This post was first published as a blog on Impactful Government Careers, the original can be read here.

I spent three years working in the Treasury, between May 2019 and May 2022. It is still the single most formative job of my career. I wrote about it, and why I left, in my blog earlier this year.

In this blog, I will give my take on the reasons to work there, and reasons not to, if you want to have a lot of impact in your career. My experience was focussed, so it is inevitably more useful to some people than others. All I can do is be open about the likely biases, which I’ve listed at the end*.

You can have a lot of impact at the Treasury

The Treasury may be small, but it casts a long shadow in British public policy. So long that multiple reviews have called for it to be broken up, for wielding undue levels of power and influence over wider UK policy with its role in controlling public finances. Some of this skepticism over-simplifies the issues, but I agree that it has an outsized role in the rest of the government.

And the Treasury is uncommon in that there’s more scope for individuals, particularly earlier in their career, to play a greater role in it- and that’s why many readers might consider working there. One of the most common virtues (or vices, depending on who you ask), is the Treasury’s flat structure - the trust it gives relatively junior staff to operate quite autonomously. 

The impact you can have is unevenly distributed

“A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing” - attributed to Oscar Wilde

Treasury jobs tend to be high impact roles, in an organisation with a lot of leverage. As someone put it to me recently, “there’s no bigger sandbox you can play in than the Treasury''. But when deciding whether or not to work there, it’s more important to consider the kind of impact you can have at the Treasury, rather than some kind of aggregate level - that’s what will really matter if you take the job.

The Treasury’s influence is concentrated around money. It has lots of influence on issues which cost the taxpayer a lot, or have a big effect on the economy. It doesn’t have as much influence on issues which don’t. You can probably have a lot of influence in the latter areas if you are creative, but the day-to-day incentives in the department will keep you focussed on the things which cost a lot, and anything else will feel like you’re fighting against the tide.

Because it deals with the “big handfuls” of government policy, the Treasury is deeply affected by competing political priorities. Indeed, it often forces that competition. Spending Reviews and other fiscal events force the government to prioritise the very long list of things it would like to do into a short list of the things that it can afford to do. This forcing of trade-offs is core to the Treasury, but day-to-day it means your influence as an official is through negotiation. The policies in your area will be competing for budget, or tax relief, or legislative time with other teams in HMT and across government, and if you can’t accept that give-and-take then you’re likely to find it frustrating. 

Because of the scale of big financial and economic decisions, even in a flat and very empowered culture, it can feel like they are out of your hands. Something you’ve worked on for months might be coming to a head in a meeting between the Prime Minister and Chancellor, on a long list of other big-ticket issues. In practice, you can influence that kind of set-piece events, but often only at the margins, and it takes months of prep work to get there. 

Why the Treasury specifically?

Many of these lessons about what impact at the Treasury looks like (focused on finances, political trade offs, learning to influence policy at the margins) are true for success in other government jobs as well - in fact, if you aren’t considering those factors in other policy roles, you are probably doing them wrong. And they are definitely part of day-to-day life in other high-impact government jobs - working at No.10, jobs in Private Office, leading big transformation programmes, doing groundbreaking analysis, and working in parts of the Cabinet Office. 

So what is more uncommon about the Treasury?

The Treasury values judgement. Netflix published a slide deck outlining their company culture in 2009, which pointed out that “actual company values, as opposed to nice-sounding company values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go”. In the civil service, rewarding people and letting them go are pretty rarely used, and promotion is so heavily bureaucratised that it’s abstract from culture. The best proxy is what people say. Every culture I’ve worked in, you notice different words become the most vaunted compliment. At the Home Office, people said their excellent colleagues were really “on it”. At Faculty, an AI company, the compliment people paid others was that they were “smart”. At the Treasury, it’s that someone “has great judgement”. Because the Treasury embraces trade-offs within a limited pool of choices, it is reliant on junior colleagues arguing their case, even if it won’t always be right.

