REVEALED: Treasury abandons numeracy to boost diversity

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0:37John Connolly: hello and welcome to coffeehouse shots the spectators daily politics podcast i'm oscar edmondson i'm joined today by our news editor john connolly and amir katecha who is a former diplomat but now the ceo of the center for government reform now john you are the talk of the town in westminster because of this scoop that you've got about the treasury can you can you tell us about it?

0:58Ameer Kotecha: Thank you for that promotion, Oscar. I'd be very happy to. Yeah, so we ran a story this week, specifically about the Treasury and its graduate development program. And we'd kind of seen, I kind of seen that over the years, the Treasury had kind of removed all the hard bits from their assessment criteria for the program. So first of all, they removed a numerical reasoning test, and they removed a verbal reasoning test and replaced it with a civil service trends test, which sounds a little bit jargony, but it's quite an easy test. And I kind of really want to to find out why. So we put in a freedom of information request and heard back from the department recently and kind of blown away by the response because, you know, in this day and age, you kind of have a suspicion of what it might be, but you don't know.

1:39Ameer Kotecha: And then the Treasury essentially confirmed and very much, you know, stated this explicitly, which was that they removed the numerical reasoning test from their graduate programme to improve ethnic diversity in terms of uptake. You know, which I found quite shocking because, you know, this is not just any government department we're talking about, we're talking about the Treasury, You know, they deal with the government's budget, finance those economic policies and so on. And the Treasury say like, well, this isn't, we're not hiring for economists or statisticians. This is for policy advisor role, which is a bit more generalist.

2:11Ameer Kotecha: You know, the whole thing is that all the Treasury's policies are about numbers. So you kind of, if you're going to be advising on policy, you do need to understand what's going on there. I think that is the particularly troubling part of it. That it is, it's the numeracy part of a Treasury test, which has been got rid of. Yeah, and it's kind of, it's a good flashpoint, I think. But this kind of stuff is going on more generally. I think this one stands out as a particularly egregious example. But like, we can kind of see standards being lowered generally all around the place. So but yeah, the Treasury going for numbers kind of sticks in your mind.

2:40John Connolly: I mean, Amir, we were talking about this at the Spectator Summer Party this week. And I think what really came across in that conversation with you is that it just didn't surprise you. This was something that you'd speculated was happening for a long time. And this is just an example to point to.

2:53Oscar Edmondson: Yeah, that's exactly right, Oscar. And look, it's a brilliant scoop by John. And as someone who spent 11 years in Whitehall, you know, my reaction was shock but not surprise, right? Because this stuff really is rife across the civil service. I mean, but there's also all sorts of other examples. You know, the Foreign Office does not require applicants to have a fluency in another language, for example, right? Whereas the French Foreign Service, they say you've got to be fluent in French, obviously, plus two other languages as a basic requirement of entry. So I think across the civil service, we've given up on demanding really high standards of domain-specific knowledge, essentially.

3:38Oscar Edmondson: And instead, we just have this really sort of bland managerialism that now sort of pervades the entire system. And that seems to be the only thing that they care about when recruiting people.

3:48Ameer Kotecha: Yeah, they always, people I know who've applied for civil service jobs are always despairing at these kind of like competencies that they're asked to prove. And they're so vague and blur. For example, like, you know, you got to prove that you can see the bigger picture, that you work at pace and so on. And it just seems very infantilizing to me.

4:04Oscar Edmondson: The important thing, John, as you say, you're exactly right. And it's not just recruitment that uses those totally bonkers behaviours, those competencies. It's also promotion within each department. So every time you take another step up the ladder, you again, you're not tested on what you achieved in your previous role or what you know about the role that you're going for in terms of concrete subject matter knowledge. You're just tested on these totally bland competencies. competencies? Are you an empathetic leader or are you a compassionate line manager? And those are the sorts of things that the system tests for.

4:41John Connolly: Where do you think that comes from, Amir? When did that change maybe happen? Did you see it slowly happening over the 11 years that you were involved in the diplomatic service?

4:49Oscar Edmondson: Yeah, look, when I joined in 2015, to be honest, it was already there. So I think there's long roots. I think a lot of this stuff goes back to Blair. But we've long had this culture of the talented amateur in the civil service but i do think it's got much worse in in recent years and i think it's almost you know the the woke ideology has sort of has combined forces with this long-running tradition of of of amateurism talented amateurism in the in the civil service and together they make for a very lethal combination and i would say as well like it's it's

5:20Ameer Kotecha: not filtering for talent when you kind of do this so you just end up with amateurism at least we had talents and amateurs in the past but yeah the modern civil service you know the ideas behind it are sort of a meritocracy that you kind of try and get in the best people for the job and if if you don't have that things sort of slowly and slowly get worse and it's not often in a very super noticeable way but i think we all do notice that we're not being countries aren't being run particularly well at the moment and politicians should have blame for that as well as civil

5:45Oscar Edmondson: servants i should say yeah no i think i think look and and the the problems here to me is also the fact that, you know, if there was a really deep problem to fix here, if the Treasury just have absolutely no ethnic minority candidates whatsoever, then at least there'd be some justification for exploring what could be done to rectify that. I still don't think they should ever resort to mad policies like binning numeracy tests. But, you know, they could be forgiven for doing something, right? But I did look at the numbers. And in 2019, i.e. before the BLM madness took over. The Treasury had 10.3 % of its workforce from an ethnic minority.

