Constitution Committee

Wednesday 14th October 2026

(began 3 weeks, 3 days ago)

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10:36
10:38
None Portrait Speaker 1
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Well, very, very broad opening question. I guess I would start just with some. The kind of core, I suppose, the core arguments that I would make. Number one. The calibre of. Many of these problems are obviously not unique to Britain. We saw in Covid, and we can see during Ukraine that you see the same many of the same pathologies across pretty much all Western countries.

So lots of these things are common. The first thing is that over a period of decades, you've had a very marked shift in elite talent, where elite talent goes and how it spends its time. In the old days, a large fraction of elite talent went into public life, went into politics, the military, intelligence services, various kinds of public service, etc., etc. and for all kinds of complicated reasons. Post 1945, that's changed a lot.

Now, very little elite talent goes into public life and a huge amount goes into some kind of mix of maths, computing, hedge funds, private equity, venture capital technology, lots of private research efforts, etcetera, etcetera. So many of the people, you know, when you look at previous crises in Britain, war efforts, etc., and you think of certain famous people and you ask where their equivalents today, then most of the equivalents are not in public service. And we saw that very clearly in Covid.

So that's one big thing. I think the second big thing is that the old British constitution that you can see pre the 1850s, and you can see very clearly in, say, 1790s in the life of Pitt and the whole period of the French Revolution and whatnot. You can see it in letters from Palmerston to Queen Victoria in the 1830s and 1840s. And the old British Constitution was obviously based centrally on the principle of ministerial responsibility to Parliament.

Responsibility was real. You can read many letters from people like Palmerston explaining it that the principle was that the minister, answering questions about the Department in Parliament, actually understood and was truly responsible for what happened in the Department. That obviously is become a complete fake charade of, again, for many complicated reasons. I think that the shift of the Northcote-trevelyan system was a huge part of it. Essentially, in that system, we substituted the old British approach for a kind of Chinese meritocracy approach of basing everything on exams like the old Mandarin system.

And that began a process of transforming British institutions under the Constitution. And you can see already its effects actually in World War One and in World War Two, you can read memoirs from people like Alan Brooke and R.V. Jones and whatnot in World War Two. And you can see already the signs there of many things that would come to haunt us in in Covid and now now over Ukraine. So I think that.

That fundamental collapse of ministerial responsibility is central. And I guess the third thing I would point out is that if you go back and look at the history of the Cabinet Office and how it was created, it was created obviously out of the crisis, terrible, terrible crisis of the trench warfare in World War One, worries in this building that we were near collapse. And out of that, the Cabinet Office was created to try to change how the center of power operated.

But if you look at the history of it, absolutely central to that history was the idea that, of course, the Cabinet Office must not become a policy making entity. And of course, even more important, the Cabinet Office must in no sense take over responsibilities for personnel and appointments. That was agreed. So there were many arguments about the creation of the Cabinet Office, including in this place. But everyone agreed at the time that it would obviously be a disaster if the Cabinet Office was in charge, had anything to do with policy and appointments.

Fast forward a century and who is in control of all policy and appointments? The Cabinet Office you have had here, former cabinet secretaries say the record that they regard the Prime Minister's Office is an accounting unit of the Cabinet Office, and I think that reflects the general view inside the Cabinet Office. Certainly the Cabinet Office does not in any way see its job as to execute the views of the Prime Minister, obviously.

So I think I would just start with those three big basics. If you have if you look at anything that really works well in the world, you see great talent, you see responsibility inside institutions, and you see speed of execution. And the way in which the British system has evolved means that all three of those things now are more or less unlawful in the current situation.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Sort of. Yeah. But I think you can't. It's obviously it's a system, right? It's a complex system. So you can't say is it? There's lots of arguments saying, oh, it's the people. No, it's not the people. It's the institutions. And you have these sort of arguments. But I think they're quite they're not really fruitful because you have to look at the overall thing and how they interact. If you've got duff people, then the institutions are going to be duff.

