Government: Leadership Training

Lord Herbert of South Downs Excerpts

Thursday 16th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Herbert of South Downs (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Norton on securing this timely debate. We have heard many interesting speeches.

The challenges that face any Government are clear; any Government would have faced rapidly rising demand and a second digital revolution. But, of course, those challenges have been exacerbated by Covid, which has now produced an overhanging deficit. This Government already had a very bold levelling-up agenda before Covid arrived. As noble Lords have said, Covid revealed weaknesses in our system of government—particularly failures of preparation, delivery and execution—but it also revealed potential strengths and solutions. As the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, just referred to, the Vaccine Taskforce is one very good example of that, and of fusion government: the bringing together of talent from inside and outside government, real leadership being shown, real expertise deployed and, crucially, individuals being empowered with specific tasks and budgets and being held to account—and yet that appointment was very strongly attacked before it was revealed to have been so successful. I think we should reflect on that.

My own qualifications for speaking in this debate may be said to be limited, having been a Minister for a short period only. But I actually have a long-standing interest in government reform as the co-founder of the Reform think tank, of which our new Foreign Secretary is an alumna, and as the chair of the Commission for Smart Government—which the noble Lords, Lord Norton and Lord Bilimoria, referred to—set up last year to look at how we could deliver more effective government.

I want to emphasise that this independent commission was cross-party and non-party. It consisted of former politicians, former Permanent Secretaries, senior advisers, very senior businesspeople and a number of noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, who is of course a former Permanent Secretary, the noble Baroness, Lady Cavendish of Little Venice, the noble Lord, Lord Nash, who is the current government lead non-executive director, the previous government lead non-executive director, and the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart of Edgbaston. Our commission concluded that, regrettably, our system of government is no longer world-class and we should be honest that in many respects it does very good things and in other respects it fails to deliver; that without transformative change, no Government will meet their policy goals; and that an understanding of that is absolutely crucial.

I want to put on record my strong view that we should not allow any sensible, objective and calm critique of our system of government to translate into an attack on the Civil Service. I am proud to be the Prime Minister’s special envoy on LGBT rights. As such, at the moment I am working with simply brilliant civil servants in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and in the Government Equalities Office; I see their commitment and passion, how hard they work and their abilities. It is not a criticism to say that we need to ensure that we have a system that is resolutely focused on better performance and on the capabilities of civil servants.

No other organisation would look at itself and consider how much more training it needs to give, the quality of that training, the quality of its people, whether it has the right people and whether they have the right skills and somehow make that an attack on itself or see it as an attack on its own people. Of course it is not. It is about instilling a high-performance culture in the organisation and ensuring that any organisation is equipped to meet today’s challenges. There is so much evidence that we are not. We must move on, and I believe we have moved on, from the idea that this is about Whitehall wars—an attack by politicians on civil servants. We must do so for two reasons. First, because that attack is not merited, and, secondly, because, frankly, politicians are part of the problem. It is our system of government which is not working properly and which we have to sort out. That is why the Declaration on Government Reform is so welcome.

Our report made a number of important recommendations in relation to civil servants, including setting up a

“world-leading MBA-style executive training programme … and … A rigorous test of knowledge and experience of technology”—

which all senior officials should have to undertake— and an

“in-house Crown headhunter to help bring in high calibre people from outside government”,

because we have seen that that can be so effective.

But crucially our report also focused on Ministers. We noted that, as has been said, Ministers begin their roles unprepared, suffer from a lack of clear directional mandate, feel that they do not have enough support, and feel that they can be held accountable for mistakes which others have made and which they are powerless to address. We therefore said that ministerial training should be a crucial new focus, and that Ministers and civil servants together should be trained in the new Queen Elizabeth II school of public service, which should be set up specifically for this task. We said that Ministers should be able to appoint outside advisers but that they should be held properly to account. We said that the commission letters that new Ministers will now be receiving, setting out their new role, should be made public, so that Ministers can be held properly to account.

In conclusion, we also said that the red box should be scrapped. If there is one obvious metaphor—one obvious exemplar of a system that is, frankly, completely antiquated—it is that papers are printed off, Ministers read them and then they are carried around in vehicles in wooden boxes. It is an absurdity and an anachronism, and it points to the fact that our system is simply not up to date. Let us introduce modern workforce management methods, proper training and proper accountability, and better performance will follow.