Question Time Special: What does the election mean for civil servants?

Inside Briefing with the Institute for Government

Institute for Government

News, Politics, Government

4.6 • 252 Ratings

🗓️ 7 June 2024

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We were swamped with loads of fantastic questions at our recent IfG webinar and didn’t have time to get to all of them – so, by special request, Jill Rutter, Cath Haddon and Alex Thomas have reunited in the IfG podcast studio to record this special Question Time episode of Inside Briefing. So as Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer hit the general election campaign trail, what does this frenzied time in British politics mean for the nation’s civil servants? What happens to special advisers during general election campaigns? What should private offices be getting ready for? Why don’t we talk about purdah anymore? And why is it important that everyone reads the IfG’s brilliant Ministers Reflect series of interviews? Produced by Candice McKenzie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everybody and welcome to this inside briefing.
0:13.3	I'm going to call it inside briefing Extra Slice or inside briefing supplementary questions.
0:19.0	Some of you will have tuned in last Friday when we had a
0:22.1	massively well listened to webinar on what should civil servants do during the general election
0:27.7	campaign. But we had so many good questions that we could only literally touch the tip of the iceberg
0:33.2	or the front page of the slido on it.
0:38.3	So what we thought we'd do is come back with two of our fantastic panelists from last time
0:43.2	and just try to rattle through as many of the questions we didn't get to last time as we can over the next 45 minutes or so.
0:50.5	So that's what we're going to do.
0:51.8	I'm Jill Rutter.
0:52.6	I'm a senior fellow at the Institute for Government,
0:55.2	and I live through a couple of transitions in government. I'm joined by Dr. Catherine Haddon,
1:01.9	who's a program director for the IFG Academy, student of transitions, historic and near a term,
1:09.4	and Alex Thomas, our program director for civil service issues,
1:13.0	who was actually in government in 2019 and I think in 2010 when power sort of shifted.
1:20.4	And there were interesting elections going on. So I'm going to take those questions.
1:25.1	We've divided them up and we will go through those and hopefully this will help you get across what is going on.
1:32.7	Kath, I'm going to start with the first question which got quite a lot of votes when we were there.
1:36.5	We used to talk about purden. Now we talk about pre-election period of sensitivity.
1:42.5	Is there any inwardness in that? Why was the name changed? And when was it
1:46.1	changed? I can't remember exactly when it was changed, but it's certainly been since 2010,
1:52.8	they started to refer to it. I mean, they called it the period of sensitivity, but now I think
	...

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