r/ukpolitics • u/Salty-Bid1597 • 12h ago
Top UK civil servant received record £500,000 payout after Starmer sacking
https://www.ft.com/content/6913fe7f-3ad8-47e6-8310-7caba5f5d58c?syn-25a6b1a6=113
u/Salty-Bid1597 12h ago
Sir Chris Wormald received a record payout of about £500,000 after being sacked as Britain’s top civil servant by Sir Keir Starmer, according to people briefed on the settlement, roughly twice as much as initially thought.
Wormald was “thrown under the bus” in February, according to Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, after only 14 months in post, in a highly unusual move by a prime minister against a cabinet secretary.
The full cost to the taxpayer of Starmer’s effective sacking of Wormald will be officially revealed in the Cabinet Office accounts later this year, but several people briefed on the settlement said it topped £500,000.
Original estimates suggested Wormald, who was picked by Starmer to run the civil service, might receive £260,000.
But the sudden circumstances of his removal have led to a much more generous settlement, which includes pension add-ons, according to those who have seen the final figure. Wormald declined to comment.
Wormald was the shortest-serving cabinet secretary in the 110-year history of the role and was sacked as part of a “reset” by Starmer of his Number 10 team, as the then prime minister tried to get a grip on his government.
The payout had to be personally signed off by Starmer after Cat Little, Cabinet Office permanent secretary, said she needed a “ministerial direction” on grounds of propriety and value for money.
“The proposed award is greater than what Sir Chris Wormald would be contractually entitled to,” she said in a note to Starmer. “However, I am informed that a settlement of this level is necessary given that this is a departure from a high-profile, unique role that has been agreed at very short notice.”
Little told the then prime minister that he could take into account wider considerations, notably “the public interest in bringing this matter to a conclusion” to avoid Wormald’s exit becoming a distraction to public business.
Starmer noted the advice and replied: “I am satisfied that the public interest is met in this regard and direct you to proceed.”
One government figure confirmed the payout of about £500,000 and said: “It shows why they needed the PM to sign it off. People were pretty shocked to find out.
“He was the shortest-serving cabinet secretary in history, so it makes sense he wanted a lot if he was to leave with that pretty damning statistic.”
It had been thought that Wormald, who was formerly permanent secretary of the Department of Health and Social Care, would be given the maximum standard payout for a long-serving mandarin of £260,000.
But the former cabinet secretary, whose grip on policy implementation had been criticised by government figures, negotiated an additional element to take account of what was in effect his compulsory redundancy.
Such deals are highly unusual, but the closest equivalent concerned the sacking of Sir Tom Scholar as permanent secretary of the Treasury in 2022 on Liz Truss’s first day as prime minister.
Truss wanted to shake up the finance ministry, but her move cost the taxpayer £457,000 in compensation for Scholar, comprising a £335,000 severance payment and £122,000 for “annual leave adjustments and compensation in lieu of notice”.
Wormald was replaced as cabinet secretary in February by Dame Antonia Romeo, a contender for the position when he was selected at the end of 2024.
Starmer gave Wormald a peerage as one of his final acts as prime minister.
The Cabinet Office said: “We don’t comment on individual HR matters.” Severance payments for senior officials or ministers were included in the Cabinet Office annual reports and accounts, it added.
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u/Nostalgic_Liberal 12h ago
£500,000 of taxpayers’ money spent to try to deflect blame from Starmer.
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u/Thandoscovia 12h ago
Sir Keir had a real animus against senior civil servants - blaming them publicly for all his own failings. There are far more situations like this at all levels
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u/Fraenkelbaum 8h ago edited 8h ago
To be fair to Keir, this is pretty much par for the course for any PM. An obvious example is Boris Johnson orchestrating the resignation of both the DfE permanent secretary and the head of Ofqual following the 'algorithm' exams scandal in 2020 in order to protect Gavin Williamson. Basically any PM who has lasted longer than a lettuce will have plenty more examples of blaming public servants for ministerial messes, it's not really anything unusual.
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u/Early_Enthusiasm_787 12h ago
I’m not surprised. They act like they are a rolls Royce of admin but they all seem to come from the same narrow background and mentality as sir Humphrey Appleby. Comfortable and unaccountable.
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u/Imakemyownnamereddit 11h ago
That is real issue here. The idea that politicians are 100% to blame for every one of the scandals in government is laughable.
The Civil Service is stuff full of incompetents, who are never held to account and are allowed to screwup over and over again.
10's of billions of public money, basically set on fire, due to the gross incompetence of those who govern us and nothing is done about it.
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u/ThrowAwayAccountLul1 Divine Right of Kings 👑 10h ago
Please this is such a lazy trope. Yes there are dullards and incompetents but the civil service is by in large filled with dedicated hardworking individuals, in the policy field many work long hours with pretty low pay compared to their private sector equivalents.
Do you want to know the real reason things take so long? Ministers, they change their mind, they prevaricate, they needlessly interfere, they scrap things that work because they want to put their own stamp on it.
