Liaison Committee Report

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Thursday 12th December 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sir Alan Beith]

I have seen the evidence given to the Science and Technology Committee and it referred particularly—these phrases keep recurring—to silos and stovepipes as an analogy for Government Departments. When I talk to Ministers, including one or two who might even be on the Front Bench now, I hear a similar language of concern about the silo mentality. It illustrates that there are fundamental issues that such a commission could properly consider.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend and the Liaison Committee for so emphatically endorsing the “Truth to Power” report produced by my Committee, the Public Administration Committee, and the central conclusion that there should be a commission on the future of the civil service. Does my right hon. Friend not agree that it is entirely predictable that there should be natural resistance to that conclusion from a Government who wish to concentrate on winning the next election and from a senior civil service that will fight shy of scrutiny of problems and failures in the civil service and the degree of change that needs to be delivered? Should we not invite the Government to set those excuses aside? They have had three and a half years to reform the civil service. It is taking a long time. The inquiry will sit for only a year before it will report. Is that not an effective way of bringing change to Whitehall?

[Sir Alan Beith]

I welcome my hon. Friend’s work on this as Chairman and that of his whole Committee. Clearly, almost all Governments have an in-built resistance to reform. That is a short-sighted view, however, because Governments need a civil service that can respond to the programmes that they want to carry out. The other problem that his Committee has rightly identified is that it is vital that civil servants tell the truth to power and feel enabled to do so. In our report, we identified examples where we felt that things had gone wrong because Ministers were told what they wanted to hear.