Government: Leadership Training

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Thursday 16th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have never been a Minister, MP or civil servant, so the noble Lord, Lord Norton, will have to forgive me if I make my remarks as an erstwhile civilian. But I have worked in education and am familiar with the training world. I am afraid that, when I hear the words “advocacy of training” and “leadership skills”, my heart sinks. My dread is that it treats leadership as a technical matter, reduces virtues to techniques and can rip the heart out of what it means to lead. To be honest, if ever there was an example of our soulless technocratic era, it is the proliferation of leadership skills courses over recent years, comparable only to the ever-growing number of organisations that pay consultants to write their mission statements—always to me a worrying sign of an institution’s lack of mission.

Of course, I am all for reform, effective government and professionalising Whitehall. I want new Ministers and staff to be able to upgrade their technical skills, and to understand procedure and how to improve drafting legislation and so on. Any measures that make government more accountable and less opaque and arcane are admirable, but I query whether leadership skills training is the remedy, and worry it might turn leadership into performative competence with too little regard for content.

In introducing this debate, the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, talked of the need for Ministers to have the skills to sign up their teams to their vision. My worry is that they do not have a vision, not that they are not trained in how to share it. It reminds me of Debating Matters, a national debating competition for 16 to 18 year-olds that I set up over 15 years ago but is now a charity in its own right. It reminds me of that because its slogan is “substance over style”, and it was set up as an explicit antidote to traditional schools’ debating, which tends to emphasise clever rhetorical tricks and devices, even employing voice coaches and drama techniques. Pupils’ speeches can be stylistically elegant but, while beautifully delivered, can often be banal cliches; some of the Debating Matters pupils might have stuttered and stammered their way through their speeches, but they were content rich. Leadership requires us to give due regard to content.

This morning, I turned on Sky News to see a representative from Rights for Residents, who was eloquently and forcefully explaining the petition that she and others were handing into No. 10 today, in support of residents and their relatives in care homes, who have been denied visiting rights. The Rights for Residents campaign did not exist before this pandemic, but the awful, cruel treatment of residents forced it to exist. It is led—that is my point—by a group of brilliant women who had no experience of public life before this and who have never been on a media training course. They took a lead because it mattered, and they showed courage, integrity and principles. I sometimes think we do not talk about that enough when we talk about leadership skills.

I also feel anxious when I hear proposals about the creation of a physical campus—a school of public service—which we have heard about. This school would apparently be

“a world leading … executive training programme, equivalent to the leading business school offers”,

in which aspiring civil servants, public sector leaders and politicians would be trained together, based on a redefined set of leadership requirements. I immediately thought about the destructive impact that MBAs and managerialism have had on public life. I am sorry, but I do not think this is the solution: think of all the damage that has been done to our language by the gobbledegook and acronyms of managerialism, the performance management frameworks and so on. Then I noticed that a priority for this new school will be to lead high-quality research to develop better understanding of the relationship between leadership, well-being and productivity. I appeal to people not to waste money on that research, because it should be obvious that there is a connection between those things. If you need to be taught that, what kind of a leader are you?

I am also worried that setting up this kind of campus might end up aping other aspects of campus culture. Think of the debacle of the Valuing Everyone training. It was supposed to make us better leaders, but it was condescending and, if anything, did not make us value others and led to the cancelling of several of our Peers for not doing it, because of the rubric and rules. Then there are the endless stories of civil servants being forced to ape the worst of the divisive aspects of student identity politics, when they are sent on training courses on unconscious bias—which is, by the way, pseudoscience—and how to champion diversity, as defined by organisations such as Stonewall.

I make this point because, rather than just saying that what we need to do is to train Ministers and civil servants, we need sufficiently to scrutinise what that training consists of, because it can actually be dangerous. I was struck by the description of the problems at the heart of government given by the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor. I agree with her and the shocking examples that she gave of the contempt shown to parliamentary accountability of late and the broader disdain for democracy shown across both Houses for popular sovereignty in relation to the Brexit vote—not because they did not know what the mandate was but in defiance of our electors.

That seems to me not something you can train people out of. It is not a skills deficit, but a democratic political deficit. That should be our focus, and we should not get distracted by all going off on training courses.