Civil Service Reform

Jack Straw Excerpts

Tuesday 19th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Maude]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who has been urging me to publish a civil service reform plan for some time. I have said many times that I am keener on civil service reform than I am on civil service reform plans, but we have set out the plan and what we aim to achieve. It will require concerted political leadership, and there must be no hiding place. The political leadership of the Government and wide consensus across the party divide, which I think there is, together with the leadership of the civil service, will provide the best chance of implementing the plan successfully. I completely accept his point that the civil service is an important component of our stability, but we need to ensure that stability does not equate to a lack of any movement.

[Mr Jack Straw (Blackburn) (Lab)]

I welcome the substance of what the Minister said and the bipartisan tone in which he put it. In particular, may I welcome his proposals for greater involvement by Secretaries of State in the appointment of their permanent secretaries? I say by way of confession that, although I am not sure what the rules were at the time, in each of the three permanent secretary appointments that I made—in the Home Office, the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Justice—I insisted that there was a shortlist of at least three candidates from which I should choose. There was not the least allegation that I had acted in a partisan or cronyist way. The point that I made to those Departments was that if I was to take responsibility for the whole Department and for the work of that permanent secretary, I needed to have some confidence in the individual at the official top of the organisation.

[Mr Maude]

I am extremely grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his point of view, which I think most people who have been Ministers would recognise and respect. As Ministers we come to the House of Commons and, more or less cheerfully, take responsibility and are held accountable, sometimes in very robust terms, for what our Departments deliver and how they perform. The relationship between a permanent secretary and a Secretary of State is the most important one in a Department, and it is not reasonable for a Secretary of State to feel that he or she has no real choice in the appointment of that permanent secretary.