Whitehall’s Woes: What Aotearoa Might Learn from the United Kingdom’s Public Service Struggles – Part Two of Two

28/01/2026

In Part One, I offered a deliberately close reading of the Institute for Government’s Whitehall Monitor 2026: the methodology, the findings, the diagnosis of dysfunction in the purple zone. This piece is simpler. The question I ask here is whether we see the same patterns in Aotearoa. The answer is that we often cannot say. And that inability is itself the finding that matters most.

The Whitehall Monitor runs to 150 pages: grade composition, professional distribution, inter-departmental movement, the relationship between workforce characteristics and performance (Institute for Government, 2026).

It permits the kind of diagnosis that distinguishes between bureaucratic failure and political incoherence; between problems that personnel changes might address and problems that are structural. The Institute has published this analysis for thirteen years, because someone decided that independent scrutiny was worth funding and protecting.

We have no equivalent. Our State of the Public Service report appears every three years and runs to twenty-five pages (Te Kawa Mataaho Public Service Commission, 2025b). The Performance Improvement Framework reviews have been discontinued. We have chosen, as a system, what to know about ourselves, and what not to know.

That choice shapes what comparison is possible.

What the Data Permits

Where comparison is possible, the parallels are uncomfortable. Both workforces expanded by roughly a third in response to crisis, Brexit and the pandemic there, the pandemic here, and both now face contraction without systematic planning (Radio New Zealand, 2025). The Institute warns that crude headcount reductions lose precisely the mobile, marketable staff that organisations most need to retain. We have no equivalent analysis of who has left, or what walked out the door with them.

Both systems have made senior leadership less attractive through pay restraint. The UK Senior Civil Service has suffered a twenty-four percent real-terms cut since 2010; ours is less dramatic but directionally identical. Chief executive salaries here increased 0.9 percent in the year to June 2024, a substantial real-terms cut in an inflationary environment (Te Kawa Mataaho Public Service Commission, 2024). If leadership matters, and the evidence suggests it does, then we should not be surprised when capability erodes.

Both have underinvested in digital infrastructure for decades and now face constraints that limit what efficiency gains are actually achievable. The Commissioner describes Aotearoa as a “digital straggler” (Te Kawa Mataaho Public Service Commission, 2025b, p. 4; Witton, 2025). The parallel is exact; only the precision of the diagnosis differs.

On fragmentation, our situation is considerably more acute. With roughly two and a half times as many departments per capita, we have built a system that struggles to work across boundaries precisely because it was designed not to (Te Kawa Mataaho Public Service Commission, 2025a; Te Kawa Mataaho Public Service Commission, 2025b, p. 7). The State Sector Act 1988 oriented us toward vertical accountability; every subsequent reform has reinforced that architecture. The Commissioner acknowledges the result: a “fragmented and siloed approach” lacking a “whole of system perspective” (Te Kawa Mataaho Public Service Commission, 2025b, p. 3). Yet our reform conversations still assume that further machinery-of-government changes will solve problems that are, at root, problems of the purple zone. You cannot restructure your way out of strategic incoherence.

These are the comparisons the data permits. But the more telling finding lies in what the data does not permit.

What the Data Does Not Permit

On grade inflation, whether our workforce structure has become distorted by the same dynamics of competitive grading the Institute documents, we simply do not know. We do not collect equivalent data.

On churn and institutional memory, whether we are losing the people we can least afford to lose, whether the relationships that effective government requires are being built or eroded, we cannot say. We count departures; we do not reckon what they cost.

On the manner of achieving savings, whether cuts preserve capability or degrade it, we lack the infrastructure to distinguish. The Institute can model consequences. We cannot, or at least do not publish such analysis if it exists. When the task is not whether to cut but how, that absence becomes urgent rather than academic.

Which raises the question of whether we might do better.

The Work That Remains

I should disclose that I produce quarterly performance reports for consulting clients, tracking service delivery across the system. I may have as much performance information as most ministers receive. But I am an outsider who cannot validate proxies against internal data I have never seen. It should not fall to individual consultants to do the work that independent public institutions ought to be doing in the open.

We could build equivalent capacity here. In Part One, I suggested that Hāpai Public, with the support of the various schools of politics, government and public administration, might provide the platform for sustained independent scrutiny. The data largely exists within the system. What we lack is the institutional commitment to collect it systematically, analyse it rigorously, and publish it completely.

Whether we have the appetite for what such analysis might reveal is another question. The Institute’s findings are not comfortable: dysfunction originates in the purple zone; political incoherence degrades administrative capacity; the familiar remedies, restructure, abolish, blame the officials, address symptoms while leaving causes untouched.

And here we can answer the question I posed at the end of Part One: whether we are making the same diagnostic errors. The honest answer is that we do not know, because we have not built the infrastructure to find out. But the structural conditions are the same. We have the same vertical logic of ministerial accountability, the same departmental allocation of budgets, the same rapid turnover, the same attenuated cabinet deliberation. If the misdiagnosis is endemic to Westminster systems, we have no reason to suppose ourselves immune.

The PIF analysis I drew on in Part One found that leadership matters, strongly and independently of other factors. Which means that if we make leadership roles unattractive through pay restraint, and offer insufficient protection to those who take them on, we should expect capability to erode over time. We are, on the evidence available, doing precisely that. But we are not tracking the erosion; and when performance falters, we will likely reach for the familiar remedy: blame the officials.

Uncomfortable readings are sometimes true. And if we wish to understand why our public service struggles to deliver, we might begin by building the capacity to ask the question properly, and the honesty to attend to the answer.

References

Institute for Government. (January 2026). Whitehall Monitor 2026. https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/whitehall-monitor-2026

Radio New Zealand. (27 May 2025). How many public sector roles are going, and from where? RNZ News.

Te Kawa Mataaho Public Service Commission. (2024). Senior manager remuneration/pay. https://www.publicservice.govt.nz/data/workforce-data/senior-leadership/senior-leader-remuneration-pay

Te Kawa Mataaho Public Service Commission. (2025a). Workforce size. https://www.publicservice.govt.nz/data/workforce-data/public-sector-composition/workforce-size

Te Kawa Mataaho Public Service Commission. (2025b). Te Kahu Tuatini: State of the Public Service. https://www.publicservice.govt.nz/assets/State-of-the-Public-Service-Te-Kahu-Tuatini-2025.pdf

Witton, B. (12 December 2025). Public service ‘not well positioned for the future’, commissioner says. Newsroom.