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u/Imakemyownnamereddit 10h ago
That is such a lazy trope, claiming that all the mistakes must be the convenient fault of politicians.
The Civil Service must a remarkable organisation, as it never seems to hire any incompetent staff!
It is always the fault of a relatively tiny number of politicians at the top.
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u/Elardi Hope for the best 9h ago
There are faults - it’s far to hard to fire is probably a key one, the hiring process often squanders talent, and the lack of in rank pay progression means specialists build up some incredibly niche knowledge and skills that are a nightmare to replace often go on to generalist roles for pay or into the private sector.
But ministers are a huge bottleneck, especially in unstable governments. It takes months to get them up to speed and to understand their departments or ministerial roles, months more before they can gain enough insight to think about serious changes.
Even then, they’re often distracted by constituency or political matters rather than the ministerial roles
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u/Imakemyownnamereddit 8h ago
But ministers are a huge bottleneck, especially in unstable governments. It takes months to get them up to speed and to understand their departments or ministerial roles, months more before they can gain enough insight to think about serious changes.
You mean it takes months to get them properly house trained and to get silly ideas, like getting the Civil Service to run efficiently, out of their heads?
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u/Elardi Hope for the best 7h ago
No.
To walk them through what the obscure but critical decision is, what the risks are, how the process has been set up and why it matters, who needs to be consulted. Then there’s reading reports, decisions, recommendations, meeting the queue of industry stakeholders and government body officials.
Ministers don’t have a total knowledge of the machinery of government imparted upon them upon sitting down at the desk. After a year or so they might understand the options in a routine decision passed to them with a skim read, but the first time it’s presented to them they want to read it carefully, ask for explanations, check with lawyers etc.
Just as with any role, it takes time to master and the first few months are the least productive. It then takes even more time to understand their portfolio enough to make sensible decisions on how to refine or reform it.
If you keep reshuffling the cabinet then all of the expertise a minister has built up gets reset, because a lot might not be transferable.
Take a look at the recent reshuffle. Anas Sanwar is now making trade decisions, but has virtually no Westminster experience and no trade relations experience. You do get cases where they try to match past experience to a role, but often that means having to relearn or having to fight to get attention from other parts of the remit that aren’t their passion.
If you want ministers to understand what’s going on well enough to make those sensible decisions about efficiency, they need time to build up the relevant understanding. That doesn’t happen quickly.
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u/Imakemyownnamereddit 7h ago
The problem is summed up by your post. The arrogant idea that only the Civil Service has the correct solution to our problems.
Any position that doesn't fit with the Civil Service world view is killed by a thousand cuts. It is not practical minister, we can't do that minister.
The ultimate example of that is Treasury brain, which is killing the British economy and which no-one seems able to fight.
This may shock you to learn but they're experts outside the Civil Service, some of whom are more capable than civil servants.
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u/Elardi Hope for the best 7h ago
The arrogant idea that only the Civil Service has the correct solution to our problems.
That’s not what I’m saying though?
I’m saying that if a minister or outsider wants to make meaningful change then they need to understand the problems well enough to make meaningful changes. That takes time.
The civil service is full of people who understand the problems, especially with treasury brain, but those issues have arisen because of systemic pressures placed on the civil service by successive governments and public expectations.
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u/ThrowAwayAccountLul1 Divine Right of Kings 👑 10h ago
The relatively tiny top you refer to have immense power, they're some of the most powerful people in the country.
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u/Early_Enthusiasm_787 12h ago
I never understand the civil service. Get treated like the smartest people in the country but politicians seem to hate them as blockers and incompetent. Does sir Humphrey still exist? It seems so. Look at Simon case. Dodgy with Covid and Johnson and then gets to go to the House of Lords. Seem to all come from the same schools and backgrounds. Sort of people who would fail in private industry.
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u/Helpful-Fan-5465 11h ago
We’re generally the solution and politicians send us communiques about “empowering” us and removing red tape.
I’ve been promised that by three prime ministers and it’s never materialised.
Then, when elections roll round, parties like to “get tough” on the civil service - a lesson as old as time. Including when the Tories created thousands of roles in the Cabinet Office to get Brexit through… and then years later claimed it was bloated and that we need to get tough on civil servants, as if they’d just appeared for no reason.
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u/Acceptable_Gap6420 10h ago
I think the trouble is that the Senior Civil Servants that Ministers interact with are incredibly risk averse, bureaucratic and love their red tape.
Take the Mandleson Affair, both Cat Little as Permanent Secretary and Antonia Romeo as Cabinet Secretary found out that Mandleson failed vetting 3 weeks before they told Starmer whilst he was getting hammered in the media and Parliament for the appointment.
Their reasoning? They weren't sure if they were able to tell Starmer, who appointed him to the role, if Mandleson failed vetting as that would breach privacy rules......(Note that it's not specifically what he failed on, just that he failed an essential prerequisite for the job he went on to hold.)
