Permanent Secretaries: Appointment and Removal (Constitution Committee Report)

Lord Butler of Brockwell Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Butler of Brockwell (CB)]

My Lords, today’s debate has been given a new topicality by two reports. One was the report of the Institute for Government, which has been referred to, and the other, which has not been referred to, is a report in the Times of a speech by Mr John Glen, a Cabinet Office Minister, in which he is reported as saying that the Government are to introduce new rules for managers to deal with underperforming staff. It is now 25 years since I retired from the Civil Service, so I am not competent to give an informed commentary on the performance of today’s service. I want to concentrate my remarks on the constitutional implications of Mr Glen’s reported remarks on today’s subject of the appointment and dismissal of Permanent Secretaries.

We must start by recognising that, like the armed services and judges, the Civil Service and elected politicians are separate professions, both serving the Crown. Civil servants and Ministers should form a unity in working for the country under the leadership of Ministers, who have earned that right to lead by virtue of their election. However, the two professions are separate, and the obligations that they have differ in some respects. On the one hand, Ministers have a right to be served by people in whom they have confidence and they have a right, therefore, to have a strong voice in appointment, but the head of the Civil Service also has a responsibility to build for the future an impartial Civil Service competent to serve Governments of different colours, and my noble friend the First Civil Service Commissioner has a duty to preside over a process that reconciles these two obligations. I was pleased to see that the Constitution Committee concludes that the recruitment principles formulated by the Civil Service Commission strike a good balance in reconciling these two sets of interests.

I now turn to the removal of Permanent Secretaries. Although a Minister has a right to be served by a Permanent Secretary in whom he has confidence, he does not have the right to dismiss a Permanent Secretary. That is why Kwasi Kwarteng’s dismissal of Sir Tom Scholar was constitutionally wrong. If Mr Kwarteng and the Prime Minister wanted to remove Sir Tom Scholar, it was a matter for the head of the Civil Service. He should have handled it, not politicians. A Permanent Secretary, or indeed any official, is an employee of the Crown, not of the party in power.

It is timely to be discussing this now as we approach a general election. I remember that when senior appointments had to be made during a period leading up to an election, I, as head of the Civil Service, was authorised by the Prime Minister to sound out the leader of the Opposition, not to give him a veto but to ensure that the planned appointee would be acceptable if there was a change of Government. I never encountered any difficulty about this, and I hope that, if necessary, that is happening today.

We can take some encouragement from the fact that, under Mr Sunak’s regime, the instability among Permanent Secretaries appears to have diminished and from the fact that the Government have accepted all the main recommendations of the Constitution Committee. Like others, I warmly congratulate the committee on its report. We can also be, at this moment, further encouraged by both the leader of the Opposition and his chief of staff knowing the Civil Service from the inside. I therefore have confidence that the conclusions and recommendations of the Constitution Committee in support of an impartial and politically independent Civil Service will be respected by any new Administration. I want to see deficiencies in the performance of the Civil Service put right but, in my view, this can be done only by good and respectful leadership on the part of the Civil Service and Ministers, not by imposed regulation of the sort threatened by Mr Glen.