If you've got duff institutions and duff leadership, then you can't recruit great people. Right? And you see this a constantly inside the Whitehall system, there's a constant demand of, well, why can't we get these great people into the system? Well, because great people have options and they're not going to go and sit in stupid meetings with PowerPoint after PowerPoint, with no one actually taking responsibility for anything. If you look at lots of great people came in to help the system in 2020 because it was such a worst crisis since 1945.

Almost every I think literally every single one of those great people that came in in 2020 was either pushed out or left in, left in disgust. Now you have this building running around going, oh my God, what do you do about AI? Cabinet was literally pushed out. People who came in in 2020 to help the British state deal with AI, who are now running some of the most important programs in the world in companies like OpenAI and anthropic.

So it's a pathological response of the system to push out such people. But it's it's a feedback mechanism. You can't expect those people to come in if they're going to be sitting around having normal meetings.
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10:47
None Portrait Speaker 1
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I think? Well, yes, it's under threat. It's under threat because. There's a general collapse of trust in the competence and integrity of institutions. And that obviously includes the political parties, includes the media, includes Parliament includes civil service. That's again, as I said at the start, that's obviously a general problem across the West, but it includes here. A fundamental aspect of this is that people can. So because of the internet, people can see many of the lies that are told.

But also people can see just a fundamental lack of responsibility for things. So and this is not a sort of idiosyncratic view of mine. If you go. And if you listen to, for example, Rahm Emanuel, who was Obama's chief of staff in the white House, right? So very, very establishment, Democrat type character. And you listen to his analysis of why America is in the situation that it's in. And he'll say, we've had Iraq, we've had Afghanistan, we've had 2008 financial crisis, we've had Covid, we've had disaster after disaster after disaster.

And the perception amongst the voters that that the old system lies about it all and refuses to ever to take any responsibility for it and to change. And the response always seems to be doubling down on, well, you should trust us more. You should give us more money and power. So yes, the British Constitution is under threat. It's yes, obviously there are foreign adversaries and enemies who hate us and are trying to cause problems.

But by far our biggest problem is here. Putin is a tiny problem relative to our own Ministry of Defence and the lawyers and the Cabinet Office. It's not Putin who's launching lawfare against the SaaS. It's not Putin who's destroyed procurement inside the Mod in a nightmare of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of money wasted, corrupt. It's not Putin who's stopping the Mod learning from drones in Ukraine.

It's a civil servants in the Mod who tell the people who come back from Ukraine, this is what's actually happening. Don't tell anybody, senior what you see in Ukraine about drones, because that will jeopardise all our budgets. So it's not Putin in China doing these things to us. It's us doing. Our main problems are what we do to ourselves.
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10:50
None Portrait Speaker 1
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Yeah, I think that's obviously a problem. And in lots of ways it started I mean, it really accelerated in the 80s, right? With the Thatcher government. A lot of people in the Tory party then thought that if we create all these independent agencies, then they'll sort of operate a bit like businesses with CEOs and whatnot. But of course, that was completely false analogy to how the world works, and all they really did was create things that aren't really responsible to, or the responsibility is extremely opaque.

And certainly it undermined, as I go back to my very first point, undermined the old British constitutional principle of ministerial responsibility. So yes, I think that is a big problem. But then on the other hand, you know, the civil service response to that would be and civil servants have said this to me directly. You know, there's an expression in Moscow, everyone's writing, everyone's unhappy. It means sort of everyone's kind of got a point.

And the civil service response to what you said is, but look at the quality of the MPs. The MPs are so rubbish. They don't want responsibility. They don't want to be in charge. Imagine, Dominic, if we put so and so minister in charge of this. Yes, it's a shambles now, but imagine if so-and-so is in charge. It would be even worse. They don't want to be responsible.

