Civil Service: Politicisation

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 28th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, that was a fascinating and remarkable speech. I must apologise that I am the only person speaking from these Benches. Two of my colleagues went down—I hope, not with Covid—in the past two days and had to withdraw, so it is left to me to express our commitment to the idea of an impartial Civil Service. I declare some interest: two members of my close family have spent a significant amount of their career in the Civil Service; I have encouraged many of my university students to join the Civil Service; and I have taught many civil servants over my career.

Government is different from political campaigning and from private business. That is one of the things that some of our Ministers in the past couple of Governments and the current one seem almost to have forgotten. The constant concern with political campaigning has distracted them from the fact that government is difficult and long-term, and you cannot pull a lever and hope that things will be delivered within six months. That is a real problem that social media and the 24-hour news cycle have made worse and therefore more difficult both for Ministers and for officials.

We also have the problem that public trust in government as a whole—politicians, the Commons, the Lords, civil servants—has sunk to a horribly lower level. We all enjoyed “Yes Minister”, but it did not do the reputation of the Civil Service much good over the long run. Then, of course, there has been the damage of the past nine years, in which Ministers in the chaos of Brexit came to distrust their civil servants in thinking what was possible and what should not be. There has been rapid ministerial churn. I know a civil servant well who had six different Ministers in two years to deal with. At that point, you begin to lose faith in the consistency of policy or your ability to promote it.

We also had some Ministers who really did treat civil servants as servants—let us be realistic—and others who believed one of the worse aspects of economic neoliberalism, which is the public choice theory that there is no such thing as a public interest and that civil servants are simply another interest group managing their own affairs as well as they can, working as little as they can and earning as much as they can, and that anyone worth knowing should be making money in the private sector rather than making rules in the public sector. That leads to a preference for private consultants over public officials, which leads to a great amount of government waste, as we have seen. The worst of that was when Liz Truss famously said that she wanted to hear only “the good news”—the precise opposite of the duty of candour, which is what we really need between Ministers and officials, and which, as the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, rightly pointed out, we have not had enough of in recent years.

There are some severe problems that we need to recover. Let us also be honest that Ministers have blamed their civil servants, and poor Ministers have blamed their civil servants as poor workmen blame their tools. The quality of Ministers is as important as the quality of civil servants. Many of the best civil servants I worked with when I was in government left within the five years that followed, and the priority that we now have for restoring the morale and quality of the senior Civil Service is extremely important.

So what should we be doing? The concept of public service is something which, I hope, members of all parties will commit themselves to. Public service matters. The quality of our civil servants also depends on not allowing the gap between public service pay and private sector pay to get too wide. I know of a number of cases recently in which people who have been on secondment from the Civil Service have found that either those interested in employing them cannot take them on because they have to pay them so little compared with others or because the choice of secondment and leaving is a matter of whether or not you are going to have a much higher salary—so the gap is possibly also too large.

We have not really come to terms in our Civil Service with the need for a greater number of specialists. What I have found from the experience of those I know is that the HR function does not value those with special language skills or special knowledge skills or, in particular, those—the few—who have good digital skills. Clearly, the balance between generalist and specialist, and how one continues to ensure that we are valuing and improving those skills as people rise through the system, is extremely important. That also means people moving in and out of the public service in the course of their career. I support the idea that, at senior levels, there should be open competitions, including people from outside as well as inside the Civil Service.

I strongly support the suggestion that local government should be part of where you need to gain your experience from. The noble Lord, Lord Bichard, mentioned the Sam Friedman book, in which he strongly suggests that one of our fundamental problems in Britain is overcentralisation, which is why the central Civil Service has grown so much while local government is very nearly going bankrupt. Unless we get delivery out of Whitehall and back into local democratic government, we will not regain the trust of the public in the quality of our government. So there is much to be done, and much to be done also in training new Ministers, and recognising that Ministers also have to be responsible and open to policy challenge, making sure that there is open debate within.

I will just say a couple of things about political advisers and special advisers because, in preparing for this speech, I came across an interesting article by the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, which distinguished between special advisers and policy advisers. He said that, in his experience, special advisers were extremely useful and policy advisers “necessary but not enough”. The earliest special advisers, I remember from Roy Jenkins’s time in government, were indeed outside specialists recruited to provide you with politically oriented specialist advice—very useful. Most spads today are political advisers; they are to deal with media management, managing the party and polishing the Minister’s reputation. I suspect that what we ought to see more of is experts from outside coming in. Some might say that I am an academic and the sort of person who would like to have more academics in government—but I would do my best to resist that.

I recall the first Policy Unit in No. 10 that I was aware of. Harold Wilson developed his own policy unit with a really good mixture of civil servants and outside experts. As someone who worked in a think tank, I worked with them and well remember the resistance of the traditional Civil Service to them, particularly the “dark-eyed evil genius” whom the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, remembers so well—she now sits on the same Benches as the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, of course. That sort of mix of insiders and outsiders, of different skills, is what we need.

Lastly, I strongly support everything that the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, said about the digital revolution and the importance of gaining digital skills. Whitehall has been, on the whole, resistant to that. Certainly, when I was in government, the resistance to the government digital service’s proposals was very strong. That is something that we all need to spend a great deal more time on.

Part of that is that we need to get back to training civil servants all the way through, from beginning to end. It was a major failure of the coalition Government in 2010 to abolish the National School of Government. I note that most things I have read on this say we now need to have another physical site for something that will rebuild the skills, the morale and the sense of solidarity of our public service as a whole. To maintain the impartiality and the quality of our public service, we need to carry through a fundamental set of changes in order to maintain the best of what we already have.