Liaison Committee Report

Debate between Lord Beith and Andrew Miller

Thursday 12th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD) (Select Committee Statement)]

Mr Speaker, I am delighted that we are able to make the first use of the procedure that you have so helpfully described to the House, and I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for enabling us to do so.

The Liaison Committee usually reports on matters of process affecting Select Committees. For example, our 2012 report was on Select Committee effectiveness, resources and powers. This report relates to public policy and is unusual in that respect. It arose because we had shared concerns among Select Committees about how contracts are managed by Government Departments. That was one of the themes of our evidence session with the Prime Minister in September. We questioned him on a range of examples of poor Whitehall contract management, from the electronic monitoring of offenders to rural broadband and the west coast main line. We pressed the Prime Minister on the significant evidence that the civil service is not equipped to support consistent contract management and tends to be driven by short-term pressures rather than by long-term value for money for the taxpayer.

There are of course many examples of civil service success. We point in our report to the successful delivery of the security for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic games, despite the contractor’s failure, as a notable example. The Prime Minister told us:

“There are some issues and problems in the civil service as well as that very good performance and we need to deal with them. But I think that we can deal with them with the plans we have in hand”.

We are not convinced that the Government’s civil service reform plan for Whitehall is based on a strategic consideration of the future of the civil service. We are concerned that the reforms proposed by the Government will not be successful in tackling some deep-rooted problems in Whitehall.

The weight of the evidence received by Select Committees across different subject areas led us to conclude that we should collectively report our concerns to the House. It is not enough just to address how best to increase Whitehall’s capacity to manage contracts. There needs to be recognition of the very different role that the civil service is now expected to carry out. It requires different skills and places new demands on the way that Whitehall works, and it is not just about civil servants. The role of Ministers needs to be examined. In our view, that requires a fundamental review of the role of the civil service. The Government have previously signalled that there will be a considerable change in that role. In July 2010, the Prime Minister promised

“to turn government on its head, taking power away from Whitehall and putting it into the hands of people and communities.”

Government Departments have also been required to change the way they work, while doing “more for less” to meet the financial constraints of austerity.

The civil service was shaped by the Northcote-Trevelyan settlement of 1854, and the Haldane doctrine of ministerial accountability. The Haldane model, dating back nearly 100 years, did not anticipate the size of modern Departments or the vast range of public services, whether they are carried out by the civil service or contracted out. There has been no independent examination of the civil service since the Fulton committee’s report of 1968. That committee was expressly excluded from consideration of the relationship between Ministers and officials. The evidence we heard on the state of the civil service clearly demonstrates the need for a reconsideration of the traditional notion of ministerial responsibility, which is hard to apply in modern circumstances.

A report published by the Institute for Government earlier this week described the current system of accountability as

“opaque, out of date and creaking under the pressure of today’s demands.”

Three months, ago the Public Administration Committee published “Truth to Power: how Civil Service reform can succeed”. It was a report of a year-long investigation into the state of the civil service. The Committee concluded that the Government’s proposed reforms to Whitehall do not look strategically at the challenges facing the civil service of the future. The Committee recommended the establishment of a parliamentary commission into the civil service. The aim of the commission would be to ensure that the civil service has the values, philosophy and structure capable of constant regeneration in the face of a faster pace of change.

The Liaison Committee has endorsed that recommendation. We say that the Government should ask Parliament to establish a parliamentary commission into the civil service and that it should be a Joint Committee of both Houses, on the same lines as the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards. It is right for Parliament to consider the state of the civil service. The Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 clearly established the principle that responsibility now lies with Parliament rather than being a matter for the royal prerogative. A parliamentary commission could draw on the extensive experience of Government and the civil service in both Houses and its conclusions would enjoy cross-party consensus.

Select Committees themselves benefited enormously from the fact that the Wright Committee had established a programme of reform that took effect immediately after the 2010 election. In the light of that experience, we recommend that the commission on the civil service be established as a matter of urgency and report before the end of this Parliament to enable its findings and recommendations to be implemented after the election. I commend the report to the House.

[Andrew Miller (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)]

I do not know whether the right hon. Gentleman has had time to see the exchanges in evidence taken by my Committee, the Select Committee on Science and Technology, from Sir Mark Walport and Jon Day, one of the permanent secretaries in the Cabinet Office. Jon Day acknowledges that in his task of horizon-scanning there is a problem of joining up and he specifically talks about the silo mentality. He goes on to say that there are some enthusiastic people who have tried to solve the problem. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that that underlines the fact that not only is there the need we have seen but that there is willingness in the civil service to go down this path, so the only obstacle is the Government?

[Sir Alan Beith]

I have seen the evidence given to the Science and Technology Committee and it referred particularly—these phrases keep recurring—to silos and stovepipes as an analogy for Government Departments. When I talk to Ministers, including one or two who might even be on the Front Bench now, I hear a similar language of concern about the silo mentality. It illustrates that there are fundamental issues that such a commission could properly consider.