And that, I'm afraid, is also very true. I mean, it's hard even to think of a Tory minister that I dealt with, who actually wanted to be responsible for what was going on in the department. So that's also an important thing. It's not just it is true that the system, the civil service system, has gradually disempowered ministers. Correct. But it's also true that the ministers and the MPs themselves have become infantilized and have actually been largely happy with this process.
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Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Portrait Lord Griffiths of Burry Port
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Yes, thanks very much. It's fascinating to hear you. My background is not in politics, but in street level activities of various kinds. And a lot of the things that we are demonstrated about and wrote petitions about and organised community responses about, we always felt were never being picked up anywhere and dealt with, but we went on doing it. And it was just strange for me when some of the things we've seen well, and we remember you being reported for, were actually saying some of these things and identifying these things at the very heart of government.

And so I found myself very fascinated by that, how someone could get in there. When we got as far as the door of number ten in order to present a petition. And that was as far as we got. So I'm in politics now, and I'm conscious of the, you know, of the , of the the tensions and pressures that compete with each other within the political machine. And you've properly pointed us towards good practice elsewhere and also in history, good practice.

And you've pointed to some key principles, ministerial responsibility and so on. I'm just wondering if , from the life that you've lived and that we've was a very public life after all, if if in the life that you've lived and the responsibilities you've handled, you have found within the machine good practice that you can bring to the attention of others that were perhaps less well served. Was, was that part of a dialectic that you were placed to, to deal with, to present and, and suggest that we could learn from internal ways of acting as well as from external ones, either temporal or , or spatial.

I don't know if I'm making myself clear on this point, but you did seem rather well placed to have your views listened to, and I wondered if you could see centers of excellence and use those as part of the dialectic that you were responsible for.
10:55
None Portrait Speaker 1
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Yeah. So I mean, so first of all, I would say, as I referred to earlier on. Private offices are actually remarkably good and remarkably understudied, I would say in general. And again, it's connected to the youth generally. They're much younger. I mean, I think almost close to 100% that that will be the case, possibly not always, but a kind of on principle. They're more junior people and there's a lot more talent density there.

So I think I think that's that's a strength. The Prime Minister's private office does attract a lot of great people, and that is a strength. But I'd also point out that a lot of those great people now leave. So it used to be a pipeline that a very important pipeline of young, talented people, talent supported and encouraged to go to the Prime Minister's private office. And then from there, kind of fast track through to leadership positions in the future.

To quite a large extent, that pipeline now is is broken. And that also has feedback effects on the system. Also means now that what has been true for a very long time of able officials trying to get into the Prime Minister's office to some extent, now no longer happens. And people have been trying to avoid it because it's just seen as such a constant nightmare and shambles. In number ten, there were obviously some centres of excellence, but you tended to find the centres of excellence were being attacked by the Cabinet Office and Treasury.

Treasury was generally trying to cut the funding of everything that worked well and oppose, oppose helping them out. But also, if you look at. So 2020 was an interesting thing in a few ways, right? Because it was such a big crisis that the system sort of had to change because you were faced with mass death on a weekly basis. So even then, Whitehall has to sort of look a bit differently at things.

But we set up the vaccine. So we were originally advised by the Cabinet Office, do vaccines the same way as the EU and beg to be part of the EU vaccine system. We looked at the system. It was obviously a complete shit show and they weren't going to build anything or do anything. So we came up with a different plan, which was to basically to do vaccines in a way, in the spirit of great things that have happened in this country in the past and also in America in the past, largely meant stripping out the way Cabinet Office and Treasury officials.

And so you could actually hire people and make people responsible. Closed down. We built sewage monitoring in 2020, which was then copied by dozens of dozens of countries, maybe a hundred countries or something now closed down by the Treasury in 2021. Cabinet office has tried to restart it, I think 3 or 4 times, each time so incompetently they haven't been able to restart it. So all over Africa there are now sewage monitoring schemes, copying what we did in 2020.

