Inside the civil service: voices suppressed
BACP Workplace, July 2024

Workplace bullying is a perennial problem for organisations which is estimated to cost the UK £18 billion per year, according to a study by ACAS.¹ But there is a human cost too and one that workplace counsellors will bear witness to when they see clients referred from organisations across the sectors. The last 25 years of my professional life has been spent working for the Civil Service as a manager, as a mediator and supervisor in the Home Office, as a trade union representative for the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS), as well as serving as Vice President of the Heathrow and West London branch of PCS.

I’ve represented employees undergoing disciplinary and grievance procedures, provided mediation to try to informally resolve bullying-related issues, and immersed myself in tackling unacceptable workplace behaviour. In the process, I’ve also been subjected to bullying, which has only strengthened my determination to call out this destructive workplace behaviour and work to create change. 

In this article, I share my research into the lived experience of victims of bullying in the Civil Service, which has informed and guided my interventions to support those victims in my role as a counsellor and psychotherapist. I hope that by sharing my research, it will be of value to counsellors, psychotherapists and other helping professionals. 

Setting the scene 

In the 2020 Civil Service Staff Survey (in which 66% of staff responded), 9% of respondents felt that they were being bullied.² As there were approximately 430,000 people employed in the Civil Service at that time, it equates to 25,500 people responding to feeling bullied. Of those, 39% reported the bullying, but unfortunately 70% of those respondents felt that no appropriate action was taken by their management. In a recent survey undertaken by the PCS union, the largest union for civil servants in the UK, 45% of their health and safety representatives reported that bullying was the second biggest issue their members faced, the largest being stress. This raises questions about the culture of work within the Civil Service, and how seriously the issue of workplace bullying is taken and responded to. 

Westminster culture 

In 2017, the #MeToo movement in the USA had consequences for UK workplace environments, and brought abuses of power more keenly into the public’s awareness. A series of reports made by junior staffers at the House of Commons followed, relating to inappropriate sexual behaviour experienced at work. The scandal at the time earned the name ‘Pestminster’. The following year, judge, Dame Laura Cox, conducted an independent inquiry into workplace bullying and harassment at the Palace of Westminster, and interviewed 200 people who felt bullied while they were working there. 

Contributing to the behaviour, Cox reported an ongoing culture of deference and subservience, which was perpetuated by ‘the acquiescence of senior management, the institutional minimising of complaints, the lack of effective procedures to address them, and the lack of support for those targeted by such treatment.² Furthermore, Cox reported the severe impact that these bullying behaviours had on those who were subjected to them – often, people who had previously considered themselves competent professionals were experiencing a loss of confidence, eating and sleep disturbance, mood swings and panic attacks. 

Commenting on the important role of workplace counselling in supporting victims of bullying, Cox noted that the waiting times to access counselling support are too long, and that the EAP counselling service is ‘overworked, under-resourced, underpromoted and undervalued by the senior administration.^’2 She further commented on the need for such provision for staff, stating that: ‘a service of this kind is becoming increasingly important in the workplace and its work deserves to be expanded and promoted.^’2

The need for workplace counselling in the Civil Service was highlighted once again last year by Helen MacNamara, former Permanent Secretary at the Cabinet Office during the COVID-19 pandemic. In her witness statement³ on the UK Government’s handling of the pandemic to the COVID-19 Inquiry, she highlighted the evolution of a macho culture at the heart of Government, where female employees were ignored and talked over at meetings, being made to feel invisible. It was, MacNamara said, ‘a he who shouts loudest culture’, which did not respect the needs of women or people of global majority background. Furthermore, she said of the failings of the Cabinet Office that, ‘the most serious of which was the failure to provide counselling or psychological support’³ to the people who worked there. 

What is workplace bullying? 

The UK Government’s own definition states that: ‘Bullying and harassment is behaviour that makes someone feel intimidated or offended. Harassment is unlawful under the Equality Act 2010.’⁴ While this offers an overarching and general definition, it could be open to subjective interpretation, and I’ve found the more specific definition offered by ACAS to be more helpful. Their guidance on what constitutes bullying states: ‘it is offensive, intimidating, malicious or insulting behaviour, an abuse or misuse of power through means that undermine, humiliate, denigrate or injure the recipient.’¹ 

Currently, workplace bullying is not in itself illegal, unless there is evidence that it is based on one of the protected characteristics of the Equality Act 2010. However, I’d suggest that this is at odds with the spirit of the Equality Act 2010 and the Serious Crime Act 2015, both of which outlaw acts of domestic abuse, such as coercive control. This means that while it is illegal to abuse your family members with coercive control, it is not illegal to abuse your colleagues in the workplace. I’d argue that this inconsistency should be a cause of concern for anyone invested in our emotional and psychological health at work. 

