Why Rik left the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit
There came a time when the Communications Team in the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit (NRU) got disbanded. The reasons for our dissolution were simple: we were too good at our job. Our branding, messaging and outreach work was so successful we were making the wider Department1's Press Office look like a troop of gibbons.
Such temerity could not be tolerated. Office Politics played out at high levels; offers were proposed, and accepted. Big Joe sold out on the promise of more powers and bigger empires and the price to be paid was the swift dismemberment of the NRU Comms Team.
I was a semi-detached member of the Comms Team at the time. My role as the Briefing and Correspondence Manager looked inwards, rather than outwards, but it still involved communications so my management line ran through the team. When the team was erased, I was left flapping in the wind with nobody to report to.
For a short while my boss was some Director, who was happy to let me just get on with stuff. That lasted until annual reporting season arrived. At which point the Director realised that not only did she have to write my report, but Big Joe himself would need to countersign it - quite a cap feather for a lowly Higher Executive Officer (HEO) like me, thus totally unacceptable!
Thus I was swiftly moved into one of the Delivery teams with a line manager whom I shall call, for the sake of decency, Cow-Print Man.
I genuinely cannot remember what my new team colleagues were supposed to be delivering. They had always been a bit of a footnote in the briefing I prepared for Parliamentary Questions (PQs) or appearances before various Select Committees. I'm sure it was very important. Not that it concerned me: I was still the Briefing and Correspondence Manager with a full workload of my own to, well, manage. Speeches don't write themselves innit!
"He want's you to do what?"
I'm lunching with my good friend Jane, architect of the Indices of Deprivation and now the Unit's Director of Research. She's been coughing for a couple of minutes and I'm beginning to worry that what I assumed was hysterical laughter is in fact food trapped in her throat.
"Explain it to me again," she says, finally managing to draw breath.
"He wants me to get access to the model the game uses. He thinks we might be able to get some insights into why some neighbourhoods go into decline."
"And what's the game?"
"It's called 'Sim City'. It's quite fun to play. You have to create a city from scratch: build roads, set up development zones, tax people ..."
"And he wants you to ...?"
"I don't really know," I admit. "I think he wants me to talk to the developers, find out how they built the model that runs the game. But I've got no idea what sort of questions to ask ..."
Jane gives me one of her legendary stares. "I suppose that explains why you offered to buy me lunch! Are you going to do it?"
My hands are raised, palms out.
"Of course not! But the idiot's writing my annual report - I'm gonna have to give him something. Have you," I ask in hope, "done any modelling on this sort of thing?"
It was a possibility. The NRU top-sliced ten percent off all available funding, to pay for research into what worked (and what didn't work) when it came to turning shit places to live into less-shit places to live. If anyone could help me, it was Jane.
She's already shaking her head. "We're only interested in how to turn places around, not how to stop them going wrong in the first place. Anyway, Cow-Print Man shouldn't be asking questions like this. It's not his policy area."
"Can you tell him that? Please?"
"No," she says with unarguable finality. "The man annoys me too much. And you're still buying me pudding!"
The key to a successful civil service career
I never intended to have a career in the civil service. Soon after moving to London I managed to land three job offers all on the same day. I turned down the opportunity to join a "Harley Street microbiology laboratory" because I had no desire to commute to a warehouse many miles from its Harley Street front office, to spend my life sifting through endless samples of piss and shit.
That left me with a choice: work on a scaffolding crew whose boss drank in the same Irish pub as my sister's new boyfriend, or take an Administrative Assistant role with the civil service. Pay for the faceless bureaucrat job was shite - less than half what I could earn playing with poles and planks of wood. The only point in its favour was that it was working indoors.
I like indoors. I joined the civil service.
The most important skill for a civil servant to learn when working in central government is "how to read the tea leaves". However secure I felt in a given post at a given time, I was always only one politician's scandal away from a departmental reorganisation.
But that's just life. What I mean by "reading the tea leaves" is getting a feel for the Office Politics: who's good to know; what's the sentiment around a policy area; where do I need to be to get to a place I want to be.
My ability to read tea leaves is mediocre. Average at best. I'd missed the signals surrounding the demise of the Comms Team. My colleagues had seen the storm coming and planned accordingly while I, happy with my work, had carried on regardless.
But this sign - the suggestion that we could learn something useful from a fucking video game - was neon-lit enough for even me to get the message. The NRU was at the peak of its achievements; the only direction from here was down.
I didn't do the task assigned to me. No emails got sent to the makers of Sim City, though I told Cow-Print Man that we were having a very interesting conversation. I don't enjoy lying, but sometimes the need to lie to your boss is overwhelming. So I lied for the benefit of every deprived community in England. But also to keep my sanity.
In place of writing imaginary emails, I put all of my best efforts into securing a new post. Anywhere but here. Six weeks later I joined the Social Exclusion Unit. Progress! A flagship outfit doing outstanding work; a whole hatful of feathers to go on my resume.
Of course I didn't realise that the SEU was already in a desperate place, and sinking fast. Those smoke signals were very well hidden - but that's an anecdote for another day.
Known as the "Department for Transport, Local Government & the Regions", before morphing into the far more glamorously named "Office of the Deputy Prime Minister". Reorganising and renaming Government Departments seems to be, as far as I can tell, the major contribution that Secretaries of State make to the governance of the nation. I believe they're now called the "Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities" - which at least reinstates both the lost comma and that marvellous ampersand to the title.