Civil Service Reform

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2014 Commons Chamber

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

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Eighth Report from the Public Administration Select Committee, on Truth to power: how Civil Service reform can succeed, HC 74, and the Government response, HC 955, and the First Report from the Liaison Committee, on Civil Service: lacking capacity, HC 884, and the Government response, HC 1216.

I shall be as swift as I can, Mr Deputy Speaker.

I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for giving me the opportunity to speak about these two reports. The main conclusion of both of them is that our civil service faces challenges that can be addressed only through the establishment of a cross-party commission on the future of the civil service in Parliament.

Let me make clear at the outset that there is far more on which we can agree than disagree. I support many of the current reforms, such as those involving procurement, the work of the Efficiency and Reform Group and innovations in IT and digital government, but who would disagree with the suggestion that reforms such as those, although necessary, are not sufficient? This is not to denigrate Ministers or civil servants; indeed, this is an opportunity for us to thank all civil servants and pay tribute to their dedication and achievements; but when concerns do arise, they all raise questions about accountability, trust—particularly trust between Ministers and officials—and leadership. Those are fundamental, and determine whether reform will succeed or fail.

The civil service is one of the great institutions of state. Under our constitution, the Executive exercises the royal prerogative, and enjoys substantial control over the legislature and appointments to the judiciary. Governments come and go, and, in the absence of a codified constitution or formal separation of powers, it is this body of permanent officials that underpins the constitutional stability of our country. That is why a permanent and impartial civil service was established. The civil service has no separate legal personality: the Crown, Ministers and the civil service are, in law, indivisible. However, under the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010, Parliament rather than the royal prerogative is now the legal source of authority for the management of the civil service, and it therefore falls to Parliament to address the future of the civil service. The only question is how that can best be done.

Some take the view that Ministers need more power, especially power to appoint and dismiss officials, while others believe that any move in that direction challenges the very principle on which the present civil service is founded. These questions should therefore be decided by Parliament, which is the only institution with the legitimacy and authority to do so. We can all agree that reform should be based on cross-party consensus, but that consensus cannot be a private one between Ministers and aspirant Ministers. It should be based on the widest possible range of evidence from those with practical and academic expertise and experience: think-tanks such as the Institute for Public Policy Research, Reform, and the Institute for Government. However, Parliament as a whole should be the guardian of that consensus, which is why any commission on the civil service should be a parliamentary commission.

[Mrs Caroline Spelman (Meriden) (Con)]

Over the last 17 years we have been in a unique position, as Ministers in all three main parties have had relatively recent experience of working with the civil service. Would not cashing in on that recent experience—particularly coalition Government Ministers’ experience of interacting with the civil service—be very valuable to the understanding that Parliament can bring to this matter?

[Mr Jenkin]

I wholly agree. I am extremely grateful for my right hon. Friend’s support for the proposal, and for her indication of willingness to serve on the commission should the House of Commons invite her to do so.

The launch of GovernUp today—to coincide with the debate—by two of the sponsors of the motion is something to celebrate, but it is also further evidence of the urgent need for a commission. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) and the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), but I am sure they will agree that too many excellent think-tank reports on the civil service have sunk without trace. Only Parliament can put the necessary authority behind a programme of reform: a parliamentary commission could not be ignored.

[Dame Anne Begg (Aberdeen South) (Lab)]

Will the commission’s remit include the Scottish civil service, which after all is the responsibility of the home civil service? It is not clear at the moment where the demarcation lines lie, or, indeed, where accountability lies, especially as there is quite a fevered political atmosphere in Scotland at the moment and it is not always clear that the Scottish civil service is acting with the impartiality one would expect.

[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.

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

On the urgency of the task, I note that the date for this commission to report is my birthday, which will be a lovely birthday present, and I also note the juxtaposition of that date with the timing of when this House will be dissolved ahead of a general election. Does having this commission reporting just before the House is dissolved meet my hon. Friend’s desire urgently to address this whole issue?

[Mr Jenkin]

The alternative is that we put it off. Perhaps the commission could finish more quickly, but these are very large and difficult subjects to deal with. The proposal one hears in the corridors of Westminster is that people want to put this off until after the general election. I suggest we cannot wait and I will come on to that point.