6:27Oscar Edmondson: Now, that is slightly below the national average, but it's not, I wouldn't say, a huge problem. I wouldn't say the discrepancy is large enough to warrant these sorts of extraordinary measures.

6:37Ameer Kotecha: Yeah, and I think there are ways to do this that aren't so bad, essentially. You can get, you know, encourage people from ethnic minorities to apply more, for example. You can, you know, know, you can go out and find them. And I don't think anyone really believes that ethnic minorities are just bad at maths. There are no, you know, there are no people who are bad at maths. Rishi Sunak was chancellor at the time of this program.

6:59Oscar Edmondson: Exactly. I mean, let's call a spade a spade. I mean, often ethnic minorities are better at maths than, you know, the majority white population. You know, those from a Chinese background, those from an Indian background often excel at maths. So I think it's just It's just another example of just total brain rot in the civil service upper echelons that they think this stuff is helpful. I mean, it's patronizing to the ethnic minorities that basically you're suggesting that they can't pass a numeracy test. But it's also destructive more generally because, of course, it leads people to think that we don't actually have a meritocracy tool.

7:34Oscar Edmondson: I think Zia Youssef says that across the civil service, we've given up on meritocracy and we now have an idiocracy. And to be honest, when I read your piece, Sean, I thought that was pretty accurate.

7:45John Connolly: Yeah, John, I did want to ask you about the response that you've had from the political class to your piece. Have you been surprised by how kind of cross-party it's been?

7:52Ameer Kotecha: Yeah, I mean, it's actually a little bit encouraging, I think. I mean, obviously you have one on the spectrum, we have Zia, who's very angry about it. But you've also got kind of Labour MPs saying out loud, come on, guys, this doesn't help. And they're the sort of the area of the political class that you'd expect to be most sort of pro-diversity and possibly pro-removing numerous tests, though. I think that's maybe a caricature. So it gives you kind of hope that maybe things can change. But I think the difficulty is it's kind of some of it perhaps require legislative change. So you have to, you know, there are parts of the Equality Act that allow kind of positive action that sort of makes these schemes legal.

8:27Ameer Kotecha: And then you also kind of have to, or you have to have quite big cultural change and you have to say to the civil service, no, we kind of, we want you to make sure you keep standards high and it's better for everyone. It's better for the more authorities who do get jobs. and it's better for how the civil service is run if you do that. So it's not going to be a completely easy thing.

8:43John Connolly: Amir, I mean, this is a sort of topic that you feel incredibly passionate about, given your experience, and part of the rebut of your organisation is issues such as this. Which parties do you think are taking the issues with the civil service seriously? And with regards to reform specifically, do you think that there's a danger there that they might overcorrect?

9:03Oscar Edmondson: Well, yeah, look, I think both the Tories and reform now seem to have sort of woken up and smelled the coffee on some of this stuff. And they realise now just how insane some of what went on or much of what went on, how insane it was. But, you know, it's difficult for them. I mean, this decision by the Treasury happened when Boris Johnson was PM. And I think this does get to a deeper problem, Oscar, because I'm not even sure ministers are aware of a lot of this stuff. I think, you know, I'm speculating here, but I think if Boris was aware that this decision had been taken by Treasury mandarins, he'd probably been as aghast about it as we are.

9:46Oscar Edmondson: But much of this stuff is seen as just normal, routine, operational sort of decision making or management that you don't need to trouble ministers with. And I think that's how the Mandarins like it, because it enables them to do this stuff under ministers' noses without them interfering. So, you know, I think that is a challenge. I mean, in terms of bringing it up to the present, I think both the Tories and reform are saying the right things about civil service reform. I think Reform UK are probably in the strongest position in terms of really embracing pretty radical changes. They've said, for example, that the majority of the permanent secretaries across Whitehall will need to go and be replaced by outsiders.

10:27Oscar Edmondson: And I think that's absolutely right. But the Tories are saying similar things, but it's taking them a little bit longer to get there, I think.

10:36John Connolly: Do you think that reform are potentially being slightly overly ambitious? Because it's Danny Kruger that's leading this project to rewire the state if they do enter government. Do you think his set of objectives are potentially a little bit unrealistic?

10:50Oscar Edmondson: Well, look, I'm in a pretty radical place. I think I've been radicalised by 11 years in the system. So I think it's pretty hard to overcorrect, to be honest. So, look, I do think we need sweeping changes across the civil service. And part of that is replacing the people at the top with, you know, more business people, more tech entrepreneurs. And partly it's all of this sort of stuff. It's the lack of expertise. You know, it's the failure to esteem subject matter knowledge. It's the fact that people move around jobs far too often. You know, those are also the things that need to change. And, you know, anyone who's interested in this, if they go on to the civil service jobs website and just have a look at some of the adverts, pretty radical.

11:39Oscar Edmondson: I mean, you know, we found one last month of the Treasury advertising a deputy director, so a senior role in charge of debt and reserves management. And it said in there, and I quote, that knowledge of financial markets was not essential because it could be developed in the role. So, you know, this stuff is totally absurd. You know, the job adverts routinely say that the important thing is that you're committed to a diverse and inclusive culture and that you're a team player and that you're an empathetic manager, rather than actually needing to know anything about the job that you're meant to be doing.

12:17John Connolly: Well, thank you so much, Amir, for joining. Thank you, John. And thank you for listening.

12:54John Connolly: We'll see you next time. 90 % savings. Go to shipstation.com and use code audio to try ShipStation free for 60 days.