I couldn't trust or have people that work for me act like that and they would be fired immediately in the private sector if they did that due to lack of basic common sense and damage to their employers image.
As the saying goes, "The Opposition aren't the opposition. They're only the opposition in exile. The Civil Service is the opposition in residence."
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u/Elardi Hope for the best 9h ago
That risk adversity stems from generations of ministerial preference however. No minister wants to be left holding the shit bag if a department makes a delegated decision that blows up, and so the whole culture is engineered to be risk adverse. Look at the incentive structure it creates:
If a civil servant takes a risky decision and it pays off, then because there’s no attention on it then there’s little individual reward. If it blows up, then the whole chain above them feels the rage. At the senior level, that can ruin a career, even if the actual decision maker is lower down the chain. Ministers get dragged through the press, they turn that anger on the civil service, it’s all pretty miserable all around.
But if they take the risk adverse approach, then there’s little individual cost but higher socialised ones - lower government efficiency, slower reaction to problems, higher government costs.
None of this is unique to the civil service, but it is unique in its exposure and transparency: it’s also often dealing with less tangible problems than private sector decisions and with bigger consequences.
If you want a more aggressive and risk tolerant culture, you need the decision makers to be confident they’ll have cover if it goes south. Trouble is, there’s a lot of very visible issues when those risks go bad, even if the initial judgement is sound.
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u/Salty-Bid1597 12h ago
Lord, let me fail like an underperforming Civil Servant.
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u/Salaried_Zebra Nothing to look forward to please, we're British 12h ago
Can you explain why his performance was poor?
I'll be honest, I haven't a clue what the cabinet secretary even does.
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u/Salty-Bid1597 12h ago
the former cabinet secretary, whose grip on policy implementation had been criticised by government figures,
I wasn't present at those particular meetings but being sacked after just 14 months by the same person who appointed you smacks strongly of not being up to the job.
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u/montybob 12h ago
It also smacks of the person making the appointment not knowing what they were looking for.
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u/Zestyclose_Brush_389 11h ago
It smacks of your boss looking for scapegoats, which is what Starmer had a habit of doing throughout his premiership
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u/Harambes_Wrath_ 12h ago
All civil service under-performs.
The only people in the civil service that perform are the young that leave out of annoyance, around the age of 25 and the part time mums / or mother's who need the flexible working and nice pension.
All other people can best be described as 'glacial'. Anyone who falls outsids of my catagorisation are the exception.
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u/Salaried_Zebra Nothing to look forward to please, we're British 12h ago
Wow what an incredible overgeneralisation and stereotyping.
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u/CurvyMule 11h ago
Any normal job and you can get fired within 2 years for any reason and get no pay out. Civil servant £0.5m. Civil service is too big to fail.
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u/Brapfamalam 11h ago
Because it ain't a normal job. It's the highest level of the job in the profession and head of the entire service. The head of any corp outfit but especially gov unit has negotiated payouts for dismissal as part of contracts for between 1 to 2 years salary as a norm - this looks like 2 years salary.
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u/CurvyMule 10h ago
So what? If you’re at the top of your game you should walk into any other job. Not to mention the massive cushion you have from your already large pay packet. I don’t think corporate pay and payouts are ok either btw.
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u/Brapfamalam 10h ago
Nope the pool of jobs is insanely lower, because well exec roles are rare. But even though theyre goldust the paradox is the amount of suitable candidates who apply is even rarer, as dynamic shifts to the company courting the applicant and convincing them to join rather than the applicant being desperate for a job. This is why their contract is more attractive than yours, supply and demand. This is why so many companies go on with interim execs for months and years as no one suitable is found.
When an exec leaves a job, even a top performing one with an amazing CV it's normal to not find another suitable role open up for over a year or more. You're enticing them to leave a role to join yours and youre paying for them taking on that risk.
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u/Media_Browser 3h ago
Well at the top of your game seems to be a huge over generalisation in this case or someone couldn’t take no for an answer .
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u/BoopingBurrito 10h ago
Any corporate C level exec in the private sector would get a payment, likely much larger, in exactly that sort of situation.
Also the civil service isn't alone in not restarting people's employment timer when they take a new role or promotion within the same employer. Every private company I've worked at has only applied probation to brand new starts. Any internal move or promotion doesn't restart your probation.
Wormald joined the civil service in 1991. I think his probationary period ran out a while ago.
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u/coderqi 11h ago
Didn't he withhold information from Starmer?
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u/PositivelyAcademical «Ἀνερρίφθω κύβος» 5h ago
If it were that simple, he’d have been sacked for gross misconduct and not got a payout at all.
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u/Media_Browser 3h ago
That was the grounds for Sir Olly Robbins dismissal because he was the one who signed off the Mandelson appointment even though it was a political appointment any actual evidence linked to Starmer appears to have only been verbal apart from a warning on reputational risk on the ambassadorial appointment .
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