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5.33 pm
Mr. A. J. Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed): The debate is hindered by the fact that we did not have access to a series of parliamentary answers that affect the privatisation of scientific parts of the civil service in particular. That matter was raised by the hon. Member for East Kilbride (Mr. Ingram) and by me, in points of order. I must say at the outset that the Parliamentary Secretary, Office of Public Service could not have been more helpful in personally ascertaining why those answers were not available and delivering copies of such answers as were available to me because I could not leave the Chamber at the time. The Department of Trade and Industry must have known the subject of this afternoon's debate, so the long delay in making answers available is not at all satisfactory. Some of us were aware that the answers were to be given, but still they were late, while others are not yet to hand.
One of those parliamentary answers reveals that the Institute of Arable Crops Research, the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research, the John Innes
Centre and the Silsoe Research Institute have all been identified as leaving the public sector, while a number of other institutes are identified as more appropriate for executive agencies within the public sector. Those matters are relevant to the debate, in which a number of privatisation candidates have been identified--even in the Government motion.
The hon. Member for Gillingham (Mr. Couchman) referred to the East Malling research institute. I hope that Ministers will note that the hon. Gentleman had a number of reservations about what might happen, even though he does not oppose in principle a change in that institute's status. I remember that institute particularly well because my wife worked there as a student. It is one of a number of scientific centres that play an important part in ensuring long-term scientific research of relevance to industry, governed by long-term considerations rather than near-market, short-term decisions--which can more readily be financed on a short-term basis.
As to Recruitment and Assessment Services, the Government must be chastened not just by the defeat that they sustained in the other place but by the weight of informed opinion forcefully expressed in that debate. It must be significant that so many people with long experience of government felt that the RAS is crucial to maintaining the impartiality, integrity and reputation of the civil service. In the Minister's discussions with the Public Service Select Committee, I hope that he will constantly keep in mind what was said in the debate in the other place. I have no continuing interest in the Civil Service College, but I taught there many years ago--particularly at its then centre in Edinburgh. The Government have at least been forced to recognise how powerful would be the opposition to that activity being outside the public sