How are civil officials in Britain classified?

Abstract: Britain is a typical country of grade classification system, and the formation of its civil officials grade classification system has gone through a gradual and effective accumulation process. since the 1980s, with the promotion of Britain's administrative reforms and changes in the pay management system, the broadbanding system has gradually become the form of the system of classification and management of the civil officials in the United Kingdom and the direction of development. The British broadbanding management system includes several aspects such as broadbanding management object, salary fixing power configuration, salary broadbanding design, and the relationship between salary and performance, etc. Its implementation is conducive to the improvement of the performance level of civilian officials and the utilization efficiency of manpower, and is also conducive to the reduction of personnel costs. However, this new type of classification system must have a certain organizational foundation, institutional safeguards, guiding concepts and policy drivers, it also divides the unity of the civil service, shaking the tradition of the civil service system, changing the spiritual qualities of the civil service, and its effective operation is faced with the establishment of a reasonable degree of assessment system and the responsibility of the public **** these two basic challenges.

I

The English term "Civil Servant" (plural "Civil Service") is derived from "Crown's Servant". The English term "Civil Servant" (plural "Civil Service") is derived from "Crown's Servant", which originally meant "King's Servant". With the development of the bourgeois democratic movement and the universal recognition and respect of civil rights, it gradually became "Citizen's Servant", which is translated into Chinese as "Citizen's Servant". "Translated into Chinese, some are called "civil servants" and some are called "civil officials". Civil servants in the United Kingdom consisted of two parts, namely, Administrative Officers (AOs) and Administrative Officers (AOs). Administrative Officers refer to the composition of the central government, including the Prime Minister, Cabinet Ministers and other elected or politically appointed senior officials, this group of people and political parties in power **** in and out of the need to assume political responsibility. The civil service officials generally refer to government officials who do not advance or retreat with the Cabinet, who are recruited after a public examination, and who have not violated the law or committed any major disciplinary offences, and who are allowed to have a permanent career. Usually the civilian management system is mainly for officials, including the rights and obligations of these people, selection, recruitment, assessment, training, promotion, rewards and punishments, exchanges, avoidance, salary and benefits, retirement and other aspects.

Britain has always been a typical country to implement the classification system of taste. 1853 Macaulay Report and 1854 Northcote-Qu William Report are the two milestone documents of the British civil service system can be established, the core spirit of the two reports is to emphasize the principle of public examination and meritocracy. 1870 British Privy Council issued a decree. The Privy Council issued a decree in 1870, dividing all civil servants into two grades: senior civil servants and junior civil servants. Senior civil servants had to have a university degree, and although there was no restriction on the academic qualifications of low-level civil servants, they could never be promoted to the senior civil service, and in 1876, low-level civil servants were divided into the adult grade and the schoolboy grade, and after serving for a considerable period of time, they might be promoted to the senior grade through strict qualification examinations and procedures. In addition, in addition to the Senior Civil Service and the Lower Civil Service, an additional category of clerical officers was created to transcribe documents, which was the predecessor of the Assistant Clerical Officers, and in 1906, the Ministry of Finance of the United Kingdom issued an order to create an intermediate grade between the Senior Civil Service and the Lower Civil Service, which was the predecessor of the Executive Civil Service. In this way, the four grades classification system of the British civil servants was initially formed. 1920, the British Wheatley Committee divided civil servants into two categories of four grades: the first category was to help formulate policies and organize and guide the government of senior civil servants; the second category was to engage in the transactional or day-to-day mechanical work of the low-level civil servants. The first category of civil officials contains two grades: the administrative grade, which includes such six grades as Undersecretary of Government and Superintendent; and the executive grade, which includes such seven grades as Executive Officer-in-Charge and Director Executive Officer. The second category also contains two grades: the clerical grade, of which there are two main types: the senior clerk and the clerk; and the assistant clerk grade.