And exercising judgement requires courage. Peter Thiel wrote that “brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius”. Management spans are very wide at the Treasury - at peak size, my team was eight people, covering annual budgets of close to £20 billion. More junior officials in the Treasury have to exercise their judgement, publicly with senior officials and Ministers, much more than other departments usually do. If you make the wrong call, often you will find out very quickly, and that can be tough. But it encourages bravery, which is very important in a profession often criticised for being unwilling to ‘tell truth to power’.

“I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy” - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

The Treasury is a small party. And its policy making is much more networked across the department than many other parts of Whitehall, which operate exclusively in organisation silo's. This creates a relatively open culture, and helps the flat hierarchy mentioned earlier be a success. But it also means there’s not much privacy about your area - if you’re going to succeed, you have to really live your ‘working together’ Behaviour examples, and build big coalitions across other teams. And if you fail, it will be visible to more people than it might be in other jobs. 

The support networks are very strong, particularly the group of other spending team leaders who I could compare notes with on shared issues. That’s partly a function of greater talent density than in some other parts of government - you have more peers who can give you genuinely useful advice, because they’re very capable and their jobs are analogous to yours. The Treasury performs consistently better on the annual People Survey than other departments, and experiences fewer of the performance management issues I wrote about recently for Civil Service World. 

The Treasury practices a specific craft. All organisations run the risk of group-think, and criticism of Treasury orthodoxy are sometimes justified. But one under-rated reason to work there is that most of the Treasury has more professional standards of what it practises than other departments, certainly in policy roles. The processes it runs for fiscal events, forecasting and negotiating are repeatable and well practised - you can learn from them over time, in a way you can’t if you do some other jobs. By the time I had left, there was a lot more thought put into codifying the Treasury’s practice. Extensive guidance always existed - in Spending Teams you were constantly advising based on principles in The Green Book, Managing Public Money, and the Consolidated Budgeting Guidance. But more training was also being delivered than I had in any other role.

Why not work in the Treasury?

There are plenty of people who want to have very impactful government careers, who are better-suited to other options. Here are some common characteristics to think about:

You don’t like finance, economics and statistics. This may sound silly, and it’s intuitive when I talk to people outside of government that you should only work at the Treasury if you’re very interested in working with numbers. But because civil servants wrap the Treasury up with No.10 and the Cabinet Office as part of the ‘centre’, people often assume that they Treasury officials need exactly the same skills as a good Private Secretary would have - political handling, quick judgement, the ability to write a good briefing. But unlike those other jobs, you need to be able to back that up with quantitative analysis in most (if not all) jobs at HMT. This is the most common failure mode for people who join.

You live and die with a specific policy. The venture capitalist John Doer encouraged start-up founders to hire missionaries, nor mercenaries. People who believed in a product to a cult-like degree. This is good advice for start-ups, but it’s imperfect for civil servants. If you’re a zealous advocate for a particular policy, then you probably shouldn’t be working in Whitehall at all - that’s hardly the marker of an impartial civil servant. But the Treasury demands more detachment from individual policies than other parts of Whitehall, because of the standards of judgement and the difficulty of being the one to force a financial trade-off. 

You don’t have thick skin. Particularly when it comes to public spending, some of the trade-offs you’ll be involved in making aren’t pretty. We always want to spend more than we can afford, and the Treasury is the balancing function, which can seem very impersonal when you’re talking about funding for health services or vulnerable people. There are always immature civil servants in other parts of Whitehall, who don’t realise you’re just doing your job, and take it personally if you can’t fund their project. That’s their fault, but it is unavoidable. 

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If this doesn’t answer a question you had, then please get in touch and ask away! And I’d love to get feedback from other people who have worked at the Treasury, on whether this chimes with their experiences.

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*Notes on biases

• I joined ‘mid-career’, having already managed teams in the Home Office. I didn’t join through the Graduate Development Programme (the Treasury’s version of the Fast Stream), though I know several who did. 