I have incorporated the terminology of the Serious Crime Act 2015 into the definition of bullying that I used for my study, defining it as ‘personal oppression by abuse of power or social agency that has a serious, adverse effect on another person’. I’d suggest that someone who has been signed off sick from work with work-induced stress due to bullying is suffering a ‘serious, adverse effect’, and this in itself should motivate action to enable the victim to receive effective support interventions, both therapeutic and managerial. 

Behaviour in Westminster 

There have been high profile cases brought to the public’s attention whereby influential and powerful figures in Westminster have been investigated for bullying behaviour. Former Home Secretary, Priti Patel, was independently investigated by senior civil servant, Sir Alexander Allan, who found that, ‘Her approach on occasions amounted to behaviour that can be described as bullying in terms of the impact felt by individuals.’⁵ Given that the Cox Report had been published only two years earlier, it seems astonishing that the former Home Secretary did not appear to realise that ‘some occasions of shouting and swearing’⁵ constituted bullying. 

The then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, responded by overruling the Allan report and deciding that Priti Patel had not breached the Ministerial Code of conduct. This suggests that bullying behaviour is not only seen as an acceptable way for ministers to manage their staff, but that there is one code of conduct for staff from which ministers are exempt, and quite another for ministers in which they can behave as they please, including depriving their staff of respect and dignity at work. This has further called into question whether the Ministerial Code of conduct is fit for purpose.⁶ 

There are similar cases of bullying behaviour in the Civil Service which have since come to the fore. Last year, the then Deputy Prime Minister, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, Dominic Raab, was also the subject of an independent inquiry commissioned by the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, into allegations of bullying by his staff across three government departments. The enquiry, carried out by independent employment law barrister, Adam Tolley KC, found that Raab had been overly aggressive in meetings, abused his power and humiliated, undermined and intimidated his staff using behaviour that was, ‘beyond what was reasonably necessary’ to enact his management style.⁷ Although Raab said in response that he had not intended to bully anyone, Tolley found that it was reasonable that Raab ought to have been aware of the impact of his behaviour on his subordinates.

Emotional abuse 

Looking more broadly, I believe that workplace bullying is a form of emotional abuse, and it needs to be well understood by mental health practitioners engaged in supporting workplace mental health wellbeing. However, while it is illegal for anyone to physically assault their work colleagues in the workplace, emotional abuse is not illegal. It’s my view that employment legislation needs to change to keep pace with the changes made in other settings; for example, domestic abuse is widely recognised as something that is not always physical abuse, and the same now needs to apply in an employment setting. This stems from my research which explored the devastating impact that bullying can have across all aspects of a person’s life – the psychological, the physical, the social and the spiritual, in terms of the impact it has on the meaning people make of their lives.⁸ 

Experiences of bullying 

In my study, the impact of bullying on the respondents was largely devastating. I carried out a qualitative study using in-depth interviews with people who had worked in the Civil Service in the previous five years, and I analysed the data using interpretative phenomenological analysis. All the respondents recognised feeling that they had noticed the start of bullying behaviours towards them when they had shown some type of ‘otherness’ to the uniformity of staff profile in their work area. 

Their ‘otherness’ could include behaviour such as challenging practices in their workplace, either established-practices which perpetuated an outdated status quo, or practices which were undermining, humiliating or discriminatory. Staff with disabilities also appear to have fallen outside a requirement for conformity, with periods of sickness absence or a requirement for reasonable adjustments, which received a hostile response from an individual’s line manager, developing into a chain of bullying behaviours. While disability discrimination is clearly against the Equality Act 2010, these episodes of bullying were ‘dressed up’ as something else; for example, by using the department’s attendance management procedure to threaten people’s jobs if they did not conform and behave like everyone else, irrespective of what their individual needs might be.  

A performance management system (now abolished in some Civil Service departments but not all), appears to have been used to punish staff who challenged their managers by alleging that they had demonstrated ‘poor behaviours’ or were underperforming in other ways. Some respondents were subjected to false allegations by their managers as a precursor to embarking on a performance or disciplinary procedure. 

