Your impressions of the civil service

Just looking for some general opinions, really. For some reason I'd always had the impression that people in the civil service, e.g. the council, the Foreign Office, the Treasury, etc, were always bound to a desk, filling in endless paperwork and working long hours. Is that a common viewpoint? Is it even the reality?

Reply 1

L i b

Yes, I suppose that's what I think about civil servants. A bunch of Sir Humphreys.

Reply 2

Clubber Lang

I have experienced Local Govt.

There is a lot of form filling and things are slow - because you need to justify everything and provide an audit trail for everything to show you did it properly - so if you need to buy a piece of equipment for example then it can take bloody ages.

There is a lot of pressure because the managers of a dept may want to do something which they think is best but they also have political pressure from Councillors and also the public so it ends up being a bit of a mish mash - certainly for the public facing roles.

IMO it would be best if they got rid of councillors and let the managers take all decisions but that goes against the very fundamentals of democracy.

But there is so much crap going on its ubelievable (I don't mean waste BTW as my dept was pretty well run, but thigns liek aprtnership working, where they have pressure from the council leaders/central govt/ and lots of other different organisations... all of which affect how the dept operates)

That said the Council I worked for were FAR more better employers than any private company I have worked at, and not all jobs are deskbound of course.