Permanent Secretaries: Appointment and Removal (Constitution Committee Report)

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, this small gathering of experts interested in this subject brings back for me happy memories of standing in the office of Mr Maude, as he then was, with his special adviser, as she then was, arguing about the future of the Civil Service and waiting for Permanent Secretaries to come in and argue with us, in what, the current Prime Minister tells us, was the chaotic situation of the coalition Government—which has been succeeded since then by the sound, single-party Government that we now have.

Of course, we are talking about the exceptional circumstances of the past five to seven years, with the astonishing turnover of Prime Ministers—two of whom, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, behaved in an extraordinary way—and part of our question is how far we can regard that, in retrospect, as an exceptional circumstance that will not recur or as something which we have to respond to and build future defences against. The noble Lord, Lord Young, reminded us that sofa government under the Blair Administration had some characteristics that were not dissimilar; some of us go back as far as Margaret Thatcher’s constant questioning—“Is he one of us?”—in relation to civil servants as well as others. So this is not entirely new and I am not sure that we want to go all the way back to the period when Crossman, as some will remember, had a Permanent Secretary with whom he absolutely could not get on but with whom he was stuck and who was a powerful personality herself. We have to adapt to change to some circumstances.

Clearly, the situation under Liz Truss and Boris Johnson was exceptional. The war on experts, or “the blob”—Michael Gove clearly regarded most of the Civil Service, as well as the BBC, universities, journalism and various other things as part of the dreadful blob to be killed—biased the debate about the role of the Civil Service.

I note that, in paragraph 124 of the report, the noble Lord, Lord Macpherson, is quoted as saying that, under the Truss Government,

“you had to tell them what they wanted to hear”.

I recall a civil servant telling me that, when Liz Truss was the head of his department, you were told that you were supposed to give her only the good news when you went into a ministerial meeting. They said that senior civil servants who might be responsible for what was being discussed were excluded if they provided opinions on what was being said that were too critical. Clearly, that is also exceptional.

We know that Dominic Cummings behaved as no special adviser should ever behave. I have been told that, on occasion, he would summon senior civil servants from other departments to see him, without informing their Secretary of State or their private office.

We have to hope that all of that exceptional behaviour is now in the past, but we must recognise that we face longer-term problems of constant short-term policy-making, failure to sustain major projects over a long period, and failures of strategic planning or foresight. We also have to recognise that those come, perhaps, from deeper and shared weaknesses among the Civil Service, Ministers and Parliament. In that case, we would have a much broader agenda for constitutional reform, which we cannot debate now.

We have to recognise that the rate of ministerial churn has been as much of a problem as that of Civil Service churn. I recall another civil servant telling me that, in three years in one post, she had four Secretaries of State and three Ministers of State. That makes constant changes of policy rather difficult to cope with. The relationship between Ministers and the Civil Service has to be based on respect for evidence and on the constructive tension that follows from those who talk about the evidence and the problems of implementation and those who talk about their preferences and their desirability to change the way in which things are done.

This raises questions about the role of Ministers—again, they are perhaps questions for another Constitution Committee inquiry—and whether Ministers also need rather more training than they receive, and whether changes of government ought to take place not over three days but over at least two weeks, to give some chance for parliamentarians, who in many cases have no previous ministerial experience, to learn a bit about what they are taking on, how to treat the Civil Service, how to run Whitehall and so on.

I should say this about ministerial roles. I used to work at Chatham House, in the 1980s, and therefore worked closely with the Foreign Office. I recall the devotion with which senior and junior officials in the Foreign Office talked about their Secretary of State, Geoffrey Howe, and the sheer sadness that so many of them expressed when he left. Relations between Ministers and officials can be close and can be very much a matter of mutual respect. We have lost that in too many cases recently; that is as much a matter of the deterioration of our politics as of our Administration, I am afraid.

If we want to get really good Permanent Secretaries and maintain them, we have to recognise that, as the report suggests, the complexities of Permanent Secretaries’ roles make previous experience of the Civil Service highly desirable. That also suggests that, if you want a broader range of experience, career paths that go in and out of the Civil Service are highly desirable. I like the suggestion that there should be a stronger alumni network for those who have Civil Service experience and have gone out; I think that that is mentioned in the Institute for Government’s report, which a number of us have clearly already read.

We certainly need to do more training for senior officials. I used to teach the top management course—which I suspect the noble Lord, Lord Maude, abolished, although I am not sure about that. I recall meeting civil servants who had been sent to INSEAD, and I think the idea of sending civil servants off to courses such as that is highly desirable. Those are all things which we hope a new Government will wish to take on board.

We have to take salaries on board as well, and we also need to recognise the sheer complexities of being a civil servant. Sir John Kingman is quoted in the Institute for Government’s report as saying that what you need is

“sufficiently dispassionate—and resigned”

attitudes

“to accept and adapt to the changing whims of successive ministers”.

That is a bit hard, but I understand what he means.

I recall a good friend in the Foreign Office who resigned and became headmaster of a public school. I asked him why on earth he had done so, and he said, “Well, I found when I was going to the cinema, William, I was crying too often. I was just having to suppress too many of my own preferences and emotions in order to sustain the neutrality of a civil servant”.

The final thing I want to refer to is the Institute for Government’s suggestion that fostering

“a national culture of contributing to government”

is a way to rebuild respect for the Civil Service and the morale of the Civil Service. If we want to maintain a competent Civil Service, with people coming through to the top who are of the top quality, we have got to shift away from the position in which the mainstream media, and too often politicians on all sides, blame the Civil Service. We should ask for that to stop and for the Civil Service to be valued properly. That is perhaps as hopeless as asking for the second Chamber, the House of Lords in its current composition, to be valued properly as well.