnik Index in 2024 - which measured the effectiveness of civil services and central administrations - we were joint 6th overall. I want us to be first.
Other countries are increasingly rewiring their states for strategic agility:
And I have heard and have listened to the criticisms of the Service.
They are no less important for being well-rehearsed:
In my 26 years in the Service, nine as a Permanent Secretary, I have observed some of them, seen improvements in some, and doubtless been guilty of some of them myself.
Ultimately, like the team employed to reorganise the office chairs, these behaviours are a function of the system.
They are set in what is incentivised, what is rewarded, and what is expected.
So if we want to change behaviours, it follows that we need to change the system.
And I believe we are on a Burning Platform.
Now nine months into my tenure as Cabinet Secretary, I am more sure than ever that we are at a defining and pivotal moment for the country.
We are in a time of extraordinary global uncertainty. Global tensions are the new normal, technology is radically changing everything, and trust in institutions is on the wane.
The Civil Service needs to be reimagined arguably in the most fundamental way since its formation, to serve the Prime Minister and the Cabinet effectively, and deliver for the British people.
There is a confluence of five imperatives which I believe together present the burning platform for change:
I’ll take each of these factors in turn.
The first of these factors is the unprecedented technological changes arising from the advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
AI presents us with the defining opportunities and challenges of this generation, and therefore also for the state. The sheer scale of that change is difficult to fathom: AI’s capabilities continue to improve at an exponential rate.
But what is clear is that, from policymaking to direct service delivery, the use of AI will radically rewrite all of the domains in which the Civil Service operates.
The traditional model of the state administering siloed services to the public is no longer sufficient. We are now delivering services to a public with tech-enabled tools and capabilities unimaginable to previous generations.
Technology-driven expectations of, and demands on, the state are nothing new, but this is of a new scale and pace. The surge of automated, high-volume citizen demand is hitting operational desks today.
AI potentially represents the most profound paradigm shift in modern governance. For the first time in history, the efficacy of public service no longer has to be artificially constrained by the limits of human bandwidth.
As well as changing how we do things, AI will change what we do. From healthcare screening for types of cancer, to tackling the risk of homelessness, technology can enable us to be much more predictive, preventative, and personalised, under appropriate controls and guardrails.
AI can help us make public services more human.
This is about more than marginal improvements. It will make goals that were previously considered impossible, possible.
But advanced technological development brings significant risks too: from economic disruption, to misinformation, or loss of agentic control. And the transition to an AI-enabled state could expand our domestic cyber vulnerability.
We need protection and resilience against these.