Civil Service Reform

Lord Maude of Horsham Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jenkin]

I am grateful for the hon. Lady’s intervention, and I can in fact inform the House that the Public Administration Select Committee is doing something very specifically on the impartiality of the civil service—and we still only have one civil service in the United Kingdom—in respect of the conduct of referendums. I am going to avoid being distracted by that topic, however.

[The Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General (Mr Francis Maude)]

On a pure point of fact, since 1922 the civil service in Northern Ireland has been separate.

[Mr Jenkin]

Touché, as they say. I am most grateful for that information. I am sure it would have been in the Government’s evidence to our Committee.

Before I continue, I draw the House’s attention to the names on motion 36 under “Remaining orders and notices” in today’s Order Book. Motion 36 would set a more limited remit than we originally proposed and determine the Commons membership of the commission on the civil service. The other place indicated last week that it would reciprocate and I can inform the House that the former Lord Justice General of Scotland and the former Deputy President of the Supreme Court, Lord Hope of Craighead, has indicated that he would chair this commission if invited to do so. The names of former Secretaries of State, former Ministers and the clear majority of chairs of Select Committees on our motion, along with the support of the other place, represent a real and powerful cross-party consensus that would give civil service reform the impetus and urgency it needs.

As we consider accountability, trust and leadership at the top of Government, it is important to understand what extraordinary demands we place on Ministers and senior officials. Ministers are accountable to Parliament for the performance of their Departments, like directors to their shareholders, but unlike in almost any other walk of life they have to rely on people they do not appoint and cannot easily remove. In addition, today’s Ministers feel accountable for a system that has become somewhat unaccountable.

PASC has watched the Government’s policy on the civil service evolve. To start with there was much talk about change in Government but no plan for how change would be led and implemented. In our 2011 report “Change in Government: the agenda for leadership”, PASC recommended that the Government should formulate a comprehensive change programme articulating what the civil service is for. The civil service reform plan of 2012 indicates that the experience of Ministers in Government has had an impact on their thinking about the civil service, but it does not meet our recommendation.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General (Mr Francis Maude)]

First, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) on securing this debate. It has been a really good debate, conducted with a lot of intelligent, thoughtful comments and insights. It has been particularly marked by a very bipartisan, consensual approach, with a high degree of agreement from those in all parts of the House. I am particularly grateful for the remarks made by the right hon. Member for Barking (Margaret Hodge) and I wish to pick up on a couple of points she made. She is absolutely right to say that we need to work on the ability of the civil service to accommodate and assimilate people coming in from outside. I also completely agree with her on the issues about women succeeding in the higher realms of the civil service, which is why I have just commissioned some work on examining exactly where and why the problems arise, so that we can address this in a substantive way. She is right to draw attention to it.

I start by saying that there are many absolutely brilliant civil servants. I have no doubt that we have some of the best civil servants in the world. Just this morning, I was with a number of civil servants in Birmingham. One example stood out, and it involved part of the Department for Communities and Local Government. The national planning casework unit, half of which is based in Birmingham, told me that its casework has risen over the past four years by 24%. The speed with which it is delivering the outcomes has improved markedly, and it is doing that with less than half the staff it had to begin with. That is a remarkable improvement in productivity.

As has been pointed out, there has been a significant reduction in headcount across the civil service. It is already down by some 16% or 17% with more reductions to come, and yet no one would say that the civil service is delivering less. There is a significant improvement in productivity. The downsizing has taken place through the recruitment freeze and through reforms to the civil service compensation scheme—the scheme was so generous as to be broadly unaffordable for the Government—for sensible voluntary redundancies to reduce the size and to reflect the need for things to be done differently. Some Departments, such as the DCLG and the Department for Education, have halved in size.

