The Civil Service Fast Stream has failed

With attrition rates rumoured to be pushing 40%, it’s time to rethink the Civil Service’s flagship leadership programme

Back when Britain was a real country, before the advent of Woke nonsense like ‘working from home’ and ‘flexitime’, a favourite metaphor in British political discourse was that our Civil Service was a ‘Rolls Royce’: a refined and impeccably engineered machine of silent obedience, purring away all across Whitehall. Of course, this metaphor now only works insofar as the Civil Service moves much more slowly than comparable organisations, and uses significantly more resources to cover the same distance.

If the Civil Service was once a Rolls Royce, its flagship leadership development programme, the Fast Stream, might now be compared to another brand of luxury British car: the Jaguar. More dynamic, accessible, and forward-thinking than stuffy Rollers, Jags used to be a symbol of ambition and energy. Correspondingly, the Fast Stream would take some of Britain’s most talented people and propel them towards senior positions in the Civil Service, cultivating a cadre of elite talent to lead the operation of the British state in perpetuity. Consequently, a prestige, much like that which used to be associated with the Jaguar marque, was attached to the scheme. Having known people who entered the Fast Stream in the ’90s, for all the problems there were in the Civil Service even back then, I daresay that this was a mostly merited prestige. The scheme has never been perfect — much the same way as the superb Jaguar XJS was nonetheless terminally unreliable — but a regimen of quality training and well-selected postings produced a great deal of highly competent people who were eventually rewarded with leadership roles across government.

Nowadays, however, Jaguar is a different brand. The affluent cads who used to be the core market are dying out; slowly, the median customer has shifted away from the former public school wideboys and towards the school-run North London mum. Consequently, Jaguar has been forced to conform; to build hideous, misshapen amalgamations of steel and plastic, such as the I-PACE — an electric SUV of all things, the most Woke of all types of car. In 2019, the firm ceased production of the XJ, a car which had been a staple of the British elite for some fifty years, resulting (perhaps symbolically) in the Audi A8 becoming the official car of the Prime Minister — the first non-British car ever to take that role.

Alas: this is not Auto Express. But my metaphor is not complicated: the Fast Stream isn’t making big beasts anymore either; in fact, it actually appears to be consciously constructed to produce halfway competent compliers, much like the I-PACE. Like Jaguar, this is a problem precipitated by changes in both the market and the views of management; both reactive and creative. Not only has the shine worn off, but the scheme itself is struggling. Nowadays, it arguably contributes to rather than mitigates the Civil Service’s crisis of inertia. Attrition rates are rumoured to be pushing 40%, with the most talented being poached by the private sector, and the others by the rest of the Civil Service (yes, really). Those who do remain on the scheme are promoted too early into jobs they have no clue how to perform. The Fast Stream seems to lack any sense of overarching strategy, with the labyrinthine structure of moving parts unable to communicate with itself, resulting in inexplicable, Kafkaesque delays and farcical administrative tennis matches. Fast Streamers nearing their third and fourth years overwhelmingly seem jaded and disillusioned. The Fast Stream is failing.

Pay: not actually the elephant in the room

It will likely have already entered your mind that pay might be a significant factor in this. Having worked in the public sector for some time now, I am beginning to find that debate — always highly self-interested on the part of Civil Servants, and smug on the part of outsiders (‘look how much I am paid’) — a little tedious. Yes, it deters many capable people, but it is something that is mostly immutable. Unless Britain suddenly transforms itself into Singapore (complete with the dramatically smaller state, massive reduction in personnel, lack of genuine democracy, extreme elitism, and all the rest), the Civil Service is never going to pay as well as investment banks, big law, or ‘tech’. But it must be remembered that despite everything, it still does pay almost as well as most private sector industries, but with the added bonus of ironclad job security, huge pensions, and far more agreeable working conditions. Fundamentally, the Fast Stream’s appeal has always been to those who believe strongly in public service and value flexibility, placing greater weight on things other than the size of their pay packet.