• I worked in the ‘Spending’ part of the Treasury - the teams which get the most coverage outside of the Treasury, but are only a small part of the organisation. When I was there, roughly 250 people worked on public spending, in an organisation which now counts 3,175 staff, the majority in tax, financial services, fiscal or economic policy. 

• 2019 to 2022 was a period of massive fiscal expansion, based on the policies of Boris Johnson’s government and the Covid-19 crisis. The Treasury was spending a lot of money, and that was good business for Treasury officials. There were more jobs than there are now in an era of headcount reductions. Many more jobs are available in Darlington now than in London, but the Darlington teams were still relatively new when I worked there

This post is a submission to the TxP Progress Prize, in answer to the question ‘Britain is stuck. How can we get it moving again?’. 

‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks’ as the saying goes. But throughout the ages of the world, Britain has learned plenty of new tricks. The Metropolitan Police Service evolved out of the Marine Police Force, the first modern police force. The establishment of the NHS was a world-first for the welfare state, in support of a new post-war settlement in Britain.  Oxford and Cambridge are the second and third oldest in the world, and have taught British leaders and officials for centuries.

But we stopped building new institutions, and since we have had nothing to fight back against the sclerosis we see today. If we want to learn new tricks, I believe we need some new dogs in the race. Britain needs a philosophy of building new public institutions for the 21st Century. It’s time for venture statecraft!

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Institutional failure

The need for new institutions is more obvious when we consider how well the existing ones are fairing at their core objectives. The Covid-19 Inquiry is uncovering fundamental flaws in the health service’s preparation for a pandemic. The Met Police remains rocked by the murder of Sarah Everard, struggling to get a grip of its own workforce - over 1,000 officers are suspended or on restricted duties. And whilst our universities remain one of our greatest exports, at home their influence is significantly diminished by a culture war imported from America and unsustainable financing.

In his 2020 paper Great Founder Theory, Samo Burja suggests that functional institutions are the exception, not the norm, and that even highly functional ones tend to decline and fail. They lose sight of the goals they had, lose the leadership of the founders that made them great, and fail to adjust to a changing world. 

Much like natural selection in evolution, or creative destruction in the markets, organisations are more commonly replaced by new ones than saved through reform. To extend the comparison - systems which allow their constituent organisations to be replaced will be more resilient than ones which expect those same organisations to endure indefinitely.

For all that our leaders have wanted Britain to be a startup nation, with a private sector to mimic Silicon Valley, we have neglected that same kind of dynamism within the public sector. Those institutions I have described as innovations in their own day- the NHS, Met Police, professional armed forces - still persist with remarkably similar business models, and their replacements are nowhere to be seen. 

Attempts at reform

Instead of replacing them, successive governments have tried to ‘reform’ them, and for the most part have failed. The dogs have not learned new tricks. I began my career as a civil servant in the Home Office in 2015, when it was still reeling from being declared ‘not fit for purpose’ by Home Secretary John Reid in 2006. The scandal he was referring to was a massive asylum backlog - the same kind of backlog as the one left uncleared this week. The same is true of wasted billions spent on NHS software, long delayed armoured vehicles, and schools where we literally didn’t fix the roofs whilst the sun was shining.

This isn’t a surprise when we consider the scale of changes we’re expecting these organisations to make. Imagine an economy where we relied only on existing companies to provide new services. Where the Macbook was built by IBM, Facebook by BT, Monzo by Barclays. It’s inconceivable - but that’s exactly what our public sector looks like. 

Established institutions face what Clayton Christensen called The Innovator’s Dilemma - market-leading businesses are so focussed on their current customers that they miss changes in the makeup of the market which call for radically different products. Eventually disruptive technologies are created by challengers to create these products, pushing out incumbents. But we don’t see the same forces at play in the public sector. When Robert Peel founded the Metropolitan Police Service in 1829, there was no internet, but now that it exists fraud & computer misuse are the most common crime types in Britain.

There is an alternative

We need to spend less time trying to reform our public institutions, and more time replacing them. In contrast to these stagnant areas, the parts of Britain where we have built new organisations are the ones we see the most dynamism! 

