The women tasked with turning ‘tepid bath’ of civil service into a stream of innovation

On Friday, Antonia Romeo, the new cabinet secretary, emailed all civil servants, expressing her pride at taking up the reins of a “remarkable institution” but promising to “do things differently”.

She would, she wrote, create a Whitehall with “innovation at its core” and a focus on public service delivery rather than policy papers. “That will require us to work at pace, collaboratively and with agility,” she said.

The first female head of the civil service, who prefers Erdem dresses to grey suits, is determined to shake things up. She has already filled her traditional wood-panelled office with flowers. A “congratulations” balloon floats above the leather-topped desk behind which a succession of white men have sat. The leather armchairs that belong in a gentlemen’s club are now surrounded by piles of books, including the memoir of the creator of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee.

Keir Starmer wants Romeo to “rewire” Whitehall, putting technology at the heart of public service delivery. Ministers will be encouraged to have all but the most sensitive papers delivered on secure iPads, rather than only in red boxes.

A set of AI tools known as Humphrey – after the fictional Whitehall official in the BBC drama Yes Minister – has already been created to support civil servants. One called RedBox helps officials with day-to-day tasks, including summarising policy and preparing briefings; another, named Minute, offers a secure AI transcription service for meetings that produces summaries in the format civil servants need.

The sudden departure of Romeo’s predecessor, Chris Wormald, after only 14 months in the job has, however, further strained relations between the Labour government and the civil service. Officials have not forgotten the prime minister’s suggestion in December 2024 that they were “comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”.

Simon Case, Starmer’s first cabinet secretary, says the relationship between Labour ministers and their officials was “very difficult” from the start. “Both sides of the relationship have been disappointed in the other,” he says. “The civil service hoped that a new ministerial team, fresh with a large majority, were going to be full of ideas and energy. And clearly that’s not happened. Likewise, ministers thought the civil service would be, after years of Conservative government, more ready and energetic to get things done.”

He thinks Romeo has a “big opportunity” to make a difference. “People have called her a disruptor or a reformer. Personally, I hope she will lean into that.”

Gus O’Donnell, cabinet secretary under Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron, says senior figures were surprised that Starmer, who had himself sat around the table at the permanent secretaries’ Wednesday morning meeting as director of public prosecutions, decided to go to war with Whitehall just a few months into his premiership. He points out that the prime minister subsequently backed away from the “tepid bath” comment: “It was counterproductive. Any manager would tell you that you don’t go in there and say, like Gerald Ratner, the product is ‘crap’. I think what the civil service is craving more than anything else is absolute clarity about what it is the prime minister and the government want them to deliver – it’s got to be something feasible and doable with the resources available – and then getting on and doing it.”

The fallout from the Brexit vote, when civil servants were denounced by some Conservatives as “woke Remoaners”, has left a demoralised workforce. Louise Casey, the government’s lead non-executive director, describes a “learned sense of hopelessness and helplessness” in the civil service. “The sense that you can’t get anything done seems to be the pervading attitude and culture right across the system,” she told an Institute for Government (IfG) conference last month. Officials must, she insisted, be more ready to “grip something and fix it”.

In the past, says one former permanent secretary, there was a contract between civil servants and the government: “Civil servants were scrupulously neutral and never leaked, and ministers protected their civil servants from the media and parliamentary pressure. If something went wrong, the minister resigned.” The problem, they say, is that “the contract has basically broken down in both directions. Certainly, ministers are very happy to hang civil servants out to dry and sometimes sack them.”

But Francis Maude, the former Conservative cabinet minister who oversaw a programme of civil service reform under Cameron, says there is too much “complacency” in Whitehall. “When I was there, the first draft of speeches would always say: ‘The British civil service is the envy of the world.’ Nobody outside Whitehall believes that. The problems are well understood – it’s the churn of people between different departments, the cult of the generalist, the lack of openness to outside influence.”

Hannah White, the CEO of the IfG, insists that “radical reform of the centre” is required, “with the cabinet secretary role split between somebody leading the civil service and another person advising the prime minister in No 10. Then you need an expanded department of the prime minister and the cabinet, which means you split the Cabinet Office, creating a separate department for the civil service.”

Romeo is taking over at a time when morale is low and the money has run out. She is, according to one Whitehall source, a “Marmite” figure. “When you talk to civil servants who have worked for Antonia, they either think she’s incredible and inspiring, or they think she’s an overpromoted self-publicist.”

Nobody, however, doubts the new cabinet secretary’s energy and drive. She has been appointed in an era of technological innovation that could simultaneously improve services, cut costs and drive productivity.

Chelsea and Westminster hospital slashed its waiting list for elective surgery by a third by replacing spreadsheets with a unified data platform. Bedfordshire police reduced the time taken to produce a suspect profile by 80% using AI. Such frontline tools, combined with Whitehall reform, have the potential to square the circle of governing with dwindling resources and rising demand.

But as one Whitehall insider says, in order to make those changes Romeo will need to have the support of the prime minister and the political machine: “Everybody can see that Keir at the moment is very weak, and the cabinet and the Labour party are calling the shots. A cabinet secretary always has a difficult time when they are working for a prime minister who is on the ropes.”

Photograph by Richard Baker/In Pictures via Getty Images