But Britain doesn't have one because Whitehall closed it. Rapid testing. Similarly, we got ahead of the game secretly on that, built ourselves into a great position, closed down and then the government just literally forgot to order any rapid tests for winter 2021. And you can just repeat this sort of tragic, tragicomic thing over and over again. What's one of the few remaining centers of excellence left in Britain? British special forces.

Who's their biggest enemy today? China? No. Russia, no Iran, no Cabinet Office and Mod lawyers.
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11:00
None Portrait Speaker 1
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So two things I guess. So firstly, with respect, you say that was long ago, but the principles of how things work well and don't work well are eternal. It's not a question of they're out of date. You see the same principles in 500 BC or 1800 with Pitt or Today in Space and you name it. So I don't think it's it's not correct conceptually to say some of these core things have become out of become out of date, of course, times change in technology changes and whatnot.

But basic principles of does an organisation have actual responsibility? Does it have great talent density? Can it move quickly? Those things are completely eternal principles. Second thing. So on your second point, specifics, I would say so in summer 2020, spring 20, spring 2020, you have meltdown of the system slowly trying to get out of it. I've actually quickly tried to get out of it, but sort of in a morass, nightmarish way.

In summer 2020, briefly, the Prime Minister was in the mode of the system as nearly killed me. The system is already killed tens of thousands of people. Every part of the British state seems to be basically failing. We've got to do things differently. And we had a series of meetings with the cabinet secretary, and I got then agreement from both the cabinet secretary and the Prime Minister to make some , what you might call baby steps.

But I think bigger than baby steps , changes. Number one was civil service appointments should shift from closed by default to open by default. That sounds like a small thing, but it's actually a huge thing. Going back to the whole point about the Northcote-trevelyan system. Since then, for 150 years, you've had a system which has morphed slowly into a closed caste system in which Buggins promotes buggins internally.

And that's why you have, for example, completely non-technical people put in charge of deeply technical programs inside Gchq or whatever in a way that would produce completely. No one would. Everyone would think that we completely lost our minds. If you showed someone from 1810 this kind of thing. If you change the default mode of the civil service from closed by default to open by default, then you're. You can do that without tearing up the entire old system and without also massive legal changes.

I think you should tear up the old northcote-trevelyan system. I think you should do major constitutional changes with primary legislation. But my point is, because of the flexibility of how the system works, you can actually do things. The Prime Minister now as Minister for the Civil Service, working with the Cabinet Secretary, if they agree, can just do very radical things now with appointments that could have a dramatic effect today. Of course, as soon as I was out the door, all of that was immediately binned.

And nothing, nothing, nothing went ahead. Secondly, again, going back to what I said about the Cabinet Office and its historical evolution. The Cabinet Office, the Cabinet Secretary now controls all the permanent Secretary appointments. And if you speak to the Cabinet Secretary and say, how are these people performance managed? Well, how are their priorities set or whatnot? It's essentially a black box from everybody who's elected from the perspective of everybody who's elected. No secretary of state has any input into it, and the prime minister doesn't have any kind of formal role.

It's sort of a whiskey with the cul de sac in the Cabinet Office and the perm sac at the end of the year, and then they dish out some bonus on the qty according to the ideas that they've got themselves. So another obvious thing to do is for the Prime Minister's Office to say, the Prime Minister's Office is going to play a central role in the performance management of the permanent secretaries, bearing in mind that the Prime Minister working through the Cabinet Secretary can actually replace these people.

Also bearing in mind the Prime Minister is the only person who can replace these people. Right. So again, why did so much of the Covid chaos happen? Because constitutionally now everything is blocked other than through the Prime Minister's office own the Prime Minister's office can unblock certain things, particularly in a crisis. So things cascade into the Prime Minister's office, making the whole system even more mad and dysfunctional and compressed inside there because people in number ten are having meeting, meeting after meeting after meeting to solve things which they shouldn't actually be dealing with.