There is, however, a unique, internal pay issue with the Fast Stream. Bizarrely, those on the scheme are paid less than their off-scheme equals. Fast Streamers work at HEO/SEO level, which is Civil Service-speak for lower-middle management. Off-scheme, these civil servants will typically earn (in London) between £38k and £52k. Fast Streamers, on the other hand, are paid (in London) £34k in their first year, slowly rising to £41k in their fourth year. This is despite Fast Streamers actually having additional responsibilities connected to the scheme! It seems that the differential here is more troubling for the scheme than its comparability to the pay of graduate roles in the private sector: much of the (very high) attrition is a result of people leaving for easier, better-paid, or simply more interesting (as being on the Fast Stream, as we shall see, absolutely does not guarantee you interesting work) roles within the Civil Service, as being a Fast Streamer grants you access to the bountiful internally-advertised sinecures on the ‘Civil Service Jobs’ page. The short-term gain for the employee is usually the Civil Service’s loss: the Cabinet Office forgoes strategic control of early-career talent, and the breadth of experience gained by the employee in question is narrowed.

The truth is that it is rarely pay alone that prompts a Fast Streamer to jump ship. In fact, those I have spoken to who have left the scheme scarcely mention it. Another reason I find the pay debate tedious is because the many other problems with the scheme are both deeper and yet (given the fiscal crisis Britain finds itself in) still potentially easier to address. Even if pay was hiked by fifty percent or more, the Fast Stream, as currently constituted, would bring in a lot more talented people, and then proceed to completely waste their abilities and put many of them off public service for the rest of their lives.

Recruitment: good ideas, badly implemented

That is, of course, if the recruitment process could even filter for that talent. Given the multiplicity of the scheme’s faults, it is probably best to start at the beginning.

A Fast Stream application is something much of Pimlico Journal’s relatively young readership will be familiar with; it is almost a rite of passage for the contemporary graduate. The Fast Stream’s continued popularity is borne out in the numbers: in the 2024 cycle, just shy of 50,000 applicants fought for one of the 915 spots available, a big increase on the year before, when many people were not aware the scheme was still on offer (due to a well-publicised but ultimately abortive attempt by Jacob Rees-Mogg to have it shut down). With 50,000 people to choose from, the Civil Service does have an understandably challenging task in selecting the best of the best; a task at which it often fails. To reassure you that the following criticism does not come from spite, I was a successful applicant. And, to also reassure you that it has not made me smug, it was in fact one of the only applications I made which was successful.

A primary flaw is that candidates, at the very outset, are able to choose up to four schemes they would be interested in, ranking them from most to least keen. The reasoning here is simple: the Fast Stream does not want to miss out on quality candidates who try for the more competitive schemes. In reality, the result is a large number of Fast Streamers taking up offers on schemes they’re not that bothered about or qualified for, setting themselves up for misery from the start. But more on that later.

One of the things the process almost gets right is that it is CV-blind, save for ensuring that you have a degree. However, for most schemes, only a 2:2 is required: a basic mistake to make, since to fail to get at least a 2:1 degree from a contemporary British university, even Oxbridge, marks you out as highly likely to be lazy, dim, or both — hardly suitable character traits for government (though you wouldn’t find yourself out of place). In practice, I doubt that this makes much difference, but it still gives the impression to candidates of low (or at least highly inconsistent) standards from the start.

However, in the main, this gives a meritocratic leg-up to the smart over the résumé-padding strivers, and affords the Civil Service an opportunity to deploy screens that will genuinely sort the wheat from the cognitive chaff. But again, the Civil Service doesn’t get this quite right. For most schemes, you will be asked to complete a reasonably effective g-loaded numerical test — which they then proceed to give very little weight, treating it more as a threshold than as a yardstick. Incidentally, I have been disturbed to hear in conversations with Fast Stream colleagues that others found this test difficult, because — flatly — it just isn’t, and the whole point of it should be to remove the candidates who do struggle.

After the numerical test, there is a Work-based Scenarios task, which is essentially a fairly ordinary Situational Judgment Test. This stage mostly serves to make sure you know how to navigate talking to biscuit-huffing Brenda about her fibromyalgia, and that you can reply to an email without accidentally cursing the recipient’s bloodline. It is redundant, anyway, because anyone who can pass both the numerical test and the eventual assessment centre will, even if thoroughly mediocre, still be perfectly able to operate in any office environment (and if they can’t, it will be for reasons more subtle than those that can be spotted by such a test).

The following Case Study Assessment is more pernicious. The Work-based Scenarios are at least basically intuitive; however, for the Case Study, one has to recognise that they want you to think like a Civil Servant. Readers hardly need be told why this is a bad idea. Of course, for the cannier, more cynical candidates, this is an easy game to play, but many honest people who think in ways which are productively perpendicular to Civil Service orthodoxy will be turfed out for daring to select more creative answers. This is the first substantive way in which the Fast Stream, despite its outward claims, begins to lobotomise the bright young graduates on which it preys.

