The Future of the Civil Service

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

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[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield]

That this House takes note of the future of the Civil Service.

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, this may strike you as a genuinely perverse opening remark, but I truly regret the need for this morning’s debate. Why is this? It is because I wish we lived in a well managed state, praised for the quality and delivery of its public services, admired for its ability to complete grand projects on time and within budget, overseen by a Whitehall where—the odd emotional spasm apart—the crucial relationships between Ministers and officials were always and everywhere in good repair. I fear that these tests are not universally met.

However, there is no need to succumb to excessive pessimism nor to unleash a relentless cataract of anxiety or criticism. There is still a lustrous quality to our great tradition of non-politically partisan public service, transferable from one Government to the next along with its perpetual duty of speaking truth unto power; of telling Ministers what they need to know rather than what they wish to hear. As a country, we also possess a considerable, usable past in the history of our conduct of central government. Public service has always attracted capable and well motivated people and it still does. However, each generation has a duty to revisit the traditional verities afresh; to test old models and established practices against new needs and, quite rightly, ever more stretching delivery requirements, while facing up to examples where performance has not risen to the level of events.

It is a very long time—48 years—since a Government commissioned a wide-lens review of the Civil Service when Harold Wilson and his Chancellor, Jim Callaghan, set up the Fulton inquiry in 1966. The Fulton story is not an entirely happy one but it is not for reprising this morning, save to note a serious flaw in its remit when Mr Wilson steered the committee away from the crucial, central question of relationships between Ministers and civil servants. It is this terrain upon which I would like to descend first in today’s debate.

These relationships, which make up what I would call the governing marriage between temporary Ministers and permanent officials, depend upon confident Secretaries of State and confident civil servants in candid symbiosis, raising the quality of each others’ game. The relationship rests on a three-way deal. The deal is the product of two key enquiries—the Gladstone-commissioned Northcote-Trevelyan report of 1854 and the Lloyd George-commissioned Haldane report of 1918—plus a good deal of practical, everyday experience of working our constitution by Whitehall generations past. Deal one is non-political civil servants speaking truth unto power in private. Deal two is reciprocal: in return for such candour, Secretaries of State carry the can in public, even if things have gone wrong in places over which Ministers did not have direct control. Deal three is a valuable, high level of continuity within the state thanks to the career Civil Service transferring between Administrations without a clean sweep of top posts, as happens in the United States.

The triple deal has been under stress for a good while now due to a number of largely post-Fulton developments. The first has been the arrival of special advisers in some quantity. Although a valuable and vitalising factor in many ways, this has complicated the old-style governing marriage and, in some unfortunate instances, has injected poison into it. The second is the truly welcome development of departments shadowing House of Commons Select Committees since 1979, which has brought senior civil servants into a public and parliamentary limelight experienced previously only by accounting officers appearing before the Public Accounts Committee. This has altered for ever the old calculus of official accountability to Parliament.

As an outside observer, I am struck by the scratchiness in some, but by no means all, current Whitehall departments between the partners to the governing marriage to the point where there are suggestions that elements of the old deals are but Victorian relics that clutter up the path to more effective and efficient government. It is genuinely ironic that, with the ink scarcely dry on the sections of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 enshrining at last the 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan tenets, one should hear whispers in Whitehall that if less dramatic reform measures fail, the 2010 Act should be amended to allow Secretaries of State to have the predominant say in who will be their Permanent Secretaries, a process known in the shorthand as ministerial choice.

Place the question of ministerial choice alongside the new development of extended ministerial offices—EMOs—a fusion of Whitehall private offices with a variant of the French Cabinet system announced last summer in the Cabinet Office document, Civil Service Reform Plan: One Year On Report, and you have what some would see as a combined move towards a real, if unacknowledged, politicisation of the senior Civil Service. Is this a creeping politicisation that dare not speak its name? Certainly, it is the coming of the EMO plus the question of ministerial choice that has proved to be the weathermaker within the wider debate about the coalition’s Civil Service Reform Plan.

I was fortunate to have an on-the-record interview with the Prime Minister last October about, among other things, the new extended ministerial offices and greater ministerial choice. Mr Cameron sought to reassure on both points. I asked him first if he sensed a whiff of danger of the politicisation of the Civil Service through the extended private office. “I don’t”, he said, continuing:

“I think that one of the things that makes the civil service great and makes civil servants proud to be civil servants is that they are not political … I think one of the most exciting things for a civil servant is the transition from one government to another; it’s a great test of professional people”.

