At an event at the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham, FDA General Secretary Dave Penman joined the IfG and a panel of guests to discuss rebuilding trust after the Johnson era.

The event in Birmingham followed the FDA’s previous partnership with the Institute for Government at the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, looking at rewiring standards in public. Chaired by the IfG’s Interim Director, Hannah White, the panel also featured the Rt Hon Sir Jeremy Wright MP, former Attorney General and member of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, the IfG’s Tim Durrant, Daniel Bruce of Transparency International UK and Dr Susan Hawley from Spotlight on Corruption.

Speaking to a packed house, Penman set out the two basic actions the government should take to rebuild the relationship and restore trust between ministers and civil servants. Firstly, he argued that ministers needed to stop attacking civil servants, both on and off the record, quoting FDA members who were sick of being “thanked in private then denigrated in public as my minister plays to the crowd”.

Reflecting on these attacks, as reported in the Guardian, the General Secretary said: “We’ve seen everything from the notes on desks, from Jacob Rees-Mogg, the hitlist that appeared on the front page of The Sunday Telegraph about permanent secretaries that are going to be sacked, and all of this was done in the knowledge that civil servants are unable to defend themselves, they’re constitutionally unable to defend themselves. I’ve known civil servants being attacked via special advisers and are having to go to those same advisers and try to get permission to defend themselves.”

Summing up, he called on ministers to “stop attacking [civil servants] and introduce the sort of independent and transparent process that the committee for standards in public life have talked about and which has been introduced elsewhere”.