If you are Blobby enough to slay this Cerberus, or at least can pretend to be, you will find yourself invited to an assessment centre. Some get to bypass the tests and proceed straight to Go — those who have completed the Civil Service’s summer internship, which up until a couple of years ago was restricted exclusively to ethnic minorities and people who identify as ‘poor’. But nowadays, for some reason it seems the bulk of the interns are chummy private school Charlies, and this type — for better or worse — pops up in every breakout room of the Assessment Centre. This is an exercise which, like the Case Study, punishes the honest and rewards the cynical. Unlike a traditional interview, your performance in the face-to-face tasks is scored against a highly-standardised mark scheme. This is understandable, but results in high scores for anyone who knows what buzzwords they are supposed to recite and when exactly they’re supposed to interrupt their fellow candidates.

The ‘AC’, as it is usually known, consists of a number of parts. In one section, you are asked to formulate policy ideas and their potential drawbacks in response to a policy issue. When time is up, your written response is submitted for marking. Now, in what is becoming a recurring theme, this is yet another element which could be potentially very effective for selecting strong candidates, especially if conducted by a top private sector employer, but unfortunately — much like the rest of the ‘AC’ — you are assessed by an anonymous lifelong public sector employee, using the aforementioned highly-standardised mark scheme, usually with about the same breadth of imagination as a contemporary television screenwriter. I was bemused when I received my own feedback: the assessor informed me that while my own policy ideas were very well developed, they lacked ‘creativity’. This was an interesting comment, considering that (unusually) my degree course had taught me a lot about said policy area, and I had never come across anything similar to what I was suggesting.

I assume this was because — like the idiot I am — I didn’t suggest a Hub of some kind. It has become a well-memed phenomenon, but I can tell you from the inside that yes, the median civil servant genuinely believes the zenith of policy innovation is to introduce a Hub; or, if you’re bolder yet, to indirectly subsidise demand for certain Good Things (nb., ‘supply’ is not a word that has yet entered the Civil Service lexicon). A real once-in-generation genius might even, with a great deal of focus and effort, craft a ban on a Bad Thing. Given who the assessors are, these are the sorts of ‘ideas’ you will be rewarded for suggesting. This is yet another part of a process that seems to primarily serve to inculcate a kind of Stockholm Syndrome in the minds of many Fast Streamers, whereby the tired and intellectually lazy thinking of the modern Civil Service becomes habit through at first cynical, and then eventually sincere, repetition.

Another section of the ‘AC’ is a group data interpretation task; the kind of thing that causes any normal person to break out in a cold sweat. The difficulty lies not in the task, but in restraining oneself from doing everything out of frustration with some of the other candidates. (Of course, this may actually be intentional on the part of HR.) It was remarkable to me how some of the candidates at the ‘AC’ managed to get past the numerical test, given that they struggled with charts no more complex than those in a GCSE Geography textbook. I can only speculate about how they got through. Perhaps they got others to do the test for them (something that is hardly unknown)? Or maybe the threshold on the numerical test really is just that low? Who knows. Either way, while I am aware that I may sound callous or arrogant here, because there are some genuinely competent and intelligent people who are just not adept at this sort of thing, I’m not sure that these people should be fast-tracked into senior positions in government. They may be able to thrive elsewhere in the world. However, the effective administration of the modern state requires a basic level of statistical literacy some clearly do not possess, and which is also very much not guaranteed by the Fast Stream’s selection process.

The story of the recruitment process, then, is essentially one of wasted opportunities. Much of it makes sense in the abstract, but is misapplied and mismanaged to the point of redundancy. Given the increasingly pernicious influence of Tiger Mothers and ‘Spring Weeks’, the CV-blind approach is a great starting point, but only if the rest of the process is focused on identifying skills which wouldn’t be clearly or reliably signalled by a CV. It is also true that which university one attended and their academic record at said university can be one of the most valuable signals a competent but poorly-connected candidate possesses.

