Accountability of Civil Servants: Constitution Committee Report

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 7th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I declare a professional and personal interest: I am, as the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, remarked, a member of the Civil Service reform board; my wife is a former civil servant; and I have a family member who is a current civil servant.

The Government welcome this report. We apologise profusely for the late completion of the response. We were keen to ensure that the committee received a carefully considered and positive response to the report and were hoping to include some of the ongoing work on accountability and Civil Service reform. That resulted in a delayed response, but I appreciate that it was a lack of courtesy to the committee to leave it quite so late. We look forward to the committee’s further work on this theme. The report is a contribution to a continuing discussion about our state, our constitution and the relationship between the Executive and Parliament.

We should not exaggerate the degree of current disagreement or discontent, or the supposed threat to the principles of Northcote-Trevelyan. It is clear that recruitment is still by merit, and I am happy that recruitment is going extremely well. The Diplomatic Service and the domestic Civil Service attract intense competition from graduates. Promotion is also by talent, although I have noticed during the past 30 or 40 years that ministerial favour has rarely hurt the careers of particular civil servants under different Governments. There are some queries about retention, particularly in the Treasury, where I think churn is one-sixth of staff a year. I am still puzzled as to why the Treasury should pay much less than some other departments in Whitehall. Those are the sort of things which some of us are querying inside government.

We still have the principle of a permanent Civil Service, although I think that it would be fair to say—and the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, will certainly remember—that when we had a large number of temporary civil servants in World War II, many of them turned out to be the great civil servants of the following generation. The idea that one has a permanent Civil Service in which there should be no movement in and out is one with which I think none of us entirely agrees.

There is of course a necessary and continuing constructive tension between Ministers and officials, and between government and Parliament. When I first came into this area as a graduate student studying under Max Beloff at the University of Oxford, the new Labour Government were then deeply suspicious of the conservatism of the Civil Service after 13 years of Conservative Government. Again, in 1974, a Labour Government came in who were suspicious of the conservatism of the Civil Service. When the Conservatives came in from 1979, there was, as the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, remarked, a mood of “Is he one of us? Are they too close to Labour?”. When new Labour came in again in 1997, there was some suspicion that many senior civil servants were too close to the Conservatives. We have now had a coalition from 2010, and some people have natural suspicions that people are too close to the previous regime.

The development of the role of special advisers during the past 25 to 30 years has, in my opinion, helped the relationship between Ministers and officials, although, of course, there are always exceptions to every case. The transformation of government during the past three generations has also changed the challenges posed to Whitehall. We have moved from policy to management, to a very large welfare state and thus to a much greater concentration on delivery, and from local delivery to central control. I note the argument as to how far the Secretary of State for Health should continue to be personally responsible and accountable for actions within the National Health Service across the whole of England. That is an interesting question. If one adopted the principles set out in the very interesting new report by the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, which proposes a substantial decentralisation of delivery, it would mean that Ministers would be less responsible for delivery on the ground. However, 50 years ago, delivery on the ground was the responsibility mainly of local authorities and not of central government. That is an issue which we will no doubt also continue to discuss.

The sharpness of financial constraints under which the Government are now operating, and they exist not just in the United Kingdom, pose real challenges for all departments of government. Major shifts in skills are needed. Permanent under-secretaries two or three generations ago did not think that they needed strong managerial skills. It is clear that in what we now call “the delivery departments” managerial skills are extremely important. Management of major projects, which the Civil Service reform plan is much concerned with, requires skills which are not always easily available within the Civil Service. We have just set up a major project academy and are well aware of the managerial failures during the previous Government and before in the management of major innovatory projects. Digitisation—which is just beginning to hit the Civil Service—might lead to a total revolution in the entire relationship between the state and the citizen, in which the state moves from paper to a much greater reliance on electronic exchanges, enabling us to have a smaller central state.