The Prime Minister went on to explain that EMOs would allow Secretaries of State to have more back-up with, and I am quoting his words,

“some experts, a bit of implementation, some special advisers. That’s quite like what the Prime Minister has. It’s quite like what some Ministers have already put in place. I think it’s growing organically. I’m helping giving it a nudge along”—

there is the word “nudge” again. Mr Cameron also sought to reassure on ministerial choice in Permanent Secretary appointments. He believed that the process,

“has been constrained, I think, rather excessively in recent years so that there is one name and the Prime Minister either has to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ … I don’t think we should have ended up in that position. I think it would have been better for one or two people to get over the line, as it were. Then the Prime Minister, in conversation with the Cabinet Secretary and perhaps the Secretary of State, to make the decision. I do not think that that’s politicisation. I think that’s just the ability of a government to make sure it’s got the right people in place to carry out the government’s policy”.

The Cabinet Office Minister with day-to-day responsibility for the Civil Service, Francis Maude, has given me similar reassurances that the coalition’s intention is not to politicise. Yet for all these reassurances, the Civil Service Commission, the instrument Mr Gladstone created to nurture and protect the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms, plainly remains concerned. The chairman of the commission, the former Home Office Permanent Secretary, Sir David Normington, has been engaged in what one might call a rolling conversation on these matters with Francis Maude.

So, where are we now? Mr Maude paused the question of more ministerial choice last year. The pause is due to end soon. On Monday, the Civil Service Commission launched a public consultation on its recruitment principles. The commission noted that the Government proposed in its 2012 Civil Service Reform Plan that Secretaries of State should be able to choose from a list of appointable candidates as assessed by an independent panel. In last year’s document, Civil Service Reform Plan: One Year On Report, the Government added a new proposal that it should be the Prime Minister, rather than the individual Secretary of State, who possessed the final choice.

In Monday’s consultation document, the Civil Service Commission declares:

“In our view—and that of our predecessor Commissions—merit is best assessed by a process which has independent oversight, is objective and evidence-based. The risk in the Government’s proposal is that it could lead to a Secretary of State substituting his or her personal view of merit for the outcome of an independent, objective assessment process. We doubt whether that is compatible with the legal requirement and it risks candidates being seen to be appointed on the basis of personal or political patronage”.

Those are strong words from the Civil Service Commission. It is striving to clarify and refine the appointments process while retaining the essential Northcote-Trevelyan principles. To this end, it is consulting on two future possibilities. The first would be to go with the new guidance on recruitment principles that the commission published a year ago in response to the Government’s Civil Service Reform Plan. This included, and these are the commission’s words,

“for the first time a provision enabling a panel to seek a Secretary of State’s view on candidates of equal merit after final interviews and before it reached a final decision on the recommended candidate”.

The second possibility canvassed in the commission’s consultative document is, and I am quoting,

“Where a panel assesses two or more candidates to be of equivalent merit … it may put those candidates to the Prime Minister for decision. He should then make the final decision, which must still be made on merit, in consultation with the Secretary of State and Head of the Civil Service”.

I have lingered on this terrain because it spans a first order question. I accept that the Prime Minister and Mr Maude do not intend to turn Whitehall into Washington, but I share the anxieties of the Civil Service Commission. To abandon the Northcote-Trevelyan principles would be a national own goal of considerable proportions.

The real test will come not when the first EMOs are set up this year, nor perhaps even when the next batch of Permanent Secretary appointments are made, though Parliament and its Select Committees will need to keep a careful eye on both. On the creation of EMOs, Civil Service Commission approval will be needed for outside recruits brought in for their specialist knowledge at Whitehall director level or above—a welcome safeguard. The true test will bite when a new Government of a different political colour takes office.

If greater ministerial choice of Permanent Secretaries has happened and several EMOs are in place—especially if they have morphed into central directorates, essentially departments within departments—might not the new Secretaries of State feel that they are inheriting a senior Civil Service that has, to quite a high degree, been politicised? True, these new Ministers will be able to create their own EMOs afresh, but is there not a risk of a future Government saying no doubt, with regret, we must replace the senior career officials too with bespoke civil servants of our own choice? Should that happen, the Northcote-Trevelyan principles would effectively have been abandoned and our Civil Service will have passed through a one-way valve.

