Permanent Secretaries: Appointment and Removal (Constitution Committee Report)

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart, who brings a unique perspective on this subject. I am grateful to the committee for its report and to the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, for her thoughtful introduction to the debate.

Despite what my noble friend Lord Maude said, I hesitated before putting my name down for this debate—because I was not on the committee, I am not a former Cabinet Secretary, I am not the First Civil Service Commissioner, I am not a Front-Bench spokesman, I have never been involved with Civil Service reform and I am not a professor of government. However, during a career with a number of discontinuities, I served with 12 different Permanent Secretaries, all of whom were of the highest calibre. In a sense, that should not be a matter of good fortune, because you do not become a Permanent Secretary unless on the way up you have had good working relationships with a range of Ministers and other colleagues. I had much more trouble with spads than with Permanent Secretaries.

What concerns me is the trend over the last 30 years increasingly to politicise the Civil Service and to compromise its independence. Both parties—indeed, all three of the main parties—have been complicit in this. That should not be confused with attempts to modernise the Civil Service or strengthen it by bringing in people from outside to reinforce subjects where it may lack the necessary skills. I hope that, at some point, we might debate my noble friend Lord Maude’s excellent Independent Review of Governance and Accountability in the Civil Service, which aims to remove some of the tensions in the system that we have been talking about and to improve the outcomes.

What prompted this inquiry was the dismissal of Sir Tom Scholar from the Treasury, but this was the culmination of a trend that has been going on for some time under both Governments. I go back to 1997, when for the first time Orders in Council gave political aides powers to direct civil servants—powers normally reserved to Ministers. More information on what happened in the Blair Government can be found in Ian Beesley’s book, The Official History of the Cabinet Secretaries. For example, he tells us that Wilson—then Sir Richard, now the noble Lord, Lord Wilson—wrote to Blair:

“Do not try to use the policy unit to run the government; do not attempt to divorce permanent secretaries from their Cabinet ministers; do not be tempted by Napoleonic models, shifting resources ... from the Cabinet Office to No 10”.


Robert Armstrong was quoted in the Spectator in February 2002 as having said this:

“I am worried about the politicisation of the civil service. It is a particular problem in Downing Street”.


Dominic Lawson, perhaps a more partial commentator, wrote in February 2006:

“So the heads of our Civil Service departments do nothing to restrain Mr Blair and his colleagues from one hare-brained ‘eye-catching initiative’ after another. They have become merely a conveyor belt for political whims, having ceased to be public servants in the truest sense”.


We also saw the use of the government information service as a political weapon, a practice followed by the coalition and Conservative Governments, who gave sympathetic newspapers exclusive previews, frequently sidelining the clear guidance in the Cabinet Manual that:

“When Parliament is in session the most important announcements of government policy should, in the first instance, be made to Parliament”.


More recently, this Government have not had an unblemished record, with the controversial departures of Jonathan Slater at the DfE, Philip Rutnam at the Home Office, and the noble Lord, Lord Sedwill. As the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, mentioned, the arrival of Dominic Cummings poisoned this particular well; he made it clear that he had no time for Permanent Secretaries, and civil servants will remember his “hard rain” speech.

However, to my mind, the summary dismissal of Tom Scholar was an infringement of a totally different order: a direct challenge to the independence of the Civil Service and to the principle that Ministers cannot sack civil servants—we are not their employer. No specific reason was ever given for his departure. As the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, said, we know from the Cabinet Secretary that there was no question of poor performance, and we know from the noble Lord, Lord Macpherson, that it was not about political views. He said:

“I have worked with Tom for about 25 years, and to this day I have no idea what his political views are”.


The statement by the then Chancellor sheds no light at all. His bland statement ended,

“he leaves the Civil Service with the highest distinction”.

Tom Scholar himself said:

“The Chancellor decided it was time for new leadership at the Treasury, and so I will be leaving with immediate effect”.


But the new leadership at the Treasury was Kwasi Kwarteng. If he wanted to change the direction of economic policy, that is the one thing at which the Civil Service excels—and on which it may shortly be tested again if it has to alter policy to reflect a new Administration.

When questions were asked as to what had happened, the then Exchequer Secretary said in an Answer to a PQ:

“It is long-standing Government policy not to comment on individual personnel matters”.


There may have been good reasons why the committee did not get oral or written evidence from either Tom Scholar or indeed the then Chancellor, so we may never know what happened.

The Times came to its own conclusion, publishing on 14 September 2022 a letter that read:

“The sad fact is that in sacking Sir Tom Scholar, one of the ablest civil servants of his generation, the prime minister and chancellor have sent a clear message to the civil service that they are not interested in impartial advice and intend to surround themselves with ‘yes’ men and women. That is a sure route to bad decision-making and weak government. It is also another small step on the road to politicising the civil service”.


The Financial Times went a bit further. It said:

“Truss had pledged war against so-called Treasury orthodoxy and ‘abacus economics’, of which Scholar was a totem after six years at the head of the department”.


Against that background, I wonder whether the conclusions of the committee were robust enough. In paragraph 131 it concluded:

“Under no circumstances should civil servants be dismissed on purely political or ideological grounds”.


But that is exactly what happened. On page 5 it concluded:

“We do not consider the small number of recent high-profile removals of senior civil servants on what appeared to be political or ideological grounds to amount to a trend”.


I hope that it is right, but we need to build in better safeguards than we have at the moment, as the committee recognised.

In conclusion, I am always interested in what my noble friend the Minister has to say, but at this point in the electoral cycle, I will also pay particular attention to what the Opposition spokesperson says.