After entering the 20th century, the division of labor in society became more and more detailed, and the scope of functions of the government staff was also expanding, many professional and technical work into the field of government work, and it was necessary to absorb the experts of various disciplines to participate in government management. In order to meet this need, the classification of taste increased horizontal division. Britain between 1945 and 1968 will be divided into two categories of civil servants general administrative staff and professional staff. General administrators*** were divided into four grades: administrative, executive, service, and assistant service. Professionals and general administrators differ in the nature of their work and in the criteria and methods of selection. Professionals include seven categories: legal staff, statisticians, researchers, engineering professionals, medical staff, accounting professionals, postal staff, etc. The 1968 civil service reform led by Rod Fulton was a major step forward in the development of the civil service. Fulton headed the Civil Service Reform Commission also recommended that the original category-based civil service structure should be abolished, and that several categories of general administrative staff should be merged into a unified administrative group to establish a new civil service structure based on ministries and groups, which was adopted by then British Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Harold Wilson, the then British Prime Minister, adopted this proposal and implemented it in 1971. This new civil service structure consists of a four-part structure: an open group of about 1,000 top-level civil servants, including three grades of permanent undersecretary, undersecretary and undersecretary of state; a general civil service ministry comprising about 75% of the civil servants with a unified recruitment, classification and salary scale; a single departmental ministry ministry ministry ministry ministry; and a cross-departmental ministry ministry ministry ministry ministry ministry ministry ministry ministry ministry ministry ministry ministry ministry. Since Fulton's reforms, the tasteful categorization characteristic of the British civil service structure has waned .

"Since the Conservative Party won the 1979 election, the British government civil service has been undergoing a transformation that is a break with tradition. The government has reformed every aspect of the civil service in terms of regulation, personnel, structure, function and process". In fact, since the early 1980s, there have been three main pressures on pay levels in the public ****sector in the OECD countries: first, labor market pressures, with the phenomenon of higher-ranking salaries in the public ****sector being lower than those in the private sector becoming increasingly serious, causing problems in recruitment and retention of talent in the public ****sector in many countries. Second, the pressure to improve management efficiency, the government to provide customer service quality in the most cost-effective way, rely on more effective pay system as a management tool. Thirdly, individual economic considerations have created pressure to improve pay flexibility in both the public and private sectors. In particular, in the public sector, it is important to keep pay costs down in order to reduce public spending and government deficits. As a result, OECD countries, including the UK, have tried to use pay as a way of changing the way public **** services operate.

In the UK, between 1980 and 1985, personnel costs were mainly controlled by reducing employment. However, during this period, although the number of employees and personnel costs were strictly controlled, the actual cost of employment still increased year by year. 1985, the introduction of operating cost control methods, and between 1986 and 1987, operating cost ceilings were set for each department. All departments were required to develop three-year plans that clearly reflected how efficiency gains would offset salary and price increases. Departments were required to obtain Treasury approval for the portion of employment costs that accounted for more than half of their operating costs. Departments are required to publish their operating cost accounts annually, detailing all variations and deviations from the cap. Any excess over the operating cost cap must be deducted from the following year's budget. In addition to the review and control of operating costs, departments authorized to set salaries must also obtain the Ministry of Finance's approval of their salary negotiation strategies and changes to their payroll systems. In 1988, the "Pay for Performance System" was gradually re-drafted, and in 1992, the "Civilian Management Function Act" was enacted to strengthen the personnel authority and responsibility of the heads of agencies, implement personnel decentralization, and pay for performance, etc. In the same year, the 13 administrative agencies began to implement the group pay for performance system. In 1994, the White Paper on "Civil Service Sustainability and Reform" was published, which strengthened the authorization of pay to be managed by departments and agencies themselves. 1996 saw the enactment of the Civil Service Act and the new Civil Service Regulations in accordance with the Order in Council 1995. The Civil Service Regulations set out a policy of decentralization and flexibility in pay; fully empowered departments and agencies to set their own pay scales; and implemented a new "Senior Civil Service" system (with new pay scales), which came into effect in 2002.

This method of using finance to control the operating costs of departments and agencies, including labor costs, allows for greater authority to be given to subordinates and allows for the implementation of a variety of pay systems by departments and agencies, the core concept of which is to change the traditional seniority-based grade and fixed pay scale structure used in the traditional bureaucratic organization to a broad pay band that incorporates a performance factor, and then to further adopt a more personalized pay system. The core idea is to change the grade-based and fixed pay structure of traditional bureaucratic organizations to a broad pay band that incorporates performance factors, and then to go further and adopt a more personalized performance pay system. The result of this reform of the pay system was not only the establishment of a flexible civilian pay system that was personalized and performance-oriented, but also the emergence of a new classification system for civilian officials, namely the broadbanding system.

