The Future of the Civil Service

Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone (Con)]

My Lords, I join those who warmly congratulate the noble Lord on initiating this debate. I am not one who believes in a major commission, except in so far as it would give the noble Lord many opportunities to present evidence which we would all greatly enjoy.

At a time of coalition Government, I do not think that uncharted territory is the time for a fundamental reform. Many of the comments around whether the central role of the Cabinet Secretary as the head of the Civil Service should be split have a lot to do with coalition Government and the fact that we live under severe financial constraint.

I declare my interests as set out in the register, but suffice it to say that, from the experience of running the health service, where we brought in commercial people to help lend their skills to what we were trying to achieve, I have become a very strong believer that there are talented people in the commercial world who have a huge amount to offer government. It is possible to find people who will undertake the work on much reduced income and be committed and add great value to what we are trying to achieve.

My concern is that, even now, the only Permanent Secretary we have who comes from an outside environment is Stephen Lovegrove at DECC, who came from Deutsche Bank to the Shareholder Executive and is now a Permanent Secretary. I do not think that this makes sense. The work that the noble Lord, Lord Browne, has been doing with non-executive advisers on departments—I refuse to call them “directors” because they are not—has shown the calibre of people who are prepared to come to assist in government. I see the noble Lord, Lord Wilson, who I remember said, “We want a permanent Civil Service; we do not want permanent civil servants”. We should question more closely whether there is a resistance in the Civil Service Commission to giving ultimate leadership appointments to individuals who have spent a lot of their life in a different field.

Only today I have published a paper about the leadership of universities. We have Bill Rammell, a former Minister; Martin Bean from Microsoft; Sir David Bell, a former Permanent Secretary; Debbie Swallow from the V&A—they are all now vice-chancellors. It is not that they should necessarily come straight into the top job. When commercial people come in, of course they need to learn and understand the subtlety and values of the Civil Service. It is my sense, however, that we should look carefully at what the resistances are.

The Civil Service was commended by my noble friend Lord McNally for diversity—maybe of gender, orientation, race and ethnicity, but not of occupational background. Every other field of endeavour in this modern, fast-changing world needs different skills, which do not necessarily grow themselves.

There are of course great differences—although I understand the ministerial frustration—but, increasingly, politicians have very little business background. They know about press notices; they do not know about delivery of projects. The implementation of anything means you have to go through winter and spring before you get to the summer of delivery. There are key fundamental principles, and my sense is that both Ministers and civil servants need to look again at this.

Finally, have we looked closely enough at the model of the Greater London Authority and some of the local government models, where service delivery and policy formation is much more closely integrated? Certainly, the much underexamined GLA has in many ways a more interesting balance of people coming through into the executive.