The civil service reform plan was published two years later and most Ministers past and present today still agree that getting things done takes far too long and what is often presented to Ministers or implemented is too late or not of sufficient quality. The Minister for the Cabinet Office himself told us there had even been examples of “deliberate obstruction” of ministerial decisions by officials. My right hon. Friend has also described civil servants as:

“Fabulous...Able, bright, energetic, ambitious to change the world.”

I am sure he would agree that no one joins the civil service to block Ministers or Government policy. People join it with the best of intentions and motivations, to serve the country, so why would Ministers feel that those same civil servants are blocking or frustrating their decisions, or not giving truth to power? Why would officials feel that that was the right or only way to act?

We do not need to rehearse examples of recent Whitehall failures, but we do need to ask why they occur and how Whitehall can learn from them. What are the common factors? We all agree that there is too much churn at the top in Whitehall, leading to discontinuity and loss of experience. How did it get like that? Problems such as a lack of key skills and competences are far from new, so we must also ask why, after repeated efforts to reform Whitehall in the conventional way over the past few decades, the same problems persist. The hardest thing to reform in any organisation is people’s attitudes and behaviour, yet there is little reference to attitudes or behaviour in the civil service reform plan, even though they should be the primary consideration.

There has been much attempted reform over the years, focusing on organisation and skills, but those leading change need to understand why people behave as they do. Unless they can change that, the job titles might change, but few will change how they work. Indeed, much of Whitehall is fatigued by reform. Many feel they have done all they can to embrace change but have become cynical and learned how to keep their heads down until the latest initiatives pass by. I think that Ministers refer to that as the “bias to inertia”—a prevalent attitude and a common behaviour that together militate against risk taking and undermine accountability.

When we speak of accountability, it is not simply a question of forcing obedience to ministerial orders so that instructions are carried out more directly, or finding who to blame when things go wrong. Accountability is much more about trust: not just about trusting people to take responsibility for carrying out their tasks and using their judgment, but about those people in turn trusting that the problems they face will be taken seriously, now and in the future, by those to whom they are accountable. Accountability and trust depend on shared understanding—it is a two-way street. Within that framework, people become willing to take responsibility and to be held to account. And when things get difficult and mistakes are made, as always happens, openness and trust become even more essential if there is to be learning and improvement.

This is the only way to improve accountability to Parliament and to citizens, and to avoid repeating mistakes. We need to analyse what accountability feels like in Whitehall today, given today’s intense pressures of the 24/7 media, freedom of information and more active Select Committees, and then to imagine what it should feel like. What, if any, change can be achieved unless we identify what attitudes and behaviour destroy trust? We need to identify those attitudes and develop a plan to change them. We do not have time to wait for attitudes to change. Far too many good people have got fed up with waiting, and they just leave. Also, far too much money is being wasted. As the Institute for Government pointed out this week, the spending challenge in the next Parliament will be much harder than in this one.

Another point on which all four signatories to today’s motion agree is that these challenges cannot be fixed by Whitehall from within. That is not to disparage the present Whitehall leadership. No organisation facing this kind of challenge can change without external analysis that is both independent and, in this case, democratically accountable. The lack of such analysis is the reason other reforms have failed. A sustained change in attitudes and behaviour has to be initiated by a renewed, united and determined leadership of Ministers and officials that encourages mutual understanding and co-operation and is enthusiastic to learn from external scrutiny and analysis.

This will mean Whitehall’s leaders listening and learning to develop new skills. Ministers and officials are so pressed by the immediate economic, political and international issues that they will surely need external support and scrutiny to achieve this. Of course, some will find this difficult to accept, but what is the alternative?

The remit proposed in motion 36, endorsed by the Public Administration Committee and the Liaison Committee, concentrates on the key issues: accountability, trust and leadership. I am pleased that the proposed parliamentary commission commands widespread and respected support. Professor Lord Norton of Louth, a leading constitutional academic, told my Committee that he supports a “full-scale proper review”. The Government’s lead non-executive director, Lord Browne of Madingley, said that such a review is “long overdue”. He also said that

“the biggest single obstacle to progress in government”—

was—

“the question of organisational learning, in particular from experiences of failure.”

He made the key point that

“stories of failure... are the only powerful mechanism for learning.”