A meritocratic system would account for this, elevate the numerical test, replace the work-based scenarios and case studies with a literacy and comprehension-anchored thinking skills assessment, and allow independent (potentially even third-party) assessors to measure candidates’ performance at the assessment centre. Objective schema, as applied to face-to-face exchanges, can probably work in some circumstances, but for the most part any person off the street can identify a clever and able person from a few hours of interaction, even if they are shy. As long as the reasons for accepting or rejecting a candidate are reasonable, and are recorded and returned to the candidate, the formula is going to work better than using a mark scheme.

At an absolute minimum, the entry requirement should be raised to a 2:1, and there is also a strong case for somewhat restricting the types of degree that are accepted. If the Civil Service wants elite, it has to ask for it first — or at least give the appearance of doing so.

Placement: an administrative disaster

Once a Fast Streamer has made it out of the trenches of the ‘AC’ (and for some, beyond also the unremarkable final selection board), they will be awarded with an offer. For many, this is where the counter-intuitiveness of the Fast Stream’s structure begins to manifest itself. With the scheme I am on (and so far as I am aware this applies to all others), an offer-holder will not be told any further details of their future employment, because at that stage the Fast Stream does not actually know where the offer-holder will be posted.

The system as constituted is that a department will bid for a Fast Streamer with the Cabinet Office, who will approve or deny such bids. The number of bids then determines the number of offers made, but apparently without any conscious selection of candidates based on the nature of bids received. Things now start to go awry: the Fast Stream, having been CV-blind, has to hold further meetings with its offer-holders and drag them through surveys to figure out where they’d best be placed.

It is not very good at this. ‘Policy’ Fast Streamers, in particular, end up posted to areas about which they have literally no prior knowledge, while others who do have experience in that area are sent elsewhere. Nobody wins, especially the people for and about whom the policy is made. The decisions are final, and opaque: Fast Stream offer holders are not told which postings are available beforehand, presumably to avoid exacerbating any potential disappointment. While this makes a certain degree of sense, it also means that offer-holders are unable to make the case for their suitability for specific roles. To top it all off, postings are not revealed until six or seven weeks before the start date — months after the offer comes through, and often after a working offer-holder’s notice is due — leading to some having to either commit to postings they don’t want, or to forgo the opportunity entirely.

For many departments, the Fast Stream is seen as little more than a source of labour to fill recruitment gaps. Where roles cannot be filled through the ordinary channels, Fast Stream bids are cynically submitted in the knowledge that, if successful with the Cabinet Office, the pothole created by a role that few people want is guaranteed to be awkwardly patched over with some keen young graduate who has no actual choice in the matter. The predictable consequence is that competent people are wasted in roles they don’t enjoy, and often fulfil poorly as a result, depressing morale and coarsening the quality of public services.

A corollary of the recruitment-gap Fast Streamer is the legacy Fast Streamer, who is posted to a team which has had a Fast Streamer for years, sometimes decades. The advantage of this is that the team knows how to handle the Fast Streamer, and how to set expectations. Unfortunately, often the role is representative of public sector inertia, in that it has ceased to be necessary or relevant, and thus the Fast Streamer does either pointless work or not enough work at all. A British ‘DOGE’ could probably identify hundreds of Fast Streamers in these posts, who are themselves actually capable of efficient and productive public service, but are directed into irrelevant mouse-wiggling emaildom by a Civil Service that fails to ever ask itself why it still does any one thing in particular.

And yet conversely, under-employed Fast Streamers are also often the product of departments and teams submitting a bid for the first time without much knowledge of what the Fast Stream is or what it does. When combined with the Fast Stream’s total failure at allocating postings intelligently, this is lethal for productivity. These Fast Streamers then find themselves in roles for which they are ill-equipped. The team, being largely unaware of the Fast Streamer’s experience or future direction, find themselves struggling to delegate appropriate tasks, leaving the Fast Streamer as little more than a purposeless burden.

As we can see, then, there are many problems with the current system, from many different directions. But the result in sum is simple: the Fast Stream’s curious approach to postings has produced a situation whereby candidates apply for unknown jobs, are allocated to unsuitable roles while suitable ones are filled by other candidates, and then eventually do inappropriate, boring, or scarce work for years of their youth. Those who stay in the lottery often do so only because of the looming carrot of a £55k job at the end of the 3- or 4-year stick, which is really quite a good salary for a young person in the public sector. But many have to endure the wrong work to get to that point, making them ill-prepared and cynical in the process, wasting time and potential for both the Fast Streamer and the Civil Service. Given how widespread the knowledge of this state of affairs is for Fast Streamers, it is certain that the administrators of the scheme know that they’re failing too.