There have been significant improvements, with some brilliant civil servants doing terrific and important work, but we need continuing and significant further improvement. No one argues otherwise, and no one in this Chamber today has said anything else. It does not matter whether we call it change, reform or improvement. We need to recognise what is great. We talk about the British civil service being the envy of the world, but what is the envy of the world is the essence of the Northcote-Trevelyan settlement. Northcote was a politician and Trevelyan a civil servant—an early example of collective leadership. What that said was not primarily about impartiality, but about permanence, and appointment and recruitment on merit. The principle of a permanent civil service capable of serving the Government of the day, regardless of their composition, is crucial. The values of impartiality, honesty and integrity are really important, but they are passive values and to them need to be added the dynamic values.

The Northcote-Trevelyan settlement is a bargain, which says that a new Government cannot replace existing civil servants with their own appointees, because the other side of the coin of impartiality and permanence is the ability to deliver the priorities of the democratically elected and accountable Government of the day. That means that the civil service must be able to deliver it. If it falls down for too long on that side of the bargain, the case to allow the Government to bring in their own appointees and thus to disrupt the settlement, which none of us wants to see, will mount.

The truth is that in the public sector productivity flatlined for too long. That happened across the public sector as a whole, and the civil service represents only a part of that work force, but none the less it was a concern. Things have improved markedly over the past four years.

When people talk about the British civil service being the best in the world, as they often do, we should just reflect on the fact that in the World Bank’s Government effectiveness index, we ranked 15th, behind countries with systems similar to ours, such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand. We need to deal with the constant concerns that are expressed about the leadership and management of change. Those concerns are also expressed by civil servants themselves in people surveys, which is an excellent institution that will continue. The capability deficit in commercial and digital project management is repeatedly flagged up by the Public Accounts Committee, the Public Administration Committee, the Liaison Committee and the Institute for Government and we are on the case, as we have been for the past four years. Some of the problems that have arisen with contracts have come to light precisely because of the improvement in contract management. They went unnoticed for far too long and came to the surface in an alarming and distressing way, and we are working hard to deal with them, including by setting up the Crown Commercial Service, the Major Projects Leadership Academy and the Major Projects Authority, to which the right hon. Member for Barking referred. We have strengthened the hand of senior responsible owners by making them directly accountable. The Government Digital Service is almost, but not quite, what the hon. Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins) was proposing—that is, a public corporation for Government IT. None the less, it is an agency within government that has massively improved capability. I rather agree with him about the need to insource some of the capability, as too much IT capability was outsourced.

Much work has already been done and the problems are well understood and are being addressed, but we need to do that much more quickly because too much public money—taxpayers’ money—is at risk.

Impartiality is, of course, important. That does not mean and has never meant being impartial to the Government of the day. The civil service must be very partial towards the Government’s getting their programme implemented; otherwise, the bargain starts to fall apart. The essence of impartiality is not indifference to the Government of the day but the ability to be equally passionate and committed to implementing a future Government’s priorities and programme. It is important that this impartiality does not turn into a cold indifference. It must be a passionate commitment to delivering the Government of the day’s priorities. That is hugely important.

There is much that has been done and much that needs to be done. Let me now come on to the proposal for a commission made by my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex. Differing views have been expressed on both sides of the House and a huge amount of work and analysis is already going on. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) on setting up another institute to study the issue and make proposals. That is very important.

As it would run alongside an active reform programme commanding very widespread support—it has slightly surprised me how little controversy has attended the civil service reform programme—one must ask what a commission would add at this stage. There would be scope-creep: the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr Raynsford) would like to add localism, the hon. Member for Luton North would like to add the size of the state, the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg) would like to add the Scottish civil service, and the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Andrew Miller) would like to consider a wider joining-up across government than that which relates to the civil service.

I am afraid that my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex has slightly added to my concern about whether a commission would delay the implementation of the existing reform programme. His Committee’s last report suggested that the Government’s modest proposal that the Prime Minister should be able to choose between two appointable candidates should not be implemented until a commission had considered it, thus lending support to exactly the concerns we have expressed for some time. If relatively modest proposals that command such widespread support can be successfully implemented, the current system will have been reinforced. If they cannot be implemented in the way we are proposing, I suggest that that would be the time for root-and-branch examination through a commission.