Energy and health optimism help lift civil service morale under Labour

Civil service morale rose slightly after Labour took power in 2024, with the biggest jumps in satisfaction in the energy and health departments, an annual Whitehall monitor report will show.The survey from the Institute for Government (IfG) thinktank, due to be published this week, found that morale rose from 60.7 to 61.2% on the civil service employee engagement index.This is a composite measure that captures civil servants’ feelings about how things are done in their organisation, and their pride in where they work.The engagement index recorded a decade of steady improvement in civil service morale from 2010 to a peak of 63.6% in 2020, followed by three consecutive years of decline from 2021 to 2023.Most departments’ scores rose slightly in 2024 but the biggest improvers were the Department of Health and Social Care, led by Wes Streeting, and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, led by Ed Miliband, where morale increased by 5 and 7 percentage points respectively. Morale in the Cabinet Office also rose by 2 percentage points following on from a 4-point rise in 2023 after four consecutive years of falling scores.Only four departments recorded falls in morale in 2024 – the Foreign Office, HM Revenue and Customs, the Ministry of Defence and the Department for Transport.The transport department had the largest drop, of three percentage points. This included 13-point falls between 2023 and 2024 for the questions “when changes are made in my organisation they are usually for the better”, and “I have the opportunity to contribute my views before decisions are made that affect me”. The department had falls of 9-10 points for “I think it is safe to challenge the way things are done in my organisation”, “I believe that change is managed well in my organisation”, and “I believe that senior managers in my organisation will take action on the results from this survey”.Experts had anticipated an increase in morale in the civil service under Labour after several years of turmoil in government departments with a constant churn of ministers under the Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak governments.The snapshot survey taken in autumn 2024 was carried out before Keir Starmer made comments in December 2024 about some civil servants being too comfortable in the “tepid bath of managed decline”, which appeared to set back relations.Last year, the IfG said three years of falling morale to 2023 was largely driven by lower scores for how the civil service felt about its leadership and the management of change, coinciding with the creation of new science, energy and business departments.