Jonathan Powell, the former chief of staff to Tony Blair, told us that without a commission

“we will lose opportunities to be better governed and to get more stuff done”.

We understand why Ministers fear that it could be a distraction from implementing current policies and reform programmes, but without this wider review no civil service reform will be sustained.

Some fear that this review will become too vast a project, but this is not another Fulton committee. Not only was Fulton allowed to take far too long, but the committee was not based in Parliament and so it became divorced from the reality of government, lacked parliamentary authority and had a flawed remit. In a brilliant “Yes Minister” act of sabotage, its remit denied Fulton the right to consider any aspect of the relationship between Ministers and officials. There is no vote on the commission today, but I hope that colleagues on both sides will endorse the view that the proposed parliamentary commission is not just a good idea, but Parliament’s duty. I hope they will join all those already pressing for this to be brought to a vote in the Lobby as soon as possible.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

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[Sir Alan Beith]

I understand the hon. Gentleman’s concern. My list was much longer than that. It included people with experience in the private sector and—as I was about to say but did not due to the shortage of time—in the armed forces.

[Mr Jenkin]

If the commission were chaired by a Cross Bencher in the other place, there would be no space on the committee for a former Cabinet Secretary.

[Sir Alan Beith]

I suppose I ought also to say that it would be an amendable motion in any event. Before I was elected to the House, I used to give university lectures about the civil service at the time of the Fulton report. My lecture notes would be of little use today as so much has changed. The Fulton report was itself trying to catch up with change, but so much has happened since then. The civil service is now far less an administrator of services and much more a buyer of services. Back-office outsourcing has been a major development. The Minister knows that I have some concerns that we will not have a footprint of the civil service in the smaller towns and communities around the country if we do not manage that carefully to take advantage of good people who are available, as in my own constituency.

The civil service can no longer be treated as a protected environment where private sector disciplines of personal responsibility, value for money and management of risk have no place. Much policy making is now international—in the European Union, the World Trade Organisation and the United Nations. We are a less centralised state, at least in Scotland, Wales and London, with some devolution to cities and combined local authorities. Departments cannot continue to operate as sole owners of policy, living in separate silos, when so many of the problems we have to address—crime prevention, public health and skills for employment, to name just three—can be solved only on a cross-departmental basis. This means that money needs to be spent in one Department when the consequent savings will be earned in another Department. Money spent dealing with alcohol problems will save money in prison places, for example. Our system is not designed to accommodate such decisions.

The Prime Minister’s office expects to be much more closely involved in many areas of policy, and questioning in the Liaison Committee has been developed to get at that and establish just what the Prime Minister’s office is doing when it has a guiding role—some would say an interfering role—in policy. Perhaps that is an unfortunately pejorative term. Many would say that it is right that the Prime Minister exercises a significant influence on policy development, but it has made a different character of work in at least some Departments.

The Treasury’s role is nowadays quite often one of encouraging specific expenditure as well as blocking other expenditure—a more active role than it sometimes played in the past. Select Committee scrutiny has pulled back the veil of ministerial responsibility and rightly opened up much more what actually happened when decisions were taken. Coalition Government has required new procedures to be developed, and Ministers are as impatient as ever to deliver policy change. The Government have sought to accommodate that through the idea of extended ministerial offices, but I am still unclear whether any Department has followed the Cabinet Office with an extended ministerial office. Perhaps the Minister can tell us.

Amidst all this there are key features of the British civil service that most of us are very anxious to keep, including political impartiality—a civil service that can serve any Government—high ethical standards and the ability to attract people of the highest ability. Resolving these things is not a simple matter. It needs some careful thought. We need to hand on to the next Parliament a well-thought-out understanding of the future of our civil service and how it can be achieved.

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[Margaret Hodge]

I entirely agree with that comment.

Finally, I want to talk about the conventions on responsibilities and accountabilities within the civil service and between civil servants and Ministers. The system is no longer working, and we need to rethink it. That is the extent of the complexity of the issues we are confronting. We need to deliver this in a sustainable way that will work across the political parties. The current position is frustrating for Ministers and for civil servants. We can look at the situation at the Ministry of Justice and at the Department for Work and Pensions, where I think there is a reluctance to speak truth to power, or at the Home Office, with the experience regarding the UK Borders Agency and the frustrations felt by Ministers.