There is also the move to formal coalition, in which civil servants have to balance between two parties in government, although that is not entirely novel either. I cherish the senior official who said to me a year ago that this coalition was in many ways working much better than its predecessor because it was a formal coalition, meaning that we had to have argument in the open and in committees, unlike in the coalition between Brownites and the Blairites which had plotted behind closed doors.

There has been a comparable shift in the relationship between the Executive and Parliament: the rise of Select Committees, a far greater seriousness of parliamentary scrutiny and the development of committees in the Lords. As I sit in the Cabinet Office, I hear people talking about “the three key committees” to which the public service now relates; that is, the Public Accounts Committee, the Public Administration Select Committee and the Lords Constitution Committee. That relationship did not concern civil servants very much in the 1970s. I cherish a comment that I came across, on the recommendation of the author of the volume, a couple a weeks ago. It was made by a senior official during an off-the-record conference on open government in the late 1970s. The civil servant said to the journalist concerned that he had a “nightmare” of being subject not just to Parliamentary Questions but to Select Committee inquiries, investigation by the ombudsman, the Equal Opportunities Commission, the Community Relations Commission and an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. “And now”, he said, “you’re trying to impose freedom of information on us”. He said it was a totally different landscape from that which he had to steer policy through than the terrain he had entered as a young assistant principal in the 1950s. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, for that quotation.

We have moved a great deal, without, of course, resolving some of the central tensions within our informal constitution between executive sovereignty or parliamentary sovereignty. All Governments tend to favour executive sovereignty and all Oppositions tend to favour parliamentary sovereignty. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, has taken note and will use in his next volume the wonderful quotation by the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, that the lines in the sand need to be kept under review. That is as good a definition of our unwritten constitution as one could possibly hope for. It recognises that much of our constitution works on trust. We only go into demands for detailed writing down of rules when trust has broken down.

The Northcote-Trevelyan principles have been retained, but have to be reinterpreted for changing circumstances. I am not involved in great, grand parricide; we are involved in adaptation.

Civil Service morale is not as bad as the FDA report suggests. The Civil Service annual survey provides a much more confident interpretation of the way in which the Civil Service currently sees its role than that which the FDA itself has provided. My own informal conversations with my former students across the Civil Service suggest that morale is still good, although, of course, there are concerns about the rapid changes which are under way.

There is not an atmosphere of hostility to the Civil Service within the current Government. There were one or two temporary officials when the Government came in, but the leading force of hostility has departed to California.

The transformation of Government over the past three generations has taken us a very long way. The Prime Minister in his statement to the Liaison Committee said very clearly:

“I do not want us fundamentally to change the system from ministerial accountability with a permanent civil service”.

But there is scope to consider how we can sharpen accountability and make it more transparent in some areas. The distinction which is made and much contested between accountability and responsibility is part of trying to ensure that Parliament is able to get at a much more complex government machine.

There is a quotation in the report which remarks:

“When Haldane established the constitutional convention that Ministers are accountable to Parliament and civil servants are accountable to Ministers, there were 28 civil servants in the Home Office”.

Today, when one is dealing with a much more complex department, in particular the Home Office, with a number of executive agencies and arm’s-length bodies, Ministers have to retain responsibility and accountability, but, of course, Parliament is entitled to ask some of the heads of those arm’s-length bodies as well to come in and give evidence.

The noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, suggested that Mrs Thatcher had never actually changed the order of the recommendations that were given to her. I can remember, and I will tell him afterwards, at least one occasion on which she did indeed change the order of the recommendations given to her.

I regret that on Action 11 of The Civil Service Reform Plan we have had such a battle in the press about one of the less fundamental issues in Civil Service reform. I do not want us to go back to the situation in which Richard Crossman as Secretary of State and Evelyn Sharp as his Permanent Secretary hated each other and went on nevertheless living with each other. There has to be a relationship between the Secretary of State and the Permanent Secretary which is one of trust and it depends on both of them maintaining that level of trust.