Work: systematic underemployment

Before you officially start on the Fast Stream, you attend what is actually one of the most enjoyable elements of the scheme: the Base Camp. This does, however, start with a bad omen: the receipt of a workbook for the week, a document strongly reminiscent of the planner I had to carry around as a student at a middling comprehensive. It is, frankly, an infantilising instrument of ‘reflection’, an activity I happen to loathe as a young and, more importantly, English man. Luckily, usage of this workbook was not as rigorously enforced as it was by my secondary school form tutors, but it signalled the unhealthy presence HR was to have in my immediate future, as well as their deeply strange approach to training — but more on this in the next section.

At the Base Camp, to fill the time not spent drinking with the rest of your cohort, you are placed in a group which develops a policy idea across the days for presentation to senior civil servants at the end. The emphasis was on creating something new and exciting, though that the target for the policy was Hull (of all places) made this challenging. This was a competition, with the top group winning a prize for their innovative thinking. The group that did win came up with an idea that was so cutting-edge, so pioneering, I’d literally never heard of it before in my life, except for the fact that it had already existed in my hometown for a number of years. It was a well-considered proposal by a group of clearly earnest and intelligent Fast Streamers, but I do suspect that a large part of their success was attributable to the fact they’d stirred the loins of the senior civil servants by uttering the magic H-word. Against a Hub, what chance did we stand?

After the Base Camp, I was thrust into my own posting, which was — thankfully — fairly well-suited to my experience. I have enjoyed a lot of it so far, but struggled with the workload. Which, to be clear, is much too small. I am an ambitious man in my early twenties, so to be mouse-wiggling for half the day is actually more stressful than pulling a twelve-hour shift in the Excel mines. While this is hardly a rare experience for junior and mid-level employees in the private sector nowadays, it is a lot more common in the Civil Service. And yet, despite the lack of work, I also appear to have been placed in virtually the only actually busy team in the entire Civil Service. As a result, my colleagues rarely have the time to delegate, and (more crucially) train me to be able to take on their own work, because I belong to a real profession (unlike ‘Policy’). Of course, none of this should be at all surprising given the inherent administrative failings, detailed above, in the Fast Stream’s approach to placements.

There are a lot of employees in the Civil Service who do very little, but since I’ve spent a lot of breath criticising my public sector peers, I should note that the people I work with are genuinely dedicated, capable people, something that would be more reassuring if it weren’t for the fact that dedication and capability are traits which often seem to be negatively correlated with seniority. My own stereotypical idleness thus induces guilt as well as lunacy, given how busy I know others to be. It’s not like I can do much else in the time, certainly nothing screenless, because I have to keep my little Teams tick in the green.

My experience is by no means unique. The ‘Spare Fast Streamer’ is such a common archetype that the very phrase is part of the Fast Streamer lexicon. It’s so bad that some departments are well-known for it among Fast Streamers — without naming names, it tends to be the agency bodies and the less glamorous offices on Whitehall. I suspect the median Fast Streamer does not manage to fill their 7.4 hours: in a pub conversation with Fast Stream colleagues, shock and awe greeted the revelation by someone that they recently worked, for one day, until 7pm.

This points us to another reason why pay is largely a non-issue: per hour worked, Fast Streamers are sometimes better paid than investment bankers of the same age. This is not merely a rhetorical point. If a fourth-year Fast Streamer does twenty hours of real work in a 37-hour week (something that is hardly atypical), their effective wage is around £40 per hour. By contrast, a junior investment banker on £100k will earn an effective wage of £38.50 per hour if they work a 50-hour week. While we can debate the latter’s salary (as this will usually be swollen by big bonuses), this is also not only a very, very conservative estimate of the hours at most banks, but also a pre-tax calculation. Regardless of the true figures, the point is clear enough.

Training: from the merely pointless to the genuinely infantilising

Alongside the constant thumb-twiddling inherent in my job, the most maddening element is the myriad ‘Learning and Development’ requirements. This does, at least, take up some more of one’s copious time, but only with the most tedious HR guff imaginable. The Fast Streamer is mandated to produce Objectives, including Posting Objectives, Development Objectives, and Corporate Objectives. Posting Objectives basically amount to ‘I will do these parts of my job’. Development Objectives are closer to an exercise you might do with a therapist: ‘I will be better in this way.’ The Corporate Objective is what you will do beyond your role to serve the strategic goals of the Fast Stream. Writing these all takes a lot of time, and the whole thing is very badly explained by the people that run the Fast Stream. It’s a quietly humiliating thing to do: reducing adult professionals to the level of a scolded teenager with a decree from the Deputy Head to write an action plan for Behaving Better; yet another of the many ways in which the Fast Stream seems to treat you like a child.