II

Broad banding is a new approach to personnel management that has emerged in recent years, and is in fact a compromise between several management methods: it retains the advantages of job evaluation, while at the same time seeking to ensure flexibility in the management of jobs. Its main approach is to place jobs in a broad occupational classification scale and a few pay bands in an organization with dozens of pay grades and hundreds of occupational classifications, where managers have the autonomy to dispose of them within this broad zone of differentiation without having to seek approval from the personnel department for endless reclassifications and so on. At the same time, it reduces the number of career mobility steps for employees, thus making their career development clearer . The greatest feature of the broadbanding system is the compression of grades, compressing the original dozen or even twenty or thirty grades into a few grades and widening the pay range corresponding to each grade, so as to form a new pay management system and operation process, so as to adapt to the new competitive environment and the needs of management development. If the grade classification management is human-centered and the position classification management is position-centered, the broadband classification is a remuneration-centered management mode, which brings people and positions into the remuneration classification for rearrangement. Therefore, in a certain sense, the broadband system is both a personnel classification management system and a pay management system, and it should be said that it is precisely from the pay management reform.

Broadband management system for civil officials in the United Kingdom formed by the civil officials' pay management reform is mainly for senior civil officials. British senior civilian officials under the Administrative Officer, is the elite of the permanent civil service system, for the mainstay of the civil service system. The new system of remuneration for senior civil servants in the United Kingdom, which has been implemented since April 1, 1996, can be divided into two categories: those who are applicable to "Permanent Secretaries" and those who are below them. From April 1, 2002, the system of remuneration for senior civil servants below the rank of Permanent Secretary was changed.

Permanent Secretaries are remunerated by the Permanent Secretaries Remuneration Committee (PSRC), which consists of the Chief of Civil Service, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Finance, and the Senior Civilian Officials. "The PSRC is composed of five members, including the Chairman and two members of the Review Body on Senior Salaries (SSRB), which is independently responsible for reviewing the salaries of permanent secretaries and submitting the results to the Prime Minister for approval. In addition to taking into account the salary levels of senior executives in the private sector, the broadbanding principles were linked to the "pay band 3" of the new broadbanding system for the remuneration of senior civilian officials under the Permanent Subordinate Ranks.

The salaries of senior civilian officials under the permanent subsecretary are considered and set by the independent "Senior Salary Review Committee". The Committee consists of 10 to 11 members, including private sector executives, university professors, and lawyers, who independently scrutinize the pay of senior civil servants, senior general officers, members of the judiciary, and Members of Parliament, and make specific recommendations to the Prime Minister, the Lord Chief Justice, and the Secretary of State for Defense. The mechanism for determining the pay of senior civil servants and above in the UK central government is therefore divided into two types, the first being the Permanent Secretary's Remuneration Committee (PSRC) which is only responsible for the remuneration of Permanent Secretaries, and the second being the Senior Salaries Review Committee (SSRC) which is responsible for determining the remuneration of senior civil servants below the level of Permanent Secretaries, and of Prime Ministers, Heads of Departments, Members of Parliament (MPs), General Officers, and Senior Judicial Officers (SJOs) above the level of Permanent Secretaries.

Three

The UK's pay reforms over the past two decades, and in particular the new system of pay since 1996, have had the effect of categorizing and managing the civil service in a very different way. In practice, these terms only serve as references and no longer have statutory significance. As a matter of fact, when analyzing the number of civil servants in the United Kingdom, the British Civil Service Statistics have adopted the number of people in the class of how many pounds to how many pounds of annual salary as the basis for calculating the number of civil servants." "Overall, the broadbanding system has had some promising results: reduced requirements for reclassification, reduced time spent on job analysis for reclassification purposes, reduced importance of hierarchical levels within the organization, increased ability of managers to use, for example, salary increases to stimulate productivity, and increased degree of employee career mobility. In a broader sense, broadbanding reinforces the image of the personnel manager as more of a facilitator of the organization's personnel activities than as a problem producer. The broadbanding system also re-establishes the relationship between the job classification and job evaluation system and the objectives of the current personnel management system: i.e., to improve the level of employee performance and the efficient utilization of manpower." In addition, practice in the UK has shown that it is beneficial in reducing personnel costs .