But it goes there because now all this constitutional authority has been funneled in a way that only the Prime Minister or someone speaking on behalf of the Prime Minister can actually get things done. So those are a couple of things, which tomorrow, if you had a prime minister who actually wanted to have a government that controls the government, you could say we're changing how the appointment structure works. System works for, for for officials. You could also sweep away a whole bunch of completely insane HR rules, which again, we started to do in 2020, but which were stopped, which are not idiosyncratic.

Again, to me, I stress, but everyone in the system knows a mad like you , can't you you , the whole kind of two year promotion system whereby you have to constantly move jobs in order to get a promotion and a pay rise again. Completely insane. No decent organisation in the world operates like that, but the civil service operates like that. Now. You could sweep away all of those, and you could have the Prime Minister's office integrated with the with the actual core definition of priorities for the Perm six.

And do we agree perm at the Home Office that if the following things don't happen, you've failed and you should be replaced? But they're just the most basic kind of conversations that would happen in any competent entity, which don't happen in our in our system. If you had a number ten that wanted to, if you had a government that wants to control the government, then you could do that. But then I go back to what I said before, which is Prime ministers have not wanted to control the government and ministers have been happy with the fake system.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Well, I guess. A few things. So in 2020, I did not attend a single cabinet meeting. It's normal for senior political people to attend cabinet, but I didn't go to any. The reason is because other than a very odd, peculiar times now of political stress, essentially cabinet is become an irrelevance, and the actual important meetings that decide what's going on are 50m away in the Cabinet Office. So if you look back, say, 2020 Covid, the media are all reporting cabinet cabinet meetings on blah rouse between A and B on blah, all basically Potemkin theatre nonsense.

The Covid task force was the thing that was actually deciding things 50m away in the Cabinet Office. Not not the cabinet. It's certainly true that the Cabinet Secretary's role is very much underrated. People don't understand how much power there is there. Also, I think people don't understand how that changed from not sure exactly when, but say roughly, I guess the Hayward era ish Gus O'Donnell Hayward era, after which another huge change there was that a lot of aspects of how things like the intelligence services work and coordination between the intelligence services, the Cabinet Office number ten mod, a lot of that machinery basically got transferred inside the National Security Secretariat in the Cabinet Office, and then that is now essentially became became a black box.

Outside any ministerial or political oversight or involvement of any description. So there are things like the NSC, NSC bracket, o close bracket meetings. O for officials, where all sorts of crucial things were decided. There are very obscure little Cabinet Office committees that decide things like how to task MI5 and MI6 with priorities. All these things essentially became completely separated from any any ministerial role. Now the defence of the system is well within the Cabinet Office, so they're sort of under the Prime Minister.

But of course, the Prime Minister doesn't attend any of those meetings. And if the Prime Minister's most senior political advisers asked to attend those meetings, they'll be told, sorry, but that would be that would that would be pet the the internal Gestapo for HR would not be happy with that sort of thing. So that's another aspect. If a bomb goes off or if some secretary of state in a completely hypothetical situation, you understand, were to have a very, very unsuitable girlfriend, which may or may not have happened in the last few years, then the first thing that happens is that people in the intelligence services go and speak to the cabinet secretary, and they have a meeting and they decide, okay, the bomb has gone off, what do we think about blah, blah, blah? And they decide then what information is given to the PM.

And the PM sits in a little room and is told a few things, but is very much not at the centre of what's going on. And a whole subterranean system operates between these other different power centres in Whitehall, almost entirely out of the view of any minister and also the Prime Minister. So that's a huge change. If you go back to Brexit as an example of the thing you're talking about, people often say questions like, oh, you know, what did the Foreign Secretary or what did, however, say about this aspect of Brexit? And the answer is, I can't remember.

And it wasn't important. What was important was what did the private secretary in the Prime Minister's Office think about X? I dealt with them multiple times a day. They wrote the agenda for meetings. We would argue about what the action points were so that those relationships. That's an official who's never been named isn't in the media, blah, blah, blah, but had like 50 times more influence on what happened on the Brexit negotiations in 2019 than any minister did apart from the Prime Minister himself.

