Whitehall is a weird place. The civil service, a workforce of more than half a million people, aren’t allowed to tell you what they think about the biggest issues they work on. Impartiality means officials can’t take public positions on policy, and in practice it stretches to much of their own experience of work as well. The one official outlet, the Cabinet Office’s People Survey, asks the questions the Cabinet Office wants answered. I spent seven years in the Treasury and the Home Office and never once said publicly what I thought about how the place was run, and I feel bad for civil servants who are stuck in this system and don’t have an outlet. So last year @restate_thinks and @CSWnews started the Alternative People Survey, to give civil servants a way to say how the system they work in is actually functioning. This year’s edition, published today with along with Public First, had 1,747 responses, 38% more than last year. They have plenty to say! “There is no culture of managing poor performance, so managers don’t do it.” “Internal promotions are non-existent. If you do well in your job and wish to obtain a higher grade you have to leave your post or go through the job evaluation process which could mean applying for your own job.” “Our voluntary exit scheme was terribly communicated and has resulted in top performers leaving. Our department is around 10% smaller but workloads are unchanged.” “I bought an iPhone charger cable via (a procurement service) for £18. The same item at Asda cost £2.” These are not disgruntled outliers, these are mainstream views on Whitehall in Whitehall. 76% disagree with the statement that the civil service manages poor performance well. 66% don’t think internal promotion puts the right people in the job. Four times as many say voluntary exit schemes are losing high performers as poor ones. 60% think government buys badly from the private sector. The appetite for change and reform is considerable! 82% now use AI in their work, up from 30% a year ago. 62% want pay rises based on performance, not the flat structure that’s available to most of the civil service. 52% feel encouraged to cut waste, up from 37%. 71% say processes get in the way of doing their job, rising to 79% among Grade 6s and the Senior Civil Service, so the people who run the machine are the ones most frustrated by it. The PM has an ambitious agenda to rewire Whitehall, and the officials who will have to deliver that have just told him(anonymously) where to start: hire, promote, pay and remove people properly. Full survey re-state.co.uk/publications/… And Substack restate.substack.com/p/why-w…