Accountability of Civil Servants: Constitution Committee Report

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Thursday 7th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield]

My Lords, each generation needs to re-examine its notions of Crown service and the accountabilities that go with it. I add my thanks to the Constitution Committee, and its chair, the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, for their resonant report of last November. It covers a great many of the crucial ingredients of what one might call the governing marriage at the heart of the British system; a marriage which brings together transient if, in the end, dominant Ministers and permanent, career, non-political civil servants in a relationship that one hopes will be greater than the sum of its parts. However, there has existed over the past 40 years a third party to the classic governing marriage in the shape of temporary, politically appointed special advisers who can bring great benefits to the work of the established couple but occasionally can also produce bursts of friction that can induce a serious domestic.

I am pleased—even relieved—that in general terms the Constitution Committee’s report has endorsed the main elements of the standard model in which civil servants are required to provide what the committee calls “candid and fearless advice” to Ministers in return for their Secretaries of State remaining can-carriers-in-chief in Parliament, in an age in which, quite rightly, senior officials are expected to give evidence to Select Committees of both Houses and to be visible and vocal to a degree not experienced by their forebears before the House of Commons created its departmentally related Select Committees in 1979.

I am particularly pleased that the Constitution Committee has emphasised in clear and powerful terms the indispensability of sustaining the classic career Civil Service virtues of integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality as enshrined in statutory form for the first time, as other noble Lords have mentioned, in Part 1 of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010—a mere 157 years after the lustrous Northcote-Trevelyan report of 1853 declared that such essentials should enjoy the protection of statute.

It is this theme upon which I should like to concentrate today. Rightly or wrongly, there has been a whiff of potential politicisation of the very senior ranks of the Civil Service in the Whitehall air since last June when the coalition published its Civil Service Reform Plan. It is the so-called “Action 11” section of that plan that has simulated this tang of unease. Action 11 urges:

“Allowing Secretaries of State to have greater influence in the appointment of the departmental Permanent Secretary”—

as this—

“increases the chances of the relationship working successfully”.

Add to this the proposal for the appointment of,

“a very limited number of senior officials”,

from outside the career Civil Service,

“for time-limited executive/management roles”,

to fill gaps where,

“the expertise does not exist in the Department”,

and you may have created the possibility of seeping politicisation-by-stealth of the senior ranks.

I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, who is both a scholar of the workings of Whitehall—the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in particular—in his civilian life, if I can call it that, and a member of the new Civil Service Reform Board, established to implement the June 2012 reform plan, will be able to sing out a ringing declaration that this is not now and will not become the purpose and policy of the coalition as the promised review of Permanent Secretary appointments proceeds this year.

There have been rumours, mentioned by other noble Lords, that a Bill is being considered that would undo those parts of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 that capture the prized principles of a politically impartial Civil Service recruited and promoted on the basis of merit and not on the political beauty of a candidate’s opinions.

These principles were one of the greatest gifts of the 19th century to the 20th in our country. If they foundered in the second decade of the 21st, it would be as tragic as it was ironic, as other noble Lords have mentioned, given that the country had waited a century and a half to have these precepts draped in the protective clothing of statute only to have them torn away a few years later because a set of Ministers had become irritated with their particular partners in the governing marriage.

I have attempted to discover if this is so. Mercifully, so far, I have found no trace of a “Stuff Northcote and Trevelyan” Bill, which I offer as a suggested title, in the minds of the current Whitehall guardians of the constitution. Yet I remain anxious. Why? Because Action 11 sounds to me, to be candid, like a hissy fit: an audible sign that all is not well in at least some of the relationships between Ministers and senior civil servants above and beyond the usual tensions that arise when Governments seethe through their mid-life crises, when it becomes quite plain that the great intractables of British society— economy and government —have become no more malleable because it is you and your colleagues in office rather than your rivals.

During such political rites of passage, it is tempting to blame the civil servants, the permanent fixtures in the choreography and geography of our governing institutions. Could it be that my traditionalist instincts have masked, for me, a set of new realities in the nature of government and politics that make the mid-Victorian nostrums of Sir Stafford Northcote and Sir Charles Trevelyan invalid at best, and positively harmful at worst?

It was the begetter of the Northcote-Trevelyan inquiry and the implementer of their report, Mr Gladstone, who wished, as his biographer Colin Matthew put it, that:

“A civil service appointed by patronage and influence would give way to a non-political administrative class”,

and that while the 17th century had been an age ruled by prerogative, and the 18th by patronage, the 19th would become one of rule by virtue. There was intense resistance to this notion of meritocracy. Queen Victoria hated it. The Foreign and Home Offices resisted for decades. However, it became the norm for the Home Civil and Diplomatic Services, the Armed Forces and the secret services. Its prime virtue is that Crown servants, in civvies or in uniform, should speak truth unto power: to tell Ministers what they need to know rather than what they wish to hear. Sir Charles Trevelyan had seen this approach first-hand at work in the Indian Civil Service. On his return to the UK, he made his case to the Commons Select Committee on Miscellaneous Expenditure in 1848 and then, as Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, to his new Chancellor, Mr Gladstone, in 1852.

How are the Trevelyans of our day operating his legacy? The Northcote-Trevelyan principles are holding. The Whitehall Senior Leadership Committee, with the involvement of the Civil Service Commission, spins off bespoke panels according to the nature and location of the Permanent Secretary vacancy. It receives direct input from the Secretary of State in the department possessing the vacancy about the qualities and capacities they, the Secretaries of State, are seeking. The leadership committee carries out the interviews and places a handful of candidates above the line, indicating that they are both capable of doing the job and in possession of the Northcote-Trevelyan non-partisan characteristics which would enable them to serve equally well a Secretary of State or Government of a different colour. After all, as other noble Lords have pointed out, we need permanent Permanent Secretaries, not temporary Permanent Secretaries who last for the duration of a single Secretary of State. As has been mentioned, there is already an alarmingly high rate of churn at Permanent Secretary level. The Secretary of State and, indeed, the Prime Minister can veto the outcome and the process starts again. However, the key safeguard is that if you do not meet the Northcote-Trevelyan requirement, you do not get above the line.

It is vital that these processes and the safeguards hold and are not contaminated by the virus of politicisation. Walter Bagehot, in an 1859 essay on Gladstone’s great rival Benjamin Disraeli, wrote how rare it was for a Minister to,

“engrave something new upon his age”.

That is exactly what Gladstone did in unleashing Northcote and Trevelyan in the 1850s, and striving to implement their reform as Prime Minister in the late 1860s and early 1870s. The mark of that engraving is still visible.

I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, and her committee will continue to watch like hawks for signs of slippage back into the—for some—tempting restoration of political patronage at the top of the Civil Service. As a seasoned public servant put it to me recently, we want neither sofa government nor sofa public servants to sit on it.

I find it hard to believe that Mr David Cameron or his Minister for the Civil Service, Mr Francis Maude, for whom I have a lot of admiration, wish to overturn the Gladstonian gold standard. As for Liberal Democrat Ministers in the coalition, such as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, that would amount to parricide. As for Conservative Ministers, they have their talismanic figure, too. I am grateful to Mr Nicholas Soames for bringing his grandfather’s words to my attention. In praise of one of his former officials, Winston Churchill said that he was,

“this faithful servant of the Crown, self-effacing, but self-respecting, resolute, convinced, sure of himself, sure of his theme … Governments, Liberal or Tory, came and went. He served them all with equal fidelity”,

consigning his personal,

“sentiments as a purely private affair”.

That is the enduring gold standard.