So I think all of these changes are, you know, a very profound but generally speaking. No one really wants to talk about the right. The MPs are quite happy for people not really to face the reality of this. The media are happy taking photos of everyone walking up Downing Street and pretending that the cabinet is actually where things are decided. The officials are always very happy with it , and the officials as I go back, have got a constant good point, right.

If you well, okay. But if you change this, do you really want Hancock making decisions? Which is a hard question to answer.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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So yeah. Yes. I think the corporate memory issue is, is real. It became I mean, it became very, very visible after Covid, right? Because the chaos. So I left, I think November 2020, huge numbers of officials then left over the next few months and into 2021. By the time we get to 2023, I was getting texts from you officials inside number ten asking me what happened then and why was this decided, and because there was just this incredible churn internally of so many people leaving.

So I think there's no doubt that that is a huge, huge problem. I would also link it in general to things like, you know, something that always stuck in my mind was a story from a long time ago now, probably like 20 years ago or something, maybe longer even of the Foreign Office destroying its own library. And that happened a lot around Whitehall. The Department of Education similarly basically cracked up its own library.

So I think, again, it's a sort of a symptom of pathological institutions is you do things like you destroy your own library. I, I think that was an early sign of where these things were going. And for sure, that's a big problem. Now , in terms of the keeping things secret, I'll just give one very obvious example. I watched repeatedly and experienced repeatedly this process Treasury sorry, terrorist incident X happens meeting with the Prime Minister in number ten explained blah blah blah blah blah.

Clearly there's a rabbit of I ask questions, people look at the ground and don't answer. Have another meeting afterwards with same officials and you say. You let a guy out of jail after MI5 warned that he would almost definitely go and blow up something again. Obviously you kept the guy under surveillance, right? Because you were warned by MI5. You kept him under surveillance in jail before you let him out so you could see who he was talking to.

Everyone's head looks at the floor. Oh, you didn't keep him under surveillance. Is that because there's Cabinet Office legal advice that says that because of X, our rights to privacy, you're not allowed to keep even convicted terrorists under surveillance inside jail? Yes. Dominic, why didn't you explain that to the Prime Minister? Why didn't you explain to the Prime Minister that we let out a guy who we thought was going to do another terrorist act, and we didn't even keep him under surveillance, because the legal advice is that it's unlawful under the Human Rights Act in the UK.

But that happens routinely. I would I would say the majority of terrorist offences that you see, there is a human rights angle, close to 0% are ever explained publicly. It's never discussed publicly. And part of the reason for that is officials do not want ministers asking questions, and the ministers don't want it raised either. We had Buckland in charge at the Ministry of Justice. Right. And all the officials know the bookers didn't want anyone raising difficult questions about that.

So therefore it's not it's not. Right. So again, you can blame officials in one sense. But also fundamentally these questions are political. And the reality is conservative MPs for 14 years did not want to face the reality of terrorism. Border control. And officials get the message. I had meetings with the now deceased former head of MI6 about various things inside MI6, and a very basic issue there is that MPs of both parties rolled over, abandoned the intelligence services on various aspects of these things, and made it clear that we don't want we're not going to back you up in difficult situations.

Now, you could say in all sorts of questions, you'd think, oh, well, MI6 must be doing X, Y, and Z, and I'll tell you that they're not doing X, Y, and Z. You'd say, well, that's crazy. What are we why? Why would MI6 not be doing X, Y, and Z? The answer is because MI6 knows that the ministers will not back up doing X, Y, and Z. So it's very hard to say exactly where responsibility lies.