It is my belief that our Civil Service does not belong to any single party or any single Government—rather, it is a national asset of central importance to Parliament and all our people. If its essential DNA is to be changed, it must be done so openly and on the basis of as high a level of consensus as possible. To achieve this, much care and forethought is required, which brings me to another question that has exercised Parliament over the past year: the need for a very substantial inquiry into the overall condition of the Civil Service as a central capability for the nation in the 21st century.

When I talk to younger officials, their eyes are not just on Northcote-Trevelyan—though they are—they are acutely sensitive to a whole range of pressing concerns that are already in play or may become so during their career lifetime. Such matters embrace the very configuration of the United Kingdom, with the possibility of independence for Scotland, of a UK intact or not, facing life in a cold economic climate outside the European Union in the 2020s—the size and scope of the state, including levels of public spending, the scale of our welfare state and the continuing affordability of our top flight defence capabilities. In my judgment, these factors powerfully reinforce the case for a broader gauge inquiry into the Civil Service.

Last week, the Government replied to the fine report Truth to Power, produced the Commons Public Administration Select Committee, led by Bernard Jenkin. I should declare that I gave evidence to PASC. To my regret, the coalition said that it does not accept the committee’s assessment that the evidence for a,

“comprehensive strategic review of the nature, role and purpose of the Civil Service is overwhelming”.

In my judgment, this reply is as misguided as it is disappointing. Last November, no fewer than 17 other Select Committee chairs, with no recorded dissenters, backed PASC’s call for a joint parliamentary commission on the Civil Service in the Liaison Committee’s report entitled Civil Service: Lacking Capacity. In our interview last October, the Prime Minister did not, however, close his mind to such a possibility when I raised it with him. He said:

“There’s nothing … to stop Parliament, if it wanted to, to set up its own Commission on Civil Service Reform, and it has now, it’s got a committee”—

he is referring to PASC—

“they’ve had an inquiry. They can go on having inquiries if they want. He”—

I think he means Bernard Jenkin—

“was asking me do I want to set up a Royal Commission. No I don’t at the moment. Maybe it would be a good idea in the future”.

I profoundly hope that the Prime Minister will reconsider. David Cameron has a shining opportunity to stimulate a modern Northcote-Trevelyan/Haldane equivalent, and something a bit more, either by encouraging a parliamentary commission or creating an inquiry on which non-parliamentarians could sit. It need not stymie, as some in the Cabinet argue, the Civil Service reforms that are under way—far from it. The Civil Service does not, and I am sure would not, sag back with relief if such an inquiry was established.

I am not a “golden ager” or a seeker after what the much missed Lord Dahrendorf once called “a better yesterday”—I think he was rather unkindly referring to the SDP. Can we see in the hand that history has dealt us—that extraordinary mixture of people and processes and that jumble of departments overseen by a centre which some say is too powerful and some say too weak—the ingredients of a highly functional, self-regenerating, top-flight system of government? We need the inquiry and we need it soon. David Cameron has the chance to do a Gladstone and a Lloyd George for the 21st century. I hope he seizes it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield]

My Lords, we have had a terrific debate. I am aware of the clock and I shall be brief.

First, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for the care and thought of his reply. But I must express some disappointment about his views—reflecting the Prime Minister’s views, as he says—on the big inquiry, although I note what he says about little inquiries. No doubt we shall come back to that.

I thank, too, my stellar PhD student, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter—terrific PhD student, like no other—for her and the Labour Party’s open-mindedness on the big inquiry. Above all, I thank all noble Lords who have contributed to the debate for their multiple wisdoms, the cornucopian wealth of their cumulated experience and their stimulating reflections. I think it is a record that we have had five former Cabinet Secretaries speaking—I do not think we have had five breathing at the same time before.

A final thought: the Hansard of today’s debate could serve as a very fine submission, a very good briefing paper for the inquiry, in whatever form it comes, whenever it comes. It is just a matter of time. Today’s Hansard will be up there, shimmering, ready. I beg to move.

Motion agreed.