Ministerial turnover has been much reduced since 2010. Permanent Secretary turnover has indeed been higher, although I am informed that one reason for that is that a number of Permanent Secretaries were asked to stay on longer than their original term of office in order to ease the transition between one Government and another. That I believe was passed by the noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell. The Government believe that there has been far too much rapid turnover in the management of major projects. We wish to insist as far as possible that people appointed to manage major projects will spend longer in post. The degree of official churn from one job to another is a matter of concern to many of us. Civil servants move very rapidly from one job to another just at the point when skills have begun to be really well established in that particular post.

On the question of short-term contracts, I do not recognise some of what the press has been saying about this. Let me give one example of a temporary contract with which I am familiar. The Government digital service is concerned to lead on moving towards digital by default. The head of the Government digital service is on a temporary contract. It might be said that he had an unfortunate political background; he was previously developing the Guardian online, but that is not something that can be held against this Government as a political bias. The people I have met from the Government digital service are incredibly good and incredibly professional and have skills which are not easily available within the existing Civil Service. That is exactly the point that we are looking at.

On special advisers, I think that is more a matter to discuss another day. I hope noble Lords are familiar with the Commons Select Committee report on special advisers. Lines of accountability for special advisers are clearly set out in the Ministerial Code and in the code of conduct for special advisers.

On the question of appraisal, again, I compare what I see inside with what I hear from the outside. I have been asked to write appraisals, both on civil servants with whom I have worked particularly closely and on special advisers. I have not yet been asked to write an appraisal on a Minister, but I look forward to that with hope.

The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, asked about contracting outside advice. This is not entirely novel. The Government have contracted for outside advice over a long period. From the 1980s, when I was director of studies at Chatham House, we had a particular study contracted by the then Department of Trade and Industry, on which we got into a sharp argument between the officials who were trade negotiators and the departmental economists over which of them approved and disapproved of the tenor of our report, which ended up in discussions with the departmental solicitor over whether we were allowed to publish it. Government benefits from outside advice and it is cheaper to ask academics and think tanks than to employ large numbers of outside consultants to provide it.

On the Osmotherly Rules, the Cabinet Office has begun a review of the guidance given to civil servants on providing evidence to Select Committees and it will be liaising with the House of Commons Liaison Committee as part of the review and also with the Lords Constitution Committee. It would not expect there to be any change in the current position, which is that the document is a Government publication and has no formal Parliament standing or approval.

On the question of interviewing named civil servants for evidence for Committees, the presumption again is that Ministers will agree to meet such a request but that civil servants are doing so to contribute to the process of ministerial accountability to Parliament and on behalf of their Ministers.

On the question of responsibilities to Parliament, let me also underline that Parliament itself has some responsibility in return. The noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, and the noble Lord, Lord Rodgers, talked about the bullying of civil servants by parliamentary committees. That is something which those committees have to take on board very fully. The case of Dr David Kelly is one from which we have all learnt a number of bitter lessons.

The noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, asked about Ministers answering to Select Committees and I hope I have given her reassurance on that. The Ministers will continue to answer to Select Committees and to be responsible to them. They will also answer for arm’s-length bodies, although others will be allowed to answer as well.

I noted the comments she made about the transparency of the structure of the Civil Service and will take back concerns about the transparency of the website. I do not have an answer on the number of secondments at present but will write to her on that.

Finally, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, that rumours of an amendment to the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 are much exaggerated and that no such rumour has reached my ears. On Action 11, I do not detect the whiff of politicisation that a number of noble Lords have suggested is there. I am reassured to hear that the informal arrangements which have operated across several previous Administrations are not too dissimilar from where we are now and reiterate that this coalition Government retain a high level of confidence in our Civil Service. We are committed to the future of a politically impartial and independent Civil Service and intend to maintain the principles of Northcote-Trevelyan, although necessarily and unavoidably adapted to the present day. I still have confidence in William E Gladstone and the legacy which he left us 160 years ago.