As the founder and chair of the Board of Trustees of Future Academies, Lord John Nash leads a learning institution created to broaden the horizons of young people and improve their life chances. In a report published by The Spectator in March 2025, Lord Nash shared strategies to help fix the UK’s civil service, observing that after serving in government for a decade he is convinced that the Whitehall model of government is broken.
In March 2025, Pat McFadden, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, announced that he was attempting to improve the civil service. In his article, Lord John Nash reflected that while he genuinely wished Mr McFadden luck, he was not optimistic. Lord Nash said that proposed civil service reforms, for example, increased digitisation and a move towards performance-related pay, only scraped the surface.
Lord Nash suggested that the civil service’s organisational structure was still in the dark ages, with layers of officials spending weeks on end drafting carefully worded submissions for ministers and meetings rarely attended by less than 10 people, culminating in a snail-like pace in decision-making. The British civil service has many organisational layers, yet there is often a lack of expertise. At the top, senior members may be out of touch with a particular issue, yet the junior members – the boots on the ground – are often left out of meetings.
While the civil service tends to employ arts graduates, Lord John Nash suggested a need to enlist the services of skilled experts, including data and computer experts, mathematicians and scientists. The civil service tends to centre around a generalist concept, often moving people around so much they have little opportunity to build knowledge on any particular subject. Lord Nash contends that the organisation would be far more effective with fewer, more skilled and highly paid people.
Organisations fail where there are too many middle managers who are ineffective at decision-making, culminating in a culture where everyone is terrified of taking risks. Lord John Nash pointed out that blame for the current state of the civil service did not lie with civil servants themselves, each of whom he found hard-working and committed, but rather indicated that fault lay with the structure.
In the civil service, a lack of business culture is becoming an increasingly significant problem. By definition, civil servants tend to be very uncommercial in terms of their experience and background. Lord John Nash highlighted this shortcoming in his report, citing the example of having to explain how a lease works to a now very senior civil servant.
Arriving at the Department of Education in 2013, Lord John Nash was put in charge of the academies programme. He discovered that each secondary academy was paying £70,000 for buildings insurance, on average. A quick analysis showed this to be a huge cost inefficiency, suggesting that self-insuring would be far more economical. As Lord Nash highlighted, a commercially minded individual would have spotted this early on, but no one in the civil service had flagged up the problem. By rectifying this single issue, the civil service saved somewhere in the region of £1 billion.
The civil service’s lack of business savvy is a significant problem. In addition, Lord Nash highlights that while the private sector is more productive than the civil service, despite the fact that the former pays the latter’s wages, civil service pay is at least as favourable. Civil servants also benefit from increasingly unaffordable pensions, culminating in a situation that is simply unsustainable.
For the civil service to work, Lord John Nash highlights a need for change in Westminster too, with a focus on enlisting politicians with business expertise and experience. He suggests that if the government really wants to bring the civil service into the 21st century, reforms must be an imperative.