Stephen Kelly

And I guess the headline numbers, the civil service started in 2010 with 492,000 civil servants, all very good people.

But then when I left, it was 380,000.

So over that period, we actually had a smaller civil service by almost 120,000 people.

And when did you leave?

2015.

um it was probably probably about more than half were through natural wastage so that was a terrible phrase but effectively people retiring people coming up to the end of their tenure people going back to the private sector um and that was obviously a program put in place through hr to actually encourage some of that as well um but then also there was some restructuring and some some elements around the machinery government were modified

to actually accelerate a more efficient government with anything.

You know, you've got almost 500,000 people and the status quo takes over.

And obviously the culture up to that time, particularly through the years of, I guess, the Blair years of where the economy was growing fast,

Typically, the civil service was growing in the same sort of trajectory with the economy.

So it was a kind of root and branch review, a restructure and a reform program that was put in place.

But a lot of the actual personal exits in the human story was done through, again, another terrible HR phrase of natural attrition.

Yeah, that's a great question, Robert.

I think my, I guess my experience and why did I take this on?

Because that's the genesis.

I kind of grew up in the world of US technology and spent 10 years with a startup company at the time called Oracle.

the 80s and 90s and that was how to build global growth companies but then I had to do a number of restructures and again probably the US model was pretty focused and very on point in the UK when I came back to government my interest was could I actually apply the playbooks of what I learned in the US when I came back to the UK I did that in a public company called micro focus and

And then the intellectual challenge, my curiosity, was tweaked by thinking, could those same sort of business practices, the tone at the top, the strategies, be employed in one of the oldest institutions in the world, the British Civil Service?

And it was the case.

So coming directly back to your question, it was the case that on the sort of restructuring agenda, we called it the reform agenda, was very focused on making sure the good people stuck around.