The UK civil service has been ranked sixth in a new global index of civil services around the world.

Singapore’s civil service tops the Blavatnik Index of Public Administration, which was published on Wednesday, with Norway in second, Canada and Denmark in joint third place, Finland fifth, and then New Zealand and the United Kingdom in joint sixth position.

These countries’ public administrations are followed in the rankings by those in: Australia, Spain, Estonia, France, the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, South Korea, Lithuania, Belgium, Austria, Latvia, Italy, Portugal, Sweden, Urguay, Ireland, Israel and Slovenia.

The results are based on comparative performances across 82 metrics from 18 data sources.

The UK civil service has received an index score of 0.80 out of a maximum potential score of 1, with Singapore’s score of 0.85 leading the table and Sudan’s score of 0.17 placing it bottom of the rankings. 

The index also rates each country’s data coverage from A to D based on how much of their data is available in the sources that make up the index. The UK and top-ranked country Singapore received a C grade, while second-ranked Norway got a D, the worst grade. Only Mexico had data for all 82 metrics.

In a pre-recorded video message responding to the results, Leo Yip, the head of the Singapore Civil Service, said he was “humbled” by the country’s first-place ranking.

Speaking at the event, Gus O’Donnell, the former cabinet secretary and head of the UK civil service, shared his thoughts on how the new cabinet secretary might make use of the index. 

“I think it’s really important that we get the leaders, the current cabinet secretaries, to learn from each other,” said O’Donnell, who is the chair of the index’s senior leadership panel.

“We’ve just announced the new cabinet secretary in the UK and the prime minister’s given that person the job of rewiring the British state. Well, that’s quite a big job. Where do you start? Well, one way to start is to look at this index and say where are the things where we lack behind countries that are similar in terms of GDP?”

The 2024 Blavatnik Index of Public Administration top 12 (see all results here)

1  Singapore

2  Norway

=3  Canada and Denmark

5  Finland

=6  United Kingdom and New Zealand

8 Australia

=9 Estonia, France, Spain and United States

Also speaking at the launch, Sapana Agrawal, director of the Civil Service Strategy Unit in the Cabinet Office, said the index would provide a “common language” for civil servants and ministers and for communicating with other countries. 

She said the UK civil service has lots of conversations with different countries and tries to learn from them but the index will help by “showing us what good looks like and how we can structure those conversations”. 

Agrawal said she is also interested in getting views from academia on how the UK civil service can shift metrics to improve its performance. 

She also said the UK civil service will also use the index to help work out which areas of reform to prioritise. 

“We’re working at the moment on the next reform plan for the UK,” she said. “And really one of the things that we’ll use the index for is to think: across all the things that we want to fixed, where do you get most bang for buck? Where should we put our marginal pound in? Because as Gus said earlier, we’re going to be asked to do a lot with less.”

The index, which includes 120 countries around the world, looks at four domains representing broad areas of public administration activity:

• Strategy & leadership: the setting of strategic direction, institutional stewardship, the core public service values and behaviours
• Public policy: core public administration functions and activities that are fundamental for any national government
• National delivery: direct public service delivery at the national level, and oversight of the wider range of public services delivered by others
• People & processes: the realities of working in or for the public administration.

In these four domains, the UK ranks joint seventh for strategy & leadership, third for public policy, joint 14th for national delivery, and joint 10th for people & processes.

Each domain contains 16 themes, which are made up of several indicators. Within those indicators are the 82 metrics.

The UK ranks first in one of the 16 themes – crisis & risk management within the ‘public policy’ domain – and its highest-scoring indicator within that area is for cybersecurity, where it places top with a score of 1.0 alongside Saudia Arabia and the United States. The UK also performed well in the ‘system oversight’ and ‘policy making’ themes. 

The index, developed by Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government, builds upon the International Civil Service Effectiveness Index, which was jointly run by the Blavatnik School of Government and the Institute for Government think tank for three years from 2017-2019. The UK ranked first in the 2019 version of that index, which featured only 38 countries, all in the OECD.

The Blavatnik School of Government said the index “aims to help senior officials, those leading reform efforts and other stakeholders understand how public administrations and civil services around the world compare”.