The Future of the Civil Service

Lord Butler of Brockwell Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Butler of Brockwell (CB)]

My Lords, this is a timely debate and I join others in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy. I agree with every word that he said and with every word that the noble Lords, Lord Forsyth and Lord McNally, said, except for one point made by the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth. I do not believe that selection on merit should be entirely confined to those already within the Civil Service. We need a more open choice than that and this has been done in the past 20 years.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, and the other speakers that something is wrong in the current working of our government, and in particular in the relationship between civil servants and politicians. A symptom of that, in my experience, is an unprecedented spate of recrimination against named civil servants, made worse by the fact that much of it has been through unattributable, backstairs briefings.

Another factor, not referred to by previous speakers, is the alarming turnover in the senior ranks of the Civil Service. Every department but one has had a change of Permanent Secretary since 2010: five have had three Permanent Secretaries in that time; and the Department for Transport had no fewer than four Permanent Secretaries between May 2010 and July 2012, which was when the debacle over the west coast main line took place. Paradoxically, the Government’s proposal for five-year fixed-term contracts for Permanent Secretaries would lengthen their tenure, not shorten it.

I support much of the Government’s programme for reform of the Civil Service. The service needs continually to be trained in the skills that today’s complex world requires, and where such skills are deficient they should be brought in from outside, although experience shows that that is both expensive and not always successful. As the chairman of the Public Accounts Committee in another place has said,

“we have to ensure that people with the right skills are trained up within the Civil Service”.

However, like the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, that is not at the heart of my concern. What worries me is that the “us and them” attitude of some Ministers endangers the relationship of mutual respect and loyalty between politicians and civil servants that has served the country well for 100 years. Before we let that relationship go, we should think very hard about whether there is a better alternative. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, that that is not a matter for just one party or one Government.

I have come to support the recommendation of the Liaison Committee and the Public Administration Select Committee in another place for a parliamentary commission on the Civil Service. It seems extraordinary that the Government should brush aside a recommendation made unanimously by the very senior chairs of all the Select Committees that scrutinise departments.

I am sorry to suggest that the Prime Minister is ignorant of the Standing Orders of Parliament, but the fact is that we would expect a sovereign Parliament to be able to set up such a commission if it wanted to. That, I am advised, is not the case. It cannot do it without the consent of the Government. That may not be right, but it is the present situation and I hope that the Government will think again.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, that is a pretty firm pass. It is very good to be back after a period away, although this is the first time I will have tried to stand for 20 minutes non-stop. I do not regret the need for this debate and I was rather puzzled that the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, said that in his opening remarks. It seems to me that it is exactly the job of this House to debate the principles of government to see where we think government may be going wrong. We are, in effect, the institutional memory—though some of us can remember rather more than others. In dealing with a number of papers over the past 10 days, I have been very struck by how the institutional memory does not go back much beyond about 1990; however, mine does, so I was able to say, “No, the problem did not begin then”. That is precisely the sort of thing that we should be doing here.

I should declare a few interests. I am a member of the Civil Service reform board. My wife was a civil servant for seven years, at a time when the Civil Service was pretty unfriendly to women with children. My daughter is a civil servant, at a time when the Civil Service is very friendly to women with children—I am happy to say that that is part of the transformation over the past 30 years.

As a young academic, in 1977 I published a study of Whitehall’s management of Britain’s international relations and then got caught up in a government review, the Berrill report, of much the same thing. I vividly remember being carpeted in the Paris embassy by Sir Nicholas Henderson, who thought that I was a dangerous radical suggesting all sorts of things that would undermine Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service—and, indeed, the Diplomatic Service saw off the Berrill report pretty firmly. That was a mistake. It is part of the problem that we have with the absence of language skills across the Civil Service at present that we did not think, as the Berrill commission and others like me were saying, that we needed to spread those skills across the Department of Trade and Industry and other departments. The internationalisation of government is one of the revolutions that we have been running through since then.

Over the past 30 or 40 years, Whitehall and the British Government as a whole have had to cope with a whole series of changes. I have mentioned internationalisation, but we have also seen the gradual centralisation of the delivery of public services—first across the country and then with the partial reversal of that in the establishment of the devolved Governments—which has left England as the most centralised country in the advanced industrialised world. I hope that what the coalition Government is now doing with city deals is beginning to reverse that. That will have implications for the central Civil Service.

