Civil Service: Politicisation

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 28th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to indulge the House with some reflections on my personal career experience as a political appointee in government. I do not want to see a politicised Civil Service, but a limited appointment of outsiders to support Ministers in policy, as well as political roles, is no threat to the integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality of our brilliant Civil Service.

My own experience as a political appointee goes back a long way. I first served as a special adviser to Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank in the Callaghan Government. In that role, I learned a great deal from my first Permanent Secretary, Sir Peter Baldwin, whom I should imagine the noble Lord, Lord Butler, knew very well. He persuaded me to be totally transparent in the advice I gave to the Secretary of State with every note copied to civil servants. As a result, he brought me on to the department’s policy board—the top board in the department.

But that closeness does not mean sycophancy. There is a danger in the Whitehall culture that promotes an adherence to a settled departmental view, which officials feel constrained by. Outside challenge, if delivered in a collegiate way, is a very good thing. A modern example of that departmental view is, for instance, the Treasury’s institutional opposition to the very idea of an active industrial policy. That has to be challenged from the inside.

I went on to serve in Sir Tony Blair’s No. 10 Policy Unit for over seven years, primarily working on European questions. The Foreign Office was greatly supportive of my role, and I am forever grateful to the noble Lords, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard and Lord Jay of Ewelme, to our excellent ambassadors on the whole, and to Sir Stephen Wall for the support he gave me. In my political networking across Europe, I believe I added something that they were not in a position to give. I also saw at first hand how Ministers operated in different administrative and political cultures on the continent.

When the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, was a European Commissioner, I worked in his cabinet. I believe, like the noble Lord, Lord Waldegrave, that the cabinet is a good model of bringing in outsiders and expert officials who are released from their director-general’s grip by being members of a cabinet. That facilitated fresh thinking. I think we should be more open to the cabinet model in Britain.

I also saw virtue in the German model of politically appointed state secretaries who took decisions on their bosses’ behalf as well as playing a managerial role in their department. Cabinet Ministers were released from day-to-day pressures and able to focus on the big picture because they had a high level of trust in their politically appointed state secretaries.

Because of the 24-hour—now perhaps 24-minute—news cycle and the dominance of social media, politics and government have taken on the nature of a constant general election campaign. We may regret this, but it is an unalterable fact of political life and, therefore, effective government needs strategists, polling experts, focus group interpreters and message crafters right at the centre of government. It also needs the outside expert to bring a breath of fresh air to a Civil Service that wants to drive reform but has become cynical and despairing as a result. I want to see to those outside experts working, and perhaps the best practice is to follow what the European Commission did for me when I was in Brussels, which was to make me an agent temporaire working on the same basis as officials, with the same responsibilities and duties, but only for the term of the Commission to which I was appointed.