EVERY cabinet secretary arrives promising to change Whitehall, and most leave it much as they found it. Dame Antonia Romeo, who in February became the first woman to hold the job, is betting that this time will be different. In her annual lecture at the London School of Economics on November 10th, “Rewiring the state and the future civil service”, she argues that there is a “burning platform” for change.

Five forces, she says, demand it: artificial intelligence, new security threats, falling trust, stagnant productivity and Andy Burnham’s promise of “devolution by default”. Together they mean that the civil service “needs to be reimagined arguably in the most fundamental way since its formation”. That is a big claim for an institution whose modern shape dates from the Northcote-Trevelyan report of 1854.

The numbers give her an argument. Only four in ten people now trust the civil service, according to figures she cites, as reported by The Times. The Office for National Statistics said last week that public-sector productivity is still below its pre-pandemic level. And money is short. The war with Iran has battered the public finances. Mr Burnham, who succeeded Sir Keir Starmer in Downing Street, has promised to raise defence spending to 3% of GDP and to spend more on welfare, leaving him facing tax rises or deep cuts next year. John Healey, the chancellor, has already told departments to trim capital budgets by 1% to help pay for defence, reports the Daily Mail. “Improving our productivity and efficiency is therefore essential in a tight fiscal context,” Dame Antonia says.

Her answer leans heavily on technology. AI, she argues, “potentially represents the most profound paradigm shift in modern governance”. It could make the state “more predictive, preventative and personalised”, spotting cancers earlier or identifying households about to tip into homelessness. Every department is drawing up a plan to widen its use of AI and build in-house engineering teams, according to Civil Service World. Pay is changing too. In May senior officials got performance-related pay progression for the first time. Darren Jones, chief secretary to the prime minister, said it would reward “the doers, not the talkers”.

Whitehall has heard this before. In 2018 John Manzoni, then chief executive of the civil service, used the same LSE platform to promise “profound, lasting, transformational change”, including cutting the government estate from about 800 buildings to 200. Dominic Cummings’s assault two years later was blunter. As The Mace recalled, one senior official was told to “nip back to the department and ask them to sort their bloody selves out”. Otherwise, “Cummings is going to come down and sort you out his own way, and you won’t like it.” Neither episode produced a civil service that was smaller, nimbler or more trusted.

Two things may be different now. The first is that the rank and file seem willing. A survey of 1,100 civil servants by the Charity for Civil Servants, published in The Mace in August, found that 66% expect more roles to move out of London, and support it. Jonathan Freeman, the charity’s chief executive, concluded that officials are “primed and ready to deliver” and see AI as “an opportunity not a threat”.

The second is Dame Antonia herself. She sits in the prime minister’s outer office, as no predecessor has, and wrote her own job description. One official told Tim Shipman of The Spectator that she is “the grippiest, grippy person you’ve ever encountered”. She reportedly dismissed an early reform plan with the words: “Basically you’ve given me a Ford, when I’m more of a Ferrari girl.”

Yet old weaknesses persist. An analysis of office attendance in The Mace in August found that most departments miss their 60% target. The Department for Education claims 59% but manages nearer 27%, and at least 3,800 officials never have to come in at all. “Civil servants are being paid to work in offices they aren’t turning up to,” it concluded. Nor is the workforce a monolith of comfortable Londoners. As Neil Woollard noted in The Mace in April, “over 80% of civil servants work outside of London”, and real pay has fallen by 12-26% since 2010, depending on grade. That makes it harder to ask more of them.

Three obstacles stand out. The first is headcount. The Conservatives say Whitehall employs nearly 130,000 more full-time staff than in 2016, and that shrinking back to that size would save £9.6bn, a party estimate rather than an independent one. Dame Antonia talks about productivity, not cuts. But a “tight fiscal context” rarely spares payrolls, and critics suspect devolution will move officials north rather than reduce their number.

The second is politics. Danny Kruger of Reform UK argues that her review strengthens officials at the expense of ministers, and says his party would abolish her post. Her own troops are not uniformly loyal either: hundreds of officials gave her appointment a “thumbs down” on the civil service intranet.

The third is structural. By keeping the jobs of cabinet secretary and head of the civil service together, and leaving the centre of government untouched, Sir Keir left in place “structures that have failed successive governments”, argues the Institute for Government. The think-tank wants a published workforce plan, open recruitment and a serious approach to poor performance, which it calls “corrosive”. These are unglamorous tasks, and they are where reforms usually die.

Dame Antonia has reportedly told colleagues that this is “the last-chance saloon for the civil service”. She may be right, though not quite as she means it. If AI and devolution produce a cheaper, quicker state, she will be remembered as the cabinet secretary who finally rewired Whitehall. If they produce pilot schemes, innovation awards and another LSE lecture in 2030, the next people to try rewiring it may not be civil servants at all. A Ferrari, after all, is only as fast as the road beneath it.