Reform MP describes the UK civil service as 'dysfunctional'

ODN

Reform MP for East Wiltshire Danny Kruger, who recently defected from the Conservatives, calls the civil service "bloated" and "dysfunctional" and says Reform UK would cut the number of civil servants working in Whitehall.    Report by Ajagbef. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn

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00:00Well at the moment you have civil servants who don't meaningfully answer to the government,

00:04who feel that ministers will change, their career prospects are best served by doing what the

00:09permanent secretary, i.e. the senior civil servant in their department wants, rather than what their

00:14minister wants. So across the political spectrum, Labour, Conservatives all complain that they can't

00:20get the Whitehall machine to do what they want. And it's a totally dysfunctional system when the

00:26state is not under the control of elected ministers. So we are going to reform the civil

00:31service code to ensure that civil servants answer meaningfully to their ministers. Also that we can

00:36bring in more political appointees to support ministers. At the moment, you know, they come

00:40a new minister, a new prime minister comes in, they can only bring a handful of quite often quite junior

00:45special advisors. And the government itself, which is the civil servants, basically say we'll take it

00:51from here, minister. We need to change that. When we get into government, if we win, we will go in

00:55with a plan and the civil servants will take their orders from us.

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