Civil Service Reform

Debate between Lord Beith and Bernard Jenkin

Thursday 3rd April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Sir Alan Beith]

I understand the hon. Gentleman’s concern. My list was much longer than that. It included people with experience in the private sector and—as I was about to say but did not due to the shortage of time—in the armed forces.

[Mr Jenkin]

If the commission were chaired by a Cross Bencher in the other place, there would be no space on the committee for a former Cabinet Secretary.

[Sir Alan Beith]

I suppose I ought also to say that it would be an amendable motion in any event. Before I was elected to the House, I used to give university lectures about the civil service at the time of the Fulton report. My lecture notes would be of little use today as so much has changed. The Fulton report was itself trying to catch up with change, but so much has happened since then. The civil service is now far less an administrator of services and much more a buyer of services. Back-office outsourcing has been a major development. The Minister knows that I have some concerns that we will not have a footprint of the civil service in the smaller towns and communities around the country if we do not manage that carefully to take advantage of good people who are available, as in my own constituency.

The civil service can no longer be treated as a protected environment where private sector disciplines of personal responsibility, value for money and management of risk have no place. Much policy making is now international—in the European Union, the World Trade Organisation and the United Nations. We are a less centralised state, at least in Scotland, Wales and London, with some devolution to cities and combined local authorities. Departments cannot continue to operate as sole owners of policy, living in separate silos, when so many of the problems we have to address—crime prevention, public health and skills for employment, to name just three—can be solved only on a cross-departmental basis. This means that money needs to be spent in one Department when the consequent savings will be earned in another Department. Money spent dealing with alcohol problems will save money in prison places, for example. Our system is not designed to accommodate such decisions.

The Prime Minister’s office expects to be much more closely involved in many areas of policy, and questioning in the Liaison Committee has been developed to get at that and establish just what the Prime Minister’s office is doing when it has a guiding role—some would say an interfering role—in policy. Perhaps that is an unfortunately pejorative term. Many would say that it is right that the Prime Minister exercises a significant influence on policy development, but it has made a different character of work in at least some Departments.

The Treasury’s role is nowadays quite often one of encouraging specific expenditure as well as blocking other expenditure—a more active role than it sometimes played in the past. Select Committee scrutiny has pulled back the veil of ministerial responsibility and rightly opened up much more what actually happened when decisions were taken. Coalition Government has required new procedures to be developed, and Ministers are as impatient as ever to deliver policy change. The Government have sought to accommodate that through the idea of extended ministerial offices, but I am still unclear whether any Department has followed the Cabinet Office with an extended ministerial office. Perhaps the Minister can tell us.

Amidst all this there are key features of the British civil service that most of us are very anxious to keep, including political impartiality—a civil service that can serve any Government—high ethical standards and the ability to attract people of the highest ability. Resolving these things is not a simple matter. It needs some careful thought. We need to hand on to the next Parliament a well-thought-out understanding of the future of our civil service and how it can be achieved.

Liaison Committee Report

Debate between Lord Beith and Bernard Jenkin

Thursday 12th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[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.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend and the Liaison Committee for so emphatically endorsing the “Truth to Power” report produced by my Committee, the Public Administration Committee, and the central conclusion that there should be a commission on the future of the civil service. Does my right hon. Friend not agree that it is entirely predictable that there should be natural resistance to that conclusion from a Government who wish to concentrate on winning the next election and from a senior civil service that will fight shy of scrutiny of problems and failures in the civil service and the degree of change that needs to be delivered? Should we not invite the Government to set those excuses aside? They have had three and a half years to reform the civil service. It is taking a long time. The inquiry will sit for only a year before it will report. Is that not an effective way of bringing change to Whitehall?

[Sir Alan Beith]

I welcome my hon. Friend’s work on this as Chairman and that of his whole Committee. Clearly, almost all Governments have an in-built resistance to reform. That is a short-sighted view, however, because Governments need a civil service that can respond to the programmes that they want to carry out. The other problem that his Committee has rightly identified is that it is vital that civil servants tell the truth to power and feel enabled to do so. In our report, we identified examples where we felt that things had gone wrong because Ministers were told what they wanted to hear.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Beith and Bernard Jenkin

Tuesday 12th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jenkin]

I have had no indication what would happen in that situation. I assume that the Government would accept such an amendment, because they cannot afford to delay the Bill. I would point to other amendments in the group that refer to the referendum period and are consequential on it.

The real reason for avoiding the combination of polls with referendums is fairness. Whatever the merits of combining referendums with elections throughout the referendum constituency, all voters should at least be treated the same. It is obvious from the date on the table at the moment that voters are being treated differently in different parts of the country.

When the then Prime Minister, Mr Blair, was contemplating holding a referendum on the euro on the same day as Welsh and Scottish elections, Professor Larry LeDuc, one of the world’s leading referendum academics, made it clear that he could not recall one similar case of such differential treatment of a referendum electorate. I challenge anyone to find an example of a serious country putting a serious decision to its people in a referendum when there is such different treatment of electors.

Professor LeDuc thought that the UK proposal was probably unique and volunteered this opinion:

“The effects…would not be uniform across the country. It would likely produce considerable distortion with regard to turnout, the nature of the campaign, and a variety of other matters that might be difficult to determine in advance. The referendum, if it occurs, would be a different sort of political event in England than it would be in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. I can’t think of a case parallel to that anywhere else.”

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

There is an obvious reason for that. In the United States, where it is common practice to combine referendums with a series of elections, there is a system by which almost all elections are held on the same day in all states. That situation does not exist here. Parts of our country have devolved Assemblies and others do not.

[Mr Jenkin]

We have come to a strange pass when Liberal Democrats hold the United States up as a model of democracy. Another point is that the United States has not changed its voting system. It has used the one it inherited from this place: the plain, straightforward, vanilla, winner-takes-all system. Perhaps that is why US democracy works so well. In fact, I do not know any academic authority that would hold up the US as a model of running referendums, and I will come back to that in a moment.