That's why I keep coming back to saying, you've got to think of it as a system. You can't just blame the people. You can't just blame the institutions. It's a mix of ideas and people and institutions over a long period of time, have created this pathological mess that we've got.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Do you question was.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Gotcha. Well, so I think it's it's it's extremely hard to fix the pipeline. Because it can't really be fake fixing it can't just be. I mean, you've had one minister after another. If you go back over the last six years, since I was in number ten, every few months there's another speech on we're going to reform the civil service, blah, blah, blah. Every speech basically repeats every other such speech.

Going back to the Watchamacallit report back in the 60s, which set out a lot of those problems then, because it was already apparent before I was even born in these things. And of course, everyone can watch Westminster, where you see them all playing out then. So you can't you can't fix it just by giving these speeches and by and by kind of declarations. Talented people will only change their decisions if they think it's real.

So in 2020, we could get talented people in there. But that was because you had a mix of genuine national crisis. What they were doing with their day job was completely turned upside down. And the Prime Minister said, come to number ten and I will support you, and we will be able to get these sort of things done. That's why we got former commanding officer of 22 SAS to come in and work on testing. That's why we got a bunch of people, extremely able people, to ditch what they were doing and come in to number ten and to help the system on on various things.

But it was real. As soon as they then saw how how things were evolving, all such people left. So it can only change if it's obvious that there's a prime minister that actually wants it to change, and he's going to force change through the system, it's not going to change. It's not going to change in any other in any other way. Of course, the small things here and there, right.

Permanent secretary can make some small little tweak in the Home Office or whatever, but you're not going to fix the fundamental core problem unless the Prime Minister says there is going to be a generational change in how this whole thing works. If people don't go and do blah, blah, blah in the private sector and do come in here, we will have real jobs with real responsibility and real budgets where you can build real things, and then that has to be done.

And people have to see it's true. And then there'll be a bandwagon effect of people going, Holy sh, this is amazing. Brilliant. I want to join in. So that's the first thing. The the where we are now is it can only change if we if there's a prime minister who wants the government to control the government and is himself or herself determined on change. Secondly, regarding Human Rights Act and borders, we went through all this in 20.

In 2020, all serious lawyers agreed whether they're pro or anti each pro Human Rights Act or anti, you cannot deal with the small boats problem unless you make primary law changes to the Human Rights Act and change how the courts give effect to the Echr. That is complete. That is a fact. It's uncomfortable for all political sides to face this fact, but it is a fact. I had discussions with Sunak about it in December 2022, when we had discussions about whether or not I might go back to number ten to help, and he persuaded himself that they were very complicated ways of getting around this, and he persuaded himself that all the internal advice telling him that he was wrong, well, themselves wrong.

And he found out the hard way himself. So everyone internally knows that this is the case, but everyone also internally knows, knew that the Tories didn't want to face the problem and that Labour doesn't want to face the problem. So the officials do what is inevitable for officials, which is obfuscate and come up with complicated workarounds, which everyone knows is not gonna actually solve the problem. But here I think it really is something where the political people are much, much, much more to blame than the than the officials are.

The officials have repeatedly written down and said, yes, of course, Prime Minister, if you want to stop the boats, you can stop the boats. This is what you've got to do legally to do that. And then every time the PM looks at it and goes, oh my God, how come I'm not doing that? Imagine how my dinner parties will go down in London. If I were to do the following things, it'd be social ostracism. So it's not done and officials all know that it's not going to be done.

Hence, you have just this sort of constant farce over the issue.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Well, I've already mentioned I think I've already mentioned them. Number one, I would just restart what I started in summer 2020, which is make civil service appointments open by default. There'd be a tiny number, like less than 1% fraction regarding national security stuff that you'd have certain kinds of exceptions for. But that's a very that's a tiny, tiny element of the whole thing. If you did that, then that would be huge. If the Prime Minister said, I am taking responsibility for.

For actual performance management of the permanent secretaries, and people are going to be made directly. So there's a concept in the private sector which some of you will know right directly responsible individual. That is how every complicated project that works works. That concept has been rendered. Something close to unlawful inside the current system. And every aspect of how the current system works is to obfuscate actual responsibility.

