The Future of the Civil Service

Lord Levene of Portsoken Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Levene of Portsoken (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, for his initiative in arranging this debate and I am happy to add to his already mammoth score. There have been quite a number of claims recently—sometimes from Ministers—that civil servants in government departments have not properly pursued the policy that their Ministers have laid down and are being insufficiently supportive of their department’s work. I do not share that view at all.

As some noble Lords may recall, I was, at the time, one of the very few people to have been catapulted into the Civil Service from outside to become a Permanent Secretary. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, and the noble Lord, Lord Butler, will remember the occasion. However, whatever the circumstances may have been concerning that particular appointment, it gave me the huge privilege—I still regard it as a huge privilege—of joining the Civil Service at the top and seeing and learning for myself how the system operated. When I joined the MoD 30 years ago, I had experienced its workings only from the outside and shared the prejudices of many people in relation to civil servants that, fundamentally, they did not work very hard and were inadequately aware of the world outside of their somewhat cloistered existence.

It did not take me very long to realise how wrong I was. When I appeared in the office for the first time, I said to the staff in my private office, “Look, I want everybody in here at 8.30 in the morning”. Their response was, “Of course, then what shall we do in the first hour?”. I recall that not long after the start of the Blair government, one or two Ministers were complaining that their staff did not brief them adequately on the actions that they should take going forward and simply presented to them a number of options without a recommendation. If I recall correctly, it was the noble Lord, Lord Cunningham, who, on leaving office himself, commented sagely that that was indeed the proper role for civil servants—to present options to their Ministers and then it was for Ministers, at the end of the day, to take the decision. He was, of course, absolutely right.

Having experienced my own realisation of what the role should be, I developed a great respect for civil servants and I made the following remark to the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, when he was writing his seminal book entitled Whitehall back in 1987:

“We have people within the MoD, within the Civil Service, for whom I would have given my right arm in industry”.

Our Civil Service is, happily, not politicised. It is made up of people who are well trained for their job, recognise their role in the process and work hard for relatively modest reward to serve their country to the best of their ability. I hope, therefore, that in debating the topic put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, for this debate—the future of the Civil Service—we can build on the excellent ethos that has been built up over so many years. I am certainly of the view that we tamper with it at our peril.