These objectives — at least the Posting and Development ones — just aren’t necessary, especially for anyone halfway self-aware. Most roles have well-defined expectations, and most people know which skills they have and which they lack. It’s almost offensive to make people track this like it’s their progress in Triple Science. If the Fast Stream wants people to have certain skills, it should mandate training for it, like in every other organisation.

Concurrent to the Objectives is the requirement to hold monthly meetings with your manager to discuss Development. You can imagine how brief these meetings are in my case, given I am a manifestly cynical young man, and my manager is no-nonsense male professional less than a decade away from retirement. This is a blessing, though I do have to record the details of our discussions for some poor sod at the Cabinet Office to read. Mostly we talk about the work I’m currently doing, a far more effective use of time. It is vaguely sinister how much the Fast Stream’s HR demands of us, in a way that actually violates a certain trust held between employer and employee. I understand the need for monitoring, and the emphasis on development; I just happen to think that failure and success are broadly evident, and any organisation that seeks as much detailed information as the Fast Stream does should perhaps expend that energy on considering why it can’t see those things more clearly.

Through all of HR’s little games run the Civil Service’s ‘Behaviours’. You are required to reference these as much as possible and live by them. They are your professional commandments, and they also happen to be the basis for the assessment of candidates in the recruitment process. This is by no means something unique to the Civil Service: many of those in the private sector will be familiar with a similar regimen, with varying degrees of presence in their day-to-day roles. Private companies, however, will usually either not take them quite so seriously.

It is clear that the supposedly ‘underfunded’ Civil Service gave Deloitte or KPMG an obscene pile of cash to whip up these lovechildren of the platitude and the buzzword. Nowadays, Civil Servants both existing and prospective are expected to demonstrate performance of these ‘Behaviours’, rather than, I don’t know, simply showing their superiors what they’ve actually achieved. The ‘Behaviours’ themselves range from the cringingly jargonistic (‘delivering at pace’), to the curiously obvious (‘making effective decisions’), and finally the almost unhelpful (‘seeing the big picture’). When you include such ‘Behaviours’ as ‘working together’, that perennial sense of infantilisation returns. It’s just all so tiresome.

Conclusion

We all already know that long ago, the Civil Service part-exchanged the Rolls Royce for a tired and leaky Peugeot diesel, but now it risks writing off the Fast Stream Jaguar too. Frankly, it’s currently being driven directly into a wall by people who insist the passengers demonstrate how they’re Wearing A Seatbelt Correctly. The whole experience is becoming like having a bad parent; the sort of one who fails at the things they are supposed to do for you and then over-involves themselves in the matters in which you should have agency and autonomy. It is at once isolating and enfeebling.

I had wanted to be in public service for much of my youth, owing to a perhaps naïve ideal of patriotic duty; that view still lurks in my subconscious. Despite my ordinary background, I am not someone who is especially motivated by money. I hold on to the hope that I might be able to influence the British state for the better. However, the Fast Stream makes it more and more difficult to maintain that professional altruism: like most normal people, I want to work hard, do the job well, and be left alone as much as possible while I’m doing it. Above all, I merely want to achieve something, anything, a thing that doesn’t have to be codified into an Objective and uploaded to a portal.

Again: I am not alone in my frustration. I have spoken to dozens of current and former Fast Streamers who have similar concerns about how the scheme is being run. By pushing away bright and ambitious people, beginning with the recruitment process, through to the placements and the work itself, and down to the training, the Civil Service is only digging itself deeper into its own hole of incapacity. Those who remain are dragged down with the rest, incubated with the stunted imagination and ersatz-corporate HR mindset that the Fast Stream tries to cultivate. Underemployment is strangely exhausting. So too is HR’s omnipresence. There are clearly plenty who wouldn’t tolerate it any longer, and I am hoping I won’t be forced to join them.

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This article was written by an anonymous contributor who is on the Civil Service Fast Stream. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

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