Relocating UK’s civil service is crucial to Johnson’s levelling up agenda

When the UK weather agency the Met Office relocated to Exeter in 2003, one senior employee felt he had no choice but to go with it. Robin Thwaytes, commercial manager, told the BBC at the time: “I suppose I could get a job in Sainsbury’s stacking shelves, but it’s not quite the same.”

The decision to relocate 1,150 civil servants from the town of Bracknell in Berkshire is just one of many efforts over several decades to break London’s grip on power and decision making by spreading officials out across the UK.

By forcing major ministries to create secondary headquarters, Prime Minister Boris Johnson hopes to deliver job opportunities and prosperity to areas traditionally under-represented by the civil service. His government, however, is also seeking a wider diversity of opinion in its policymaking — challenging what ministers see as a dominant Remain-leaning metropolitan mindset.

Those working in the Met Office reported initial hostility to the move due to distance — Bracknell is 40 miles from London, Exeter is almost 200 — and bad perceptions about the area. But Thwaytes’ enthusiasm proved widespread: 90 per cent of the staff opted to move with him to Exeter.

The Met Office’s success in escaping London’s orbit is a template Britain’s Johnson hopes to follow. As part of his levelling up agenda to tackle regional inequality, he plans to move 22,000 civil servants out of London by the end of the decade.

The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government is the first department to formally announce its move: 500 officials will relocate to the West Midlands with a new headquarters in the city of Wolverhampton. Ministers will also spend part of their working week out in the new office.

Other departments are expected to do the same. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport will shift half its staff to Manchester by 2025, while the Foreign Office is exploring an office in the same city. More departments are expected to follow suit.

The relocation agenda is broadly welcomed by senior civil servants. Several admitted to the Financial Times that policymaking is “too London centric” but they expressed concerns that these new offices risked being “tokenistic outposts shut down by future governments”.

The challenge is making sure it’s not just target driven and ensuring whole careers can be built outside of London

Dave Penman, head of the FDA union representing senior civil servants, said “it’s always a good thing for the civil service to reflect the country” but said senior posts should move too.

“The challenge is making sure it’s not just target driven and ensuring whole careers can be built outside of London. Having a few jobs dotted around without career planning means gravity will pull the most senior roles back to Whitehall,” he added.

The crowning piece of the programme is Treasury North: an economic campus to be based in the northern railway town of Darlington, housing 750 officials from several ministries including the Department for Business and Transport. It will mark the first time a substantial part of the Treasury and its policymaking functions are based out of Whitehall.

As it embarks on its plan to change the geographical balance of the civil service, ministers will be mindful of lessons from the past. The Met Office was a success, boosting the local economy by £69m annually. According to Exeter City Council, it improved perceptions of the city and kickstarted the launch of a scientific park at the local university. It is also one of the area’s biggest employers.

But other moves were less clear cut. One more contentious effort was the 2006 decision to move the Office for National Statistics to the Welsh town of Newport. Similarly to the Met Office, the statistics department made a wholesale relocation to an out-of-town campus.

Unlike the Met Office, 90 per cent of staff opted not to make the move — forcing the ONS to rapidly recruit. A review undertaken later concluded that the relocation damaged the department due to the exodus of senior staff and the quality of its output suffered.

Sarah Nickson, a senior researcher at the Institute for Government think-tank, said Johnson should be “realistic at the potential for attrition” of civil servants when Whitehall ministries are moved out of London.

“If people really don’t want to go, they won’t go. If you pick somewhere unappealing, it risks creating a whole lot of disruption that is not worth it. Like the ONS, those who work in the Treasury have other options about where they can work.”

The ministry that has undertaken the shift most akin to the Treasury is the Department for International Development, which has a major presence in East Kilbride on the outskirts of Glasgow. The split headquarters was set up in 1981, then known as the Overseas Development Administration.

Before DFID was merged with the Foreign Office last year, 45 per cent of its staff were based in Scotland. The decision in the early 2000s to expand its operations beyond accountancy and procurement into policymaking was crucial in affirming its role as a secondary headquarters.

Yet according to a report by the Institute for Government, DFID has struggled to maintain a constant presence of the most senior officials in East Kilbride, despite a steady increase in new policy roles create.

Although the department made early use of video conferencing equipment to avoid unnecessary journeys from London, the four-and-a-half-hour train ride for commuting still proves problematic.

Based on the DFID experience, Nickson said the Johnson government must make an early decision on whether it is serious about rebalancing the civil service and enduring the necessary upheaval.

“There is a trade off for ministers between do you want to do something big and revolutionary with five to 10 years of pain? Or minimise disruption and do things around the edges?”

While creating secondary headquarters around England may be a key part of Johnson’s plans for reforming the British state, a much bigger shift in the civil service may result from coronavirus pandemic. According to Penman, a major shift to homeworking is under way.

“Rather than moving 2,000 expensive jobs out of London, you can say to people that they can be based in any number of locations across the country — instead of targets for individual departments,” he said. “It wouldn’t have been imaginable two years ago but we’ve seen how it can work during pandemic.”