As the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex said, the doctrine of ministerial accountability is constructed on a basic lie. If Ministers are to be held accountable for the work of their civil servants, it is nonsensical that they can neither hire nor fire them. If we do not challenge that basic lie, we will never achieve the effective changes that we require.

[Mr Jenkin]

The right hon. Lady might be surprised to know that when I addressed 200 civil servants at lunchtime today and asked how many had read the Haldane memorandum, which remains the absolute basis of the doctrine of ministerial accountability and should affect every one of their working lives, no one put their hand up. Does that not suggest that we need to rework the whole concept of accountability into the education of civil servants so that they understand why they are accountable?

[Margaret Hodge]

The hon. Gentleman has had a very telling experience, and I agree with him.

Right across today’s world, not just in Government but in every sphere of life, better accountability and more transparency should be the order of the day, and that must feed into the way that we govern ourselves and are governed. Analysing the fact that we have a problem is much easier then finding a sustainable solution over time.

In this short contribution, I have been able only to skim the surface of some very tough issues. We need a radical overhaul of how we do Government. We need cross-party co-operation if we are to make progress. We know that we have the brightest and the best working for us in Government and the civil service, and we need to work with them to ensure that between us we properly serve the people in whose name we are privileged to govern.

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[Nick Herbert]

I find great difficulty in understanding how a cross-party Select Committee would find it impossible to come to a conclusion, but a parliamentary commission would not. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman could explain that.

[Mr Jenkin]

Why does my right hon. Friend think that the think-tank he has set up would be any more objective than a parliamentary commission? Indeed, how would it be more objective when it has been sanctioned and approved by the Cabinet Secretary and the civil service—the very thing he seeks to reform?

[Nick Herbert]

I agree with the right hon. Member for Barking that we should let a thousand flowers bloom. Many will wish to do work in this area, but I doubt very much that the GovernUp initiative, which I and the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne have set up, is sanctioned by the leaders of the civil service. What I specifically said was that they had agreed that civil servants could perhaps sit on a reference panel. That does not mean that they would have control over any of the body’s work. My argument is that we now need to do the work. It is the detailed research and analysis that we need to do; we do not need political grandstanding or an inquisitorial approach. That is why I think that the proposed parliamentary commission would be wrong.

I believe that the narrative of Whitehall wars, whereby Ministers are at loggerheads with civil servants, is wrong and misplaced. There is plenty of evidence that civil servants themselves seek change. Indeed, the Public Administration Committee report notes that Lord O’Donnell, the previous Cabinet Secretary, said in his evidence that

“if you really want to improve public sector outcomes, I think there is a radical transformation necessary.”

It seems to me, therefore, that the question is not whether change is necessary, but what is the nature of the change and who will make the case for it? Do we have a system that is equal to the challenges facing this country, with rising demand for services, the need to adjust to further spending reductions in the next Parliament and in the future, and the fact that we face ever greater international competition? All parties need to understand that Government reform is as significant as, and essential for, public service reform. That is why this is such an important issue.

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[Mr Jenkin]

I thank my right hon. Friend the Minister and everyone who has spoken in the debate. I agree that it has been an interesting debate in which there has been a great deal of consensus and agreement. Let me just respond to the last point made by my right hon. Friend. The point we are making in our report is that it would be wrong for the Government to overrule the Civil Service Commission without Parliament having some say in the matter, because the Civil Service Commission was established by Parliament to provide precisely that kind of check and balance in the system to stop the Government making such a decision merely on the basis of royal prerogative. Personally, I am sympathetic to the idea that ministries should have more influence and choice, as they had in the past, over decisions about the appointment of permanent secretaries.

In all the speeches today, I have not heard a single solid argument against the civil service commission. Every argument in praise of GovernUp and the work it is doing is an argument in favour of the civil service commission in Parliament. How can we let one thousand flowers bloom, as the right hon. Member for Barking (Margaret Hodge) said—my right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) endorsed that—if we stamp on the one flower that has democratic authority and legitimacy on the question of the civil service in Parliament?

[Nick Herbert]

It is a weed.

[Mr Jenkin]

My hon. Friend says it is a weed, but I think he demeans himself by being derogatory about so many others who have offered their service in this, including Members who are supporting—