Government: Leadership Training

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 16th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I start by apologising to the House and the noble Lord, Lord Norton, that I am the only speaker from the Liberal Democrat Benches. There were four Liberal Democrat names down but, unfortunately, my three colleagues had to return to distant parts of this country—the Scottish Borders, the West Country and East Anglia. I have heard from a number of Conservative Peers over the past few months the suggestion that all the Liberal elite are metropolitan. That is not the case. I suspect that the illiberal financial elite is a good deal more metropolitan than we are.

I have some interests to declare. My wife was for some years a civil servant, including a period teaching at what was then the Civil Service College. A number of my other relations and former students are in the senior Civil Service. I taught in a number of Civil Service College courses in the 1970s and 1980s, in senior management courses in the 1990s and in executive courses at the London School of Economics provided by the Spanish Government and a number of multi- national corporations and banks.

The noble Lord, Lord Maude, reminds me of the embarrassing occasion some 25 years ago when I arrived at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard to teach a series of seminars on British foreign policy and recognised among the students the newly-appointed Permanent Secretary of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. These things are not entirely new.

The noble Lord, Lord Herbert, also reminded me of the story of the Liberal Democrat Minister under the noble Lord, Lord Maude. The Minister’s private office explained that he could not have a car to take him back to his constituency. When he replied, “So I can take my red box on the train and work on it there?”, the answer was, “No, Minister, you can’t. The red box cannot be allowed on a train. It will be sent ahead by car.”

The Motion refers to the “introduction” of training for Ministers and senior civil servants. Civil servants have been trained, as I have suggested, for some time. Ministerial training presents an existential problem in a political system in which, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, and others suggested, Ministers are expected to answer in Parliament and to the media within a day or two of their appointment. There is a very strong case in general for a slower process of government formation.

I agree with the Commission for Smart Government’s proposals for a longer transition period between Governments—the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, suggested up to two weeks, on the Canadian model—and for

“an interval between announcement and taking up position, to enable incoming Ministers to read up and be … fully briefed before they start work.”

Effective use of junior ministerial appointments as training for senior roles would also help, although some Secretaries of State, in my experience, are remarkably uninterested in treating their junior Ministers as part of a team. Expert advisers—which is what spads were when first introduced—are also highly useful and desirable.

However, there is an underlying issue about political recruitment. Fewer lawyers now become MPs than 50 years ago, as do fewer with experience in local government or elsewhere managing within the public sector. The Commons offers a narrow talent pool. The emasculation of local democracy means that MPs now spend more and more of their time on local issues and less on national or international ones. A Commons Public Administration Committee report in 2015 recommended a parliamentary Civil Service scheme along the lines of the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme. That should be considered further.

However, more Ministers in the Lords, or even non-parliamentary Ministers, will not win support from MPs. I agree strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Young, that fewer Ministers must be part of the answer.

Training for civil servants, by contrast, has a long history, from the Fulton report to the Civil Service Department, then to the Civil Service College, which became the National School of Government. A Conservative Minister abolished the NSG in 2010 and sold off the campus. The PACAC report The Minister and the Official noted in 2018:

“It is now widely accepted that the closure of the National School of Government has left a gap”


in the training and professional development of civil servants that has not yet been closed.

What is now proposed is in many ways reinventing the wheel—which does not make it any less desirable. I have heard highly critical remarks from some civil servants about the contracted-out courses that have been provided since 2010 and I strongly support proposals to reconstruct a physical centre for Civil Service training, which would also bring together people with experience across the wider public sector and beyond—what the senior management course used to do.

Mutual trust between Ministers and officials is essential to effective government. Ministers too easily treat efforts to point out the complexities of policy changes as attempts to resist or undermine what they want to do. Many Labour Ministers in 1997 assumed when they came in that officials were naturally conservative and therefore unsympathetic to Labour proposals. Many Conservatives in 2010 believed that officials were pen-pushers and bureaucrats, who would be out making more money in the private sector if they were any good and were concerned primarily with defending their own jobs and privileges. Some still believe that today.

Attacks by Michael Gove and others on “the Blob”, which, for Simon Heffer in last Sunday’s Telegraph, covers the Civil Service, higher education, the Church of England, the BBC—of course—and the leadership of the NHS and the Metropolitan Police, do not help build confidence that this is a Government open to challenge and willing to listen to argument, and who value a well-trained and politically neutral public service. The quality of ministerial leadership in recent Governments has been, at best, mixed. Bad Ministers blame their officials, as bad workmen blame their tools. Ministers have to earn the respect of their officials and hold it. I have seen Conservative Ministers expressing their distrust of the Civil Service in front of senior officials—a leadership style that does not strike me as very effective. I have noted excellent senior officials with whom I worked in government leaving because they felt they could no longer work with Ministers who dismiss reasoned argument. That does not promote smart government either.

I felt there was an air of fantasy about the declaration on government reform this June and the speech by Michael Gove that accompanied it. It spoke of the success of the management of the pandemic, of rational policy-making without concern for tactical advantage, press presentation or partisan patronage. There was no mention of the fiasco and excessive cost of test and trace, of the smell of corruption in the way contracts were handled or the enormous profits that outsourcing companies have made by providing services that local authorities and local public health officers could have managed more cheaply and effectively.

The Commission for Smart Government report also has some fantastical elements. If departmental boards are really intended to provide vigorous challenge to ministerial and official groupthink, then recent appointments of non-executive directors have been extraordinarily ill chosen.

The government of England is dreadfully over- centralised. Ministers in Whitehall concern themselves with the details of issues that were entirely within the hands of local government 40 years ago. Sending bits of Whitehall departments to Middlesbrough or Manchester will not do much to bring citizens and government together. That requires a revival of effective and democratic local government, which would enable Westminster and Whitehall to reduce the numbers of central Ministers and officials, and even to shrink our bloated Cabinet to a size where it might again become an effective body. It is time for a careful review of the cost effectiveness of outsourcing of many public services after a pandemic in which the profits of outsourcing and consultancy companies have risen sharply, with the Government supporting far larger salaries for the flood of consultants than in-house experts would have cost.

If we are to be really smart about good government, we should attempt reforms that will last longer than the life of any one party in power. The Fulton report managed that. I encourage the rational reformers, such as the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, to resist the uber-partisans within the Conservative Party who want to push ahead without consulting anyone outside the Conservative Party, and try to create reforms with wider support that will outlast the next election or two. This is the sort of issue that might usefully have been covered by a constitutional commission, as promised in the Conservatives’ 2019 manifesto. Sadly, the promise to establish such a commission has been broken.