The Future of the Civil Service

Lord McNally Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally (LD)]

My Lords, I echo the tribute paid by the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, to the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy.

In 2010 I returned to Whitehall as the Minister of State for Justice after a gap of some 31 years, having served as a special adviser to the late Lord Callaghan in the Foreign Office and Number 10 from 1974 to 1979. I am often asked what my impressions were of working again with our Civil Service after that 30-year-plus gap.

I was impressed by the high quality of bright young people who still join our Civil Service motivated by a desire to serve the public good. What is more, in the intervening 30 years, our Civil Service has achieved a diversity in race, gender and social background that, although still a work in progress, outstrips anything seen in the upper reaches of the judiciary, for example. I found a service that, far from being resistant to change, was eager to embrace new methods of working and new technologies.

However, we are moving to a relationship where the public sector acts more and more as a commissioner of services, with the private sector as a supplier. To make that work, we need to equip our Civil Service with the skills for that task. That will mean the Civil Service embracing greater transparency, underpinned by freedom of information. It is increasingly going to need the skill sets to manage contracts with the private sector in a way that gives the taxpayer high performance and value for money. It will need a capacity to procure and manage highly complex information-technology programmes.

We will recruit and retain the civil servants for those tasks only if Ministers are willing to defend public servants from the mythologies, prejudices and dogmas of left and right. One of the great reforms of 19th-century liberalism, as was referred to, was the implementing of the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms that cemented into our governance the concept of a Civil Service that is politically neutral and selected on merit. In the search for efficiency and technical competence, we must not lose either the ethos of public service or the political neutrality and selection on merit that have served us so well in the past and are still qualities to be valued in a Civil Service for the 21st century.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

[Lord McNally]

I think that the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, may have been on to something. This House can set up its own committee if the Government were so stubborn as to try to stop any other route. This House can do it and may have to.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the Government are not opposed to intelligent inquiry by Parliament. One of the many things that has changed over the past 40 years is the relationship between Parliament and civil servants. Parliamentary inquiries by my honourable friend Bernard Jenkin’s committee, Margaret Hodge’s committee and others are a regular part of life in a way that they were not 40 years ago. That is a desirable development. We are now having to think about how we rewrite the Osmotherly rules to fit in with this new development.

I have heard a diversity of views in this debate about how far civil servants and senior officials should be directly answerable to Parliament for the major projects that they have been leading. That is another area that is worth examining. After all, we are light years away from the Crichel Down affair, when a Minister resigned over a failure in his department about which he knew little. We would not want go back to that. This is another area where the relationship among Ministers, senior officials and Parliament has evolved, and it will no doubt need to evolve further.