The free schools movement was incubated by the Conservatives in the opposition years, then came to life in government - harnessing naturally entrepreneurial teachers and parents who wanted to build alternative school choices. The Vaccine Taskforce was lauded as a world-leading approach to procurement, but only because it was removed from the usual Whitehall processes and could work independently.The Advanced Research and Innovation Agency (ARIA) hopes to replicate this model in science funding, having been legally separated from the rest of government interfering by an Act of Parliament.  

Venture statecraft is the answer

Venture statecraft applies some of the principles of venture capital (VC) to the public sector. The economy escapes the Innovator’s Dilemma when small startup companies disrupt the business model of incumbents, often using new technologies (software, hardware or humanware) to provide better products. To challenge incumbents, they need investment. 

Venture statecraft rests on two pillars:

• Investing in new institutions. Just like venture capitalists, the government has a big enough balance sheet to manage the risk that some of those investments may fail. Over time, as they prove they can take on frontline responsibilities, these can be transferred from incumbents to their replacements.

• Empowering people at the edge of networks instead of the centre. Whitehall and most other institutions are still run by small groups of people whose whole careers are spent within them, particularly those who operate at the ‘centre’ of them - in Whitehall, those who worked in 10 Downing Street, the Cabinet Office or the Treasury. It’s easier to bring in new blood and new ideas with a new organisation which doesn’t have the same baggage. 

Modern VC began when Arthur Rock funded eight ‘traitors’, scientists fed up with poor management at the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory - liberating them to pursue their own ‘adventure’, and pioneer integrated circuits and transistors in the process. How many great teams are constrained by our current bureaucracies, and could be liberated by venture statecraft to serve the public good? The only way to know their names is for us to try.

We don’t need a Venture Statecraft Strategy, or a Cabinet committee, or an independent review. These new institutions will only be birthed by the hard labour of doing. The last government’s manifesto promised a new “cyber crime police force” - we should establish it. As Large Language Models upend education, why don’t we establish a new AI-first free school to embrace new models? Most military strategists believe drones will have a much bigger role in the future - rather than trying to fit them into existing structures, the MoD should establish a new front-line command to specialise in autonomous systems and new kinds of warfare. It’s time to (re)build.

"It is true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards.” - Søren Kierkegaard, Journalen JJ:167

“I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread. That can't be right. I need a change, or something.” J.R.R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

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Welcome to Power Lore, my newsletter/blog! It’ll mainly be mid-form pieces about policy, tech and governance, but this first post is to give a sense of why I’m writing about those areas.

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Like most New Year’s resolutions we make, publishing this first post is a rollover. I’ve been meaning to write this since I left the civil service in 2022, but since then it’s been a hectic sequence of house-moving, wedding-organising and job-changing. However, starting a new job this week is a good time to reflect, and what better way to do it than putting pen to paper!

Since beginning my career it’s been a great adventure. The hardest was deciding to leave the civil service in 2022 to try working at an AI company. And then last month, I left Faculty to return to Westminster and work on policy at a think tank. Had I stayed in either, my feelings about 2024 would probably be quite different - and this post wouldn’t exist at all. But looking back has helped me understand what I want to write about, and is probably the best way to introduce this.

It’s hard to understand your career decisions at the time, and perhaps it’s also too easy to read into them in hindsight. I thought about leaving Whitehall for years, but it was still the hardest decision I’ve ever made. I didn’t join Faculty expecting to leave before at least two years had passed, but the opportunity to work at Reform made it a quicker decision than most.

Looking back, I’ve been following both an idea and a feeling since the early days of my time in Westminster, and I think it’s time to write about both.

In 2017 I started working on future applications for technology, particularly AI, in government. It wasn’t the project I wanted to be given at the time - tech was, and largely still is, seen as quite a low-prestige area in government. But as the months passed I became obsessed, and I think the events of 2023 have shown that we were right in that obsession.