But it should also be seen that the implementation of this broadband management system is based on the following four results of the administrative reform in the United Kingdom: first, the reorganization and separation of the internal structure of the administrative organization, the separation of decision-making and implementation, and the formation of executive boards. These executive agencies are under the managerial accountability system and have autonomy within the framework of the objectives and performance indicators set by the Government. "As of April 1993, 92 such executive agencies employed up to 62 percent of civil servants, and two years later, more than 100 executive agencies employed 70 percent of civil servants, and the government announced the transfer of 90 percent of civil servants to executive agencies." The high degree of autonomy enjoyed by the executive agencies provides a prerequisite for the introduction of a broadbanded pay system. Second, an independent pay setting mechanism. The broadband system is mainly managed by the use of pay. After the implementation of the decentralization of pay-setting authority and the introduction of decentralized collective agreements, the UK has set up a special Senior Salaries Review Committee, a Permanent Secretary's Salaries Committee and a pay negotiation organization for civilian officials in general, which are composed of leaders of the private sector, eminent persons from the mainstream professions in society and professional academics, etc., and which regularly compare the salaries between the government and the rest of society, so as to determine the government's reasonable salary levels so that it can maintain relative competitiveness to attract and retain talents. Thirdly, competition is encouraged and imposed to select the best provider of a given public ****service and to ensure that best value for money is obtained from public ****sources. Fourth, the main policy practice is the systematic improvement of quality and expansion of choice, as clearly defined in the 1991 Citizens' Charter, which emphasizes the need for the publication of clear standards of service, the provision of complete and accurate information, the expansion of consumer choice, the provision of courteous service, the improvement of mechanisms for the receipt of complaints, and the enhancement of efficiency. "These policies amounted to a revolution, a revolution that changed the culture, role, structure, and mental attributes of the civil service to make them more efficient and sensitive to consumer demands in delivering public **** benefits to consumers." These four outcomes of administrative reform provided the organizational foundation, institutional safeguards, guiding philosophy, and policy drivers for the introduction of broadbanding in the UK civil service, and the broadbanding system of management could not have been introduced without the outcomes of these four areas of reform as conditions.

In addition, the implementation of the broadbanding system has also brought about a number of other impacts: firstly, the changes in the mode of recruitment and the mode of payment, the constant division of public **** service purchasers and suppliers, to a certain extent, affecting the unity of the civil service. Secondly, the internal organization of the civil service has been shaken and some of its basic principles have been shaken. For example, the principle of permanent employment has been violated by compulsory redundancies and the increasing number of short-term contracts; the principle of equal treatment based on equal rank has been replaced by negotiated salaries and rewards determined by the results of work; the hierarchical system has been replaced by the contractual and cost-based system; and the principle of xenophobia has been shaken by the appointment of managers to private organizations, and so on. Finally, some of the spiritual qualities of the civil service have been changed. The principles of universality and uniformity in the provision of public ****services have given way to selectivity and targeting, and managerialism based on efficiency, cost-consciousness, and consumer rights has become y rooted in the minds of civil servants.

It should also be noted that there are two difficulties in the effective operation of the UK's civilian broadband system: firstly, the identification of a rational, objective and proportionate assessment system. Broadband system is a set of management system closely integrated with the performance, for the cost, accounting, objectives, performance indicators, etc. should have a reasonable specification, these into a system of assessment indicators is very difficult to determine, it is difficult to be objective and fair. At the same time, too many overly indiscriminate assessment system and assessment behavior, on the contrary, will increase administrative costs, leading to excessive interference in the behavior of civilian officials, so the formation of a reasonable, objective and measured assessment system has been the problem faced. Secondly, the determination of public *** responsibilities. As a result of the implementation of a flexible civilian organizational structure, the separation of decision-making and executive organizations, and the sharp growth of semi-autonomous non-governmental organizations, the correspondence between decision-making and execution has become relatively blurred, and the question of whether or not the transfer of power implies the transfer of responsibility has become a problem that must be solved. In addition, under the broadband system, the chief of department has the power to fix the salary of the civil servants in the same broadband, which leads to their interference in the administrative behavior of their subordinates, and the determination of public **** responsibility under such conditions has also become a problem that must be addressed.