The expansion of public services, particularly the provision of welfare and health, is running up against the limits of the capacity of government to finance the services being provided. That is one of the underlying problems that any Government of any party will face in the coming years.

Over the past 20 years, there has also been the growth of outsourcing and contract management. The move away from lifetime employment has been a matter not just for the Civil Service but for our entire economy and society. It has been recognised that the accumulation of skills from shifts in post in your career helps you on your way to reaching positions of responsibility at the top—particularly, the need to acquire management skills, which the Civil Service has been much concerned about.

Of course, there is also now the digital revolution. The Government have been behind the private sector in moving from paper to digital exchange, but I am happy to say that through the Cabinet Office—Francis Maude and others—they are doing their utmost to catch up. One of the most effective pieces of insourcing in which this Government have been engaged is the creation of the Government Digital Service. This is made up of a number of bright outsiders who hate wearing ties when they come to work but who are very good at pushing forward the revolution that we need in this respect.

There has also been the revolution of the coalition Government, to which the Civil Service has had to adapt. In my experience, a number of civil servants have adapted extremely well to the tactful ways in which Ministers of two different parties have to be treated. There has been a need for adaptation while, as a number of people have argued, sticking to the core principles of Northcote-Trevelyan.

On the concept of civil servants following the national interest, we no longer talk about them as being “servants of the Crown” but the noble Lord, Lord McNally, talked about the ethos of public service and a sense of altruism as being important parts of what they believe in. That ethos has been undermined to some extent, particularly on the economic right, by the growth of public-choice economics and by the philosophies of Ayn Rand which have come across the Atlantic, but I think that all of us here would hold to the idea that service to the state and the concept of public service are important parts of what holds government, the Civil Service and society together.

The noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, referred to the transformation of the Civil Service in terms of diversity and gender. It is encouraging how many bright young women there are coming up in the Civil Service. I think that eight of the 36 Permanent Secretary posts are now held by women—that is not enough; it was rather more two years ago and we hope that it will again be rather more in a few years’ time. There is real diversity across the sector. When I travel to other countries, it seems to me that at every embassy that I visit the economic counsellor is of south Asian extraction. Lots of bright people, men and women, are coming through the Civil Service. That is one of the achievements in particular of the Blair Government and, within the Foreign Office, of Robin Cook. We recognise that that has helped to take us forward.

On the issue of a parliamentary commission, the Government are not persuaded of the need for a vast commission. The noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, is too young to remember some of the royal commissions of the past. When he was probably still at school, I was a junior adviser to the Crowther-Hunt Royal Commission on the Constitution. If he has the nine volumes on his shelves, he will find in volume VII a paper that I wrote. The commission took several years and almost no one now remembers it. We are hesitant about getting back to the circumstance in which, as they used to say, such commissions “take minutes and years”.

The Prime Minister did say to the Liaison Committee that he is not entirely closed to the idea of further inquiries. As the noble Lord, Lord Norton, suggested, it would be more helpful if we took one chunk at a time rather than tried to take the whole thing. For example, there is the question of the relationship among Ministers, civil servants and Parliament. The noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, talked about the role of junior Ministers and how many we may need, which is a rather fundamental issue for the future of the relationship between Executive and legislature. The noble Lord, Lord Waldegrave, suggested that we look at the future of the Civil Service Commission.

Through committees and in debates, there are a range of things that this House and the other House should be encouraged to do. That is a different exercise from saying that we need to start again and re-examine the principles of Northcote-Trevelyan, of Haldane or indeed of Fulton.

[Lord Butler of Brockwell]

Will the Minister confirm that Parliament can look at these things, in toto or seriatim, only with the consent of the Government? Can we expect that the Government will be more encouraging than they have been so far?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am not entirely sure what the position on this is, but I suspect that there is a formal position and an informal one. Parliamentary committees inquire into a great many aspects of government, and that is welcome and will no doubt continue. I think that where a good case for a parliamentary inquiry is made, the Government will not obstruct it.