Senior civil servants have voted to take a stand against inflammatory language from politicians and in favour of legal action to combat bullying, as former cabinet ministers Jacob Rees-Mogg and Dominic Raab renewed their attacks on officials.
Members of the FDA union passed a motion in favour of using “all means available” to challenge bullying and harassment of officials, including “use of targeted legal action”, in after the scandal that forced Raab to resign.
They backed the union pushing for an independent process for investigating complaints of bullying and harassment by ministers and MPs, and better ways of challenging bad behaviour.
At their annual conference, senior civil servant delegates also voted to mandate their union to “challenge inflammatory language and unfair characterisations of the civil service, both publicly and privately and via media engagements”.
However, it came on a day of renewed attacks on the civil service by senior Conservatives, as the business secretary, Kemi Badenoch, appeared to accuse Whitehall of having tried to preserve EU laws rather than focus on “meaningful reforms” as she dropped “sunset clause” plans for EU legislation.
Raab also told the House of Commons that “Whitehall resistance” to rolling back EU laws should have been resisted, and Rees-Mogg asked whether “civil service idleness” had been behind the government’s decision to drop the plans.
Their rhetoric added to strained relations between ministers and civil servants, after strikes, threatened job cuts, the sacking of the Treasury permanent secretary, and the bullying of officials by Raab and Gavin Williamson. After resigning over a report that found he bullied officials, Raab hit out at “unionised officials” he believed were targeting him and accused civil servants of being insufficiently resilient in the face of his demanding management style.
Penman, the general secretary of the FDA, said the process of investigating Raab had been so “flawed” that it would discourage people from complaining about bullying again, and he criticised Sunak’s handling of the affair.
“I spoke to some of the people who raised complaints, and they’ve said: ‘We’d never do it again, we would not go through this again,’” he said. “I just simply wouldn’t advise anyone, because the process is so completely flawed and one-sided, I wouldn’t advise anyone to go through this again.”
But Penman also said it was not the case that Raab was “one bad apple”, as civil servants had reported in a survey that there were problems with other ministers as well.
He said of the FDA members who most regularly come into contact with ministers, 70% said they had no confidence in the system for raising complaints. One in six reported misconduct from ministers in the past 12 months alone across more than 20 departments.
The general secretary also urged Sunak to make a stand and defend civil servants against the rhetoric of politicians that has labelled them “lazy, woke, inefficient, remainer activist snowflakes” as well as “machiavellian geniuses, able to unseat ministers and undermine the settled will of government” – an apparent reference to Raab’s claims of activist civil servants trying to get rid of him.
To applause from the audience of FDA members, Penman said: “I don’t know about you, conference, but I’ve had enough of this. At some point we need to say enough is enough. Ministers need to demonstrate they value civil servants.
“It is they who have put a number on that, not us. It is they who believe that the cost of living crisis should be addressed for some public servants and not others, and it is they who have pushed the FDA over the edge into balloting for industrial action.”
The civil servants also won support from David Gauke, a former Conservative justice secretary who said ministers needed to stop trying to look tough by being confrontational and trying to establish dominance in meetings with officials.
Gauke, who served in the cabinets of Theresa May and David Cameron, said it was not effective for ministers to deal with problems by “asking which idiot is to blame” rather than trying to solve them.
Speaking at the conference, he said that at some level ministers need to be tough, but added: “Too often the view of what tough means is a confrontational approach in meetings and desire to establish dominance and the dismissal of challenge.”
The former politician said he was “not convinced those in favour of a confrontational approach necessarily are the most effective ministers”.
Gauke said one reason he was frustrated with the Raab affair was that a minister should feel privileged to have a dedicated private office of civil servants trying to make their working lives easier.
The conference also backed the ballot for strike action over pay for the first time in 40 years, meaning its members may join civil servants from Prospect and the Public and Commercial Services union on the picket line. It comes after the government offered most civil servants a pay rise of just 4.5% and no cost of living lump sum, which is on the table for other sectors. The FDA will start balloting members at the end of May, the ballot will close at the end of June and, if successful, action will take place before summer break
In other motions, the conference voted in favour of more reasonable arrangements for civil servants wanting to work from abroad and improving wellbeing for civil servants.
