Morale across the UK civil service has shown a modest but significant improvement in the wake of the Labour Party's victory in the 2024 general election, according to a major annual survey. The findings reveal a notable surge in staff satisfaction within key government departments, marking a reversal of a three-year decline.
Key Departments Drive Overall Improvement
The Institute for Government (IfG) thinktank's annual Whitehall monitor, due for publication this week, indicates that the overall civil service employee engagement index rose from 60.7% to 61.2% in 2024. This composite index measures how staff feel about organisational processes and their pride in their workplace.
While most departments recorded slight increases, two stood out for dramatic improvements. Morale at the Department of Health and Social Care, under Secretary of State Wes Streeting, jumped by five percentage points. Even more strikingly, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, led by Ed Miliband, saw a seven-point surge in staff satisfaction.
The Cabinet Office also continued its positive trajectory with a two-point rise, building on a four-point increase in 2023 after four consecutive years of falling scores.
Departments Bucking the Positive Trend
Despite the general uplift, the report highlights four major departments where morale continued to fall in 2024. These are the Foreign Office, HM Revenue and Customs, the Ministry of Defence, and the Department for Transport.
The Department for Transport experienced the most severe drop, with overall morale falling by three percentage points. The survey revealed particularly sharp declines in staff confidence regarding organisational change and leadership. Scores plummeted by 13 points for statements like "when changes are made in my organisation they are usually for the better" and "I have the opportunity to contribute my views before decisions are made that affect me".
Further significant declines of 9-10 points were recorded for perceptions of psychological safety to challenge processes, the quality of change management, and faith that senior managers would act on survey feedback.
Context and Recent Tensions
Experts had predicted a potential boost in civil service morale under the new Labour administration, following years of political turbulence characterised by rapid ministerial turnover under the previous Conservative governments of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak.
It is important to note that the survey snapshot was taken in autumn 2024, prior to Prime Minister Keir Starmer's controversial comments in December. His remark about some civil servants being too comfortable in a "tepid bath of managed decline" was widely seen as damaging to the nascent relationship between the government and its officials.
The report charts a decade of steady improvement in morale from 2010, peaking at 63.6% in 2020, before a three-year slide from 2021 to 2023. Last year's analysis attributed that decline largely to falling scores on leadership and change management, coinciding with significant Whitehall reorganisations that created new departments for science, energy, and business.