But that was quite an easy thing to be right about, and it was the hard truths I wanted to work on. Government was wildly under-prepared to use new technologies, which didn’t get any easier when I moved to the private sector to try and help. I thought the problem could be fixed by better software, but now I believe it’s a failure of social technologies - bureaucracies, the political economy and systems of incentives. They won’t be solved by more GPUs or better architecture, only by politics - by constructing some kind of new set of incentives that prize significantly better management and innovation within the state, on a scale never seen before. It’s not just a theory about how government needs better technology, but a theory of how power actually works.

Interesting ideas are the product of both care and frustration, and mine aren’t any different. I loved working in Whitehall. There will never be anything quite like the feeling of briefing Cabinet Ministers, going to No10, meetings in COBR, and watching your policies on the news. I was 21 years old when I joined, 28 when I left, and whilst seven years isn’t much of a stretch by most standards, in those years decades happened. Brexit, pandemic, war in Ukraine, two elections, three Prime Ministers. But living through it day to day, it went in a flash. 

For the most part that’s because the people I worked with were amazing, and we were trying to do the right thing. Whitehall at its best has the feeling of being in the trenches together, fighting the good fight.

But the same things that made government brilliant - the responsibility, the shared project, the sense of community - also wore me down. Instead of office politics, we Whitehall has actual politics, and institutions which count their birthday candles in centuries come with a lot of baggage. Whenever I felt this most, I thought about leaving, but work had a good habit of giving me excuses to put it off - one more cool opportunity, one more problem to solve, one more chance to be a team player.

Ultimately I realised I couldn’t keep colouring inside the lines, and I had to draw my own. I’d watched the tech industry keenly from a distance, and was excited by the new technologies they were developing, but I knew that a career in government would never give me that experience in the same way that I’d get by trying it myself.

I knew if I left, a part of me would stay behind. But equally, if I stayed, a part of me would leave forever - and I’d miss my last chance at another adventure before more responsibilities piled up. I decided that was the part more precious.

Leaving felt like a release for all these pent-up interests. Faculty let me work with genuinely innovative tech, and with entirely different kinds of people - data scientists and engineers whose professional backgrounds and ways of thinking were foreign to how I’d been trained. And it was a great excuse to meet new people and groups who were thinking about the same things I was - to be reassured that I wasn’t alone. And it’s not just my professional life - since I left the long-hours of Whitehall, I’ve made time for a few other things - Lily and I bought a house last year, and got married in September. 

Years ago someone suggested I shouldn’t pick jobs based on high-minded ideals, but what they involved day-to-day. I’ve always loved writing (if you hadn’t guessed yet), and the practice of sitting down to write a paper has always been my favourite part of every job. But in policy advice and tech consultancy, you are always writing whilst glancing over your shoulder - thinking about your bosses, your clients, the context. 

Rather than just writing, I’ve been looking for the freedom writing brings - to talk about things which matter, on their own terms rather than with caveats.

I want to bring that idea and that feeling together in this blog. To write about how people use power to change things for the better - to take the right ideas (comfortable or uncomfortable) and put them into practice. The analysis of power-  how organisations work, why they change (or don’t), and how they affect the rest of the world is hugely under-rated. And how to think about the jobs in your career in terms of power, of how you can change the things you want to, is even rarer. I’ve become a keen follower of a few people who have touched on this problem, and hope to contribute my own part:

• Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok on Marginal Revolution, particularly writing about state capacity.

• Samo Burja and his writing about how organisations (particularly bureaucracies and startups) succeed and fail.

• Palladium Magazine’s thinking about governance futurism, particularly this excellent article from earlier this year.

• Works in Progress, who are popularising new and different ideas about how to make progress a reality, with excellent longform pieces like this one.

I’ll be writing this alongside my new day job as Policy Director at Reform, where I’m going to lead the ‘Reimagining Whitehall’ programme and other areas of policy analysis of state capacity.

Beyond the first couple of post, I haven’t got more of a plan than a disorganised Notion page of half-organised bullet points. So if you have any ideas or feedback then I’d love to talk!

Happy New Year,

Joe

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