𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Civil servants attending claymaking sessions and playing Grand Theft Auto are a “perfect microcosm of everything broken about the civil service”, critics have claimed. It follows reporting that Whitehall staff played the violent 18 rated video game with members of the public and were paid to do so.

Other incidents saw civil servants attending model clay sessions as well as pretending to be earthworms as part of an “interspecies council”. Mandarins sat down for video game sessions, playing a violent game in which players can sell drugs, race cars, shoot police and solicit sex workers. Now Ameer Kotecha, CEO of the Centre for Government Reform, has slammed the news, accusing the civil service of losing sight of its core mission.

The sessions were organised through a scheme called Policy Lab and was handed to Whitehall staff as part of a late-2024 plan to learn about the “lived experience” of Britons.

But Mr Kotecha raged”while public sector productivity flatlines and Whitehall struggles to deliver basic services, taxpayers are funding a team of officials to play Grand Theft Auto, model clay and tie Peruvian knots, all in the name of ‘experimental policymaking’.”

He branded Policy Lab as “a perfect microcosm of everything broken about the civil service: process dressed up as purpose, waffle masquerading as insight, and an institution fundamentally lacking in accountability.”

Other sessions saw staff attending a workshop wherein they undertook clay modelling and knot tying.

The scheme also hired an artist who drew pictures of benefits claimants so they could experience each other’s “shared humanity”.

“This is the mindset of a bureaucracy that has lost sight of its core mission,” Mr Kotecha told the Daily Express.

A former diplomat, Mr Kotecha set up the Centre for Government Reform to try and bring in experienced people from the private sector to help run Whitehall.

During the sessions playing the GTA game, one member of the public, as reported by the Daily Telegraph, told civil servants they “enjoy spending time at their nightclub business or on their yacht”.

Others said they enjoyed completing the game’s missions. One mission has the player torture a man, whilst others see the player racing against the clock to deliver prostitutes to their clients.

Whitehall’s use of such methods is “precisely why we need to bring people in from the private sector who know what it means to be answerable for concrete results, not just indulgent process and paper-pushing”, Mr Kotecha said.

A Government source told the Daily Telegraph: “This is a decades old Tory initiative that we are now looking into.”