General Matters

Helen Goodman Excerpts

Tuesday 17th July 2012 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson), who made a very interesting speech, to which I listened intently.

I wish to speak about reform of the civil service. A well-functioning civil service is exceptionally important to the effectiveness of any Government, and we must get it right. I was therefore interested to see the Government’s White Paper on reform of the civil service. Ministers must be able to rely on civil servants and to be able to drive their work forward. I was a civil servant for 16 years, between 1980 and 1997, in the Treasury. Some 10 years later I returned as a Minister, serving briefly in the Cabinet Office and the Department for Work and Pensions. So I have experience of fighting on both sides of the barricades, as it were.

I found that some aspects of the culture were unchanged in the 10 years that I was out of Whitehall, with some seemingly unchanged for 400 years. Coriolanus is told by Shakespeare to proceed by the procedure, and I think that the culture of process over delivery is a long-lasting one in Whitehall. For example, in 2006 an official who was working on the forecasting of the number of immigrants who would come from eastern Europe said, “We went through all the right processes. What more could we have done?” That forecast was out 30-fold.

The good news is that we have a professional civil service that is largely free of corruption. I say “largely” because although we were all looking for more exchanges between the public and the private sector, those have sometimes engendered rather unfortunate behaviour. Our civil servants are also, by and large, intelligent and committed. The problems, however, are well rehearsed and some are mentioned in the Government’s White Paper. They include the fact that the civil service has a stronger capacity on policy than on delivery, which has been recognised as a problem in the British civil service since the Fulton report of 1968. In this White Paper, the Government say that only a third of projects are delivered on time and to budget. One point that they do not raise, but it is an issue, is the narrow social base and experience of civil servants, particularly senior officials. That leads to ignorance and naivety in areas of social policy. I noticed when I was a DWP Minister that I sometimes knew far more than my officials.

Other problems include: the lack of specialist expertise in project management, in contracting and commercial work, and in finance and in human resources—those are all key management delivery skills—a culture of irresponsibility; weakness in long-term and strategic thinking; poor oral and communication skills; a focus on managing inwards and upwards, rather than downwards and outwards; and, I am sorry to say, a loss of administrative skills and honesty. For example, when I was a Minister I had my electronic signature put on documents that I had not seen.

Does the Government’s White Paper address those issues? The answer is: up to a point. I notice that it is a document that calls for less bureaucracy, despite having three forewords. The proposal to have stronger management—the measure for pushing out the bottom 10% and boosting up the top 25%—is rather crude. I would have thought that a well-managed organisation would not need to use such crude management techniques. However, the Government note the importance of strengthening capabilities and of shared services, and they want to strengthen ministerial influence over senior appointments. I agree with what they are doing there, but I do not think that they are going far enough.

The approach of “open” policy making is extremely complex. Obviously, Ministers want to be able to source ideas from people other than Whitehall officials, but the neutrality of officials is also very important and we need to hold on to it. The Government are going wrong in cutting too far, there are too many new-fangled financial mechanisms, such as payment by results, which will be more expensive than gilts, and they have not addressed the narrow social base and the experience situation.

The crucial issue is accountability. Three basic types of accountability are possible in an organisation: hierarchical, market or democratic. In Whitehall, the most important of those is the democratic element. That means that Ministers can be responsible for policy and, if they are warned, for delivering failures, but that otherwise officials must be responsible for delivery. I totally support the work that the Public Accounts Committee has been doing in that regard.

The negative needs a proactive solution. The Secretary of State should be able to appoint the permanent secretary from a shortlist that has been put together by the Appointments Commission. I had always thought that that was a good idea, but when I heard Lord O’Donnell, the previous Cabinet Secretary, say on Radio 4 that that was the one thing he did not want to happen, I knew that it was the lever that we must pull.

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[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley), who is a personal friend. We have campaigned together on many things over the years.

I am saddened by the issue I have to raise this afternoon. As a Member with reasonably long service, I have been very disturbed over recent months about the low morale among the people who make this place work. For the information of the House, over the past few days I have talked to chefs, kitchen staff, cleaning staff, visitor assistants, maintenance men and women, Library researchers, Doorkeepers, Committee staff, procedural Clerks, finance and legal workers, human resources staff, drivers, porters, attendants, curatorial staff, Hansard reporters, members of the media and events teams, accommodation staff and so on. I have done my homework, and I have never met a group of people so demoralised by what they have to put up with as employees of Parliament.

We all rely on the staff in this place; we cannot provide a good service to our constituents without their support. This Parliament should be an exemplar of the best kind of employer, but I am afraid we are not the best employer. As I talked to members of staff, they constantly said, “It isn’t what is happening, it’s not knowing what’s happening.” There is poor communication.

I am keen on management and I chair the all-party management group. I know a little about good management. If managers do not keep in touch with their stakeholders—all the people who make this place a success, and make it amenable to good working for Members of Parliament—and if they do not keep communication open and tell people what is happening, staff become disillusioned and unhappy in their role.

Over recent months—perhaps longer—there is every sign that certain people who are influential in the management of this place believe that it is a business. It is a funny old business where people do not know quite when the House will be sitting. In 2007, we sat for 151 days, and in 2008 it was 150 days. In 2009, we sat for 134 days, in 2010—election year—128 days, and in 2011, 149 days. This is a hard-working House, but it works funny hours, because a lot of our job is done out in the constituency, where we look after our constituents and find out the information that we need to be effective parliamentarians. We cannot run this place as though it were a commercial undertaking; indeed, the House voted by a majority for changes in the sitting hours, which will make it even more difficult to run this place.

We speak to members of staff who say, “All of us in this department, after 20 years of service, have been asked to reapply for our jobs”, and to people in catering who say, “We all hear that they will privatise this, and we will all be out of employment.” That is either true or false, but whatever is happening should be communicated to our members of staff, so that they have some assurance.

[Helen Goodman]

I am appalled and amazed by what my hon. Friend is saying. Does he have any sense of which departments are involved, and how many staff are being treated in this way?

[Mr Sheerman]

The research is quite difficult, but there are 78 senior managers involved in one way or another in the management of this place, and a range of interesting people are involved. We have in the House a business change manager, a director general of human resources and change, an assistant corporate risk management facilitator, and an implementation manager. We have an awful lot of managers—and I am sure that, according to their lights, they are doing a good job. What I am saying to the House is that we should take the welfare of the people who make this place work very seriously indeed.

There is another really worrying thing, apart from the welfare of the people who work here and have, over the years, put so much into their work. I am not talking about well-paid people, or people who have the most comfortable life in this country, in terms of their pay and conditions. I am also talking about the people in the Palace involved in security, who believe that security is threatened by the lack of morale here. They are trying to do the job with staff cuts, and with a declining number of people involved. I had a hand in improving the education offering in this place. It is so nice to see many more people visiting, and lots of children on educational visits. Interestingly enough, as was pointed out to me when I tried to do my research, the downside—if there is a downside—is that this becomes a busier place to manage, in terms of numbers and security. It cannot be all one way.

The reason I asked to speak in this debate is that there are very grave concerns about security, if some of the voices that I have listened to are right. Is it not about time that the management of this place got better, so that we can communicate with people in all the jobs that I enumerated? We serve our constituents best if we are served well by those people. We now have time to reflect on what we are doing to the people in all these departments, and to communicate and manage better. We Members of Parliament are the ones who will benefit from that change.