The FDA has expressed serious concerns about the sacking of the Treasury’s Permanent Secretary, Tom Scholar. As reported in the Financial Times and on BBC News, the FDA’s General Secretary, Dave Penman, described the removal of Scholar as the start of “an ideological purge of permanent secretaries”. 

When reports first emerged that the incoming Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, and Prime Minister, Liz Truss, were planning to remove Scholar from his position, Penman warned that “it would be a real act of self harm for the new Prime Minister” to begin removing experienced civil servants for ideological reasons. 

Scholar had been Permanent Secretary at the Treasury since 2016 and served five different Chancellors, and he had been re-appointed in January 2021 for a further five-year term. His removal from this position, effective Tuesday 6th September, was confirmed on Thursday 8th September. 

Penman pointed out that the sacking represented a missed opportunity for the new Prime Minister: “Truss had a chance to reset the relationship between ministers and civil servants, yet even before she was officially elected, her team were briefing against…Scholar”, he argued. Yet, “on the very afternoon that she wrote to civil servants saying that ‘our world leading civil service is the ace up the sleeve of any Prime Minister’”, she has begun an ideological purge of permanent secretaries. 

He continued that “civil servants weary of the endless attacks from within the Johnson government would already be judging the new administration by their deeds not words”. Truss actions have already begun to contradict her words. 

In a column for Civil Service World, Penman asked why a new Prime Minister and Chancellor would not want an experienced and admired civil servant at the heart of government and choose to continue the constant and self-defeating attacks on civil servants, stating “good ministers don’t fear robust advice; they welcome it.” Penman, quoted in the Guardian, argued this sacking is “a demonstration that they don’t want challenge” and a “sign of weakness”.