The Future of the Civil Service

Lord Sutherland of Houndwood Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood (CB)]

My Lords, we had a splendid opening to this debate and that has been carried through, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Hennessy on that. A number of years ago when I was serving what I suppose was, in a university context, an apprenticeship for this kind of thing, I was the junior member of a senate and had to sit on an appointment panel for a very senior administrative post—university registrar, I think. We were wise and we brought in someone from the Civil Service to help—which is the reverse of the process that we have been complaining about today—as it was an administrative post. He started his questions by looking the first candidate in the eye and saying, “You are evil, but you are necessary”.

I have pondered that ever since and, on the whole, have come down on the “necessary” side, especially in the present company. That was a lesson, and I have to say that any civil servant who was feeling a little bruised in the run-up to this debate might take a turn sitting in front of a senate of academics. I say to them, what you are experiencing now is nothing in comparison.

Lest I run out of time, there are two comments that I will make straightaway. One is that wherever I travel in the world where there is still evidence of the influence of the British Civil Service system, it is a benign influence. Where it is wholly absent, you can tell. By whatever measure you use, this is a benign influence. Secondly—and I should say that I do not think that it is all the fault of the politicians, because we do run the risk of moving in that direction and saying that they are to blame and this perfect Rolls-Royce model is trundling on—I want to focus my remarks for my remaining minute or so on something that has not been discussed in this debate: namely, the place of quangos. They sit roughly between the Civil Service operating as it does and the special advisers brought in to do the jobs that they seem to do.

This came to light in my experience when I was chairing a commission looking at the national tests debacle for schools in 2008, when thousands of schoolchildren did not receive their results on time. The essence of it, eventually, was that there was a quango running this. The internal processes of that quango had failed and the procurement process, though it ticked all the boxes, was not adequate. I have spoken about this before in the House. Also, the lines of communication between the Civil Service, the Department for Education and the quango were messy.

The plan was to deal with the problem of devolving power to a quango by putting observers on the quango and all its subcommittees. It did not work. The observers did not have defined instructions or roles. They did not know, for example, whether they were reporting everything that happened to the Permanent Secretary or not. The members of the quango thought, “Well, we have observers from the DfE sitting here; surely what we are doing is all right”. There was, of course, a real problem and a collapse: a process that spent potentially £150 million of government money collapsed. I ask that, if there is a move towards having a much wider debate, the role of quangos—their powers and their responsibility and accountability to the department—should be sorted out very clearly, especially for those bright young people who go in as observers and do not quite know what they are doing.