I’d argue that using departmental management systems which exist to ensure that the management of staff is efficient, equitable and fair, to instead bully people who are in a poor position to respond, is a form of institutionalised bullying. The checks and balances of having a countersigning manager, i.e. the line manager’s manager, to independently and fairly assess how someone is managing, seemed ineffectual from the experiences that my respondents described. The countersigning manager either took a grade-conscious view of the situation and supported the line manager (irrespective of the facts of the case), or they took a laissez-faire view – by not getting involved and trying to ignore the situation where possible. 

Sick leave 

All of the respondents in my study were signed off sick with work-related stress at some stage while experiencing the bullying behaviour. Respondents shared a wide variety of similar symptoms, including general anxiety, eating and sleeping disturbances, severe symptoms of depression that went beyond low mood (such as not feeling able to get out of bed), feelings of pointlessness, paranoia, flashbacks, withdrawal, alcohol abuse and suicide ideation. Some respondents reported experiencing migraine headaches and stomach pains. Their reported emotional and physical symptoms seemed to match the criteria for PTSD specified in DSM-5.⁹ 

Returning to work was challenging and respondents either made a gradual return or started an entirely different job or role. All respondents experienced a loss of trust in their employer and their managers, with many reporting suffering both a loss of self-confidence and a sense of self. Having previously regarded themselves as competent professionals, they were left doubting their own abilities, not only in the workplace but in their daily lives outside work. Others found that, where once their job had given them an important sense of meaning in their lives, this had been lost and they were left with a sense of meaning vacuum. 

Reflections on therapy

Most of the respondents accessed some form of counselling or psychotherapy, either from their EAP or from a private therapist, while they were experiencing the bullying at work. How helpful the respondents found the therapy depended on a number of factors, including how well the therapist understood the client’s work environment. Some reported feeling frustrated at having to explain their work situation in detail to the therapist, which they felt was limiting in the value that the sessions had for them. 

This reflects the findings of a German study, where the victims of bullying were treated as inpatients at a German psychotherapy clinic,¹⁰ and gave feedback that they felt their therapy experience was hindered by the therapist not having an adequate knowledge of their work area. 

In my research, I found that the micro-behaviours and micro-aggressions that facilitate bullying, particularly institutionalised bullying, are not well-recognised, identified and called out early enough by victims. This may be because they do not recognise these initial hostile acts as bullying, which is why therapists, trade union representatives or other helping professionals need to be able to offer appropriate support to name and address what is taking place before the situation escalates. 

To build an effective therapeutic alliance, the therapist needs a deep understanding of the nature of bullying in order to work at the edge of the client’s awareness, and help to deepen their understanding. Not all the respondents found that the therapy they were provided with met their needs, for example, single modality therapy such as CBT was not helpful to all. Others found that analytical psychotherapy, where they could explore their past experiences that the bullying episode had triggered, helped them to move forward.  

The number of sessions offered was also an issue of concern. Many felt that the six-session model, on offer via their EAP, was not sufficient. Unhelpfully, some reported requesting further sessions and were allocated a new therapist, and so they had to explain their experiences again and build a new therapeutic relationship from scratch. Respondents also talked about their need for after-care, after a case of workplace bullying had been concluded (usually, with either party being moved to an alternative workplace). A space was needed to continue to process the trauma of their experiences, whereby they could gain support as they developed a changed perspective and life-interpretation which had come about due to the bullying behaviour experienced. 

Closing thoughts 

Workplace bullying within the Civil Service will remain an ongoing issue, despite the introduction of various initiatives to tackle it over recent years. To create meaningful change, a holistic view of the institutional culture of the organisation needs to be taken, where its internal processes, such as the ‘blame, shame and punish’¹¹ approach to maintaining standards, are replaced with alternative dispute resolution strategies, and outdated performance management is replaced with regular dialogue and constructive relationship building. 

This would highlight, instead, the importance of identifying micro-aggressions and resolving them at the earliest opportunity, rather than letting them develop and fester while a lengthy grievance process of questionable effectiveness trundles on, further damaging people who are already in a vulnerable position. 

By embracing a more person-centred approach to management, the Civil Service could leave behind the culture of ‘strong’ or ‘robust’ top-down, hierarchical management that was so popular in the last century. It remains to be seen whether the next Government and organisational culture in the UK will eventually accept that it should be a human right to attend your workplace without being emotionally abused, and support that with legal and managerial instruments. 

In the meantime, counselling and pychotherapeutic interventions have a vital role to play in enabling victims of bullying to recognise the nature of what they are being subjected to, and helping them to find that suppressed voice to call out that enough is enough. As Helen MacNamara put it in her evidence to the COVID-19 Inquiry, ‘The absence of this support not only damaged the people involved but I am sure that it impacted the quality of the work. Both matter.’³