And if you say in a meeting internally Whitehall, which specific person is actually responsible for doing X by date Y, everyone throws their hands up in horror. So if you have a Prime Minister that says, we're going to open up the system to, to, to external appointments, we're going to have actually directly responsible individuals at the top with those directly responsible individuals are going to have the power to hire and fire like, again, like every healthy, successful operation in the world does, then you would have a very big effect on the whole system.

You would get huge amounts of talent going in. There's this huge demand, right? When I wrote that blog in January 2020 saying, we're going to open up the system and we want people to to apply, there was something like 55, 55, 60,000 people emailed a gmail account. Some of those people then came in and worked inside the system. So this huge desire in the country to actually help, right? People are so miserable and depressed and fed up with what's what's been going on since way before Brexit, but also obviously watching the farce post-Brexit, post-COVID.

Now there's huge desire of people to help. But at the moment all those people are basically repelled by the existing structure. If you have prime ministerial leadership, that makes clear that they're going to change, that. You will see thousands and thousands and thousands of people say, I'll pack in my brilliant job on blah to come and do it, but only if the job is real. I'm not going to pack in my great job and have all the problems of public life for a Potemkin job, right?
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Lord Waldegrave of North Hill Portrait Lord Waldegrave of North Hill
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I find a great deal of what you say . Very. Very attractive. I was part of a small unit in 1971 that was. And I got the job because the head of this unit, which defined itself as throwing grit into the smooth running of the machine, asked for young people to come and work for him. So the civil service sent a lot of people age 45, and I happened to be passing by and quite unjustifiably got a job aged 25.

And it was great fun. And we were done down in the end by the Treasury, of course. But the point I want to try and get at is something to do with the baby and the bathwater. Northcote-trevelyan was partly to do with getting rid of the old corruption stopping ancestors of mine, building out an out of the proceeds of being running the country, and the evangelicals and everybody else at that stage in the 19th century said, we've got to get rid of the corruption.

So how do how do a prime Minister with the with the power these parties got to have his party more or less under control in the House of Commons. He can do more or less anything he likes, I think. I think I think. I think Lord Hailsham was right. It's an elective dictatorship in that stage. If you're brave enough to to do it. But where should the constraints be that don't allow the people to start stuffing their money in their pockets again? What at the.

moment people would say, oh, well, an independent civil service is, is a barrier to. corruption would be, I suspect some people would say, and there are other. guardrails like that. Where do we where if you've got a sufficiently radical and united leadership to have the will to do some of the things you want to do, where . Are the.
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. Does.
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Have . Been
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So .
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So I'd say.
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sitting .
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. With the
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. Civil
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. To do that,
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.
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Lord Beith Portrait Lord Beith
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Not less. I don't disagree with that. What I'm. suggesting is that to place on the system of ministerial. responsibility alone the responsibility for protecting us against abuse of executive power, you're relying too much on a system which in which other interests prevail, and you can't ensure that it is protected. What abuses of executive power are you worried about? What what what abuse is you talking about? Abuses of executive power? What sort of things are you talking about? To make it more specific? I don't understand what you discriminate in favor of one group in society as against others.

So what are we using using that power to discriminate against one group of society, in society, in favor of others? There are many examples of abuse of executive power, use of use of the political system to preserve the executive in power. There are many. I don't need to tell you there are many potential abuses of executive power. Well, I mean, the. responsibility when when when Keir Starmer gave a speech in January last year and said the real problem with the grooming gangs isn't the grooming gangs, it's Elon Musk talking about the grooming gangs on X, right.

Disinformation from the top of the British state. You could say that's an abuse of executive power. Who's responsible for that? He's responsible for that politically. And an accumulation of such disastrous decisions is what did for him. But the idea that the civil service somehow can correct for that. I don't really understand what it is that you're suggesting. You can't. There's no system which is going to stop PMS doing stupid things, sometimes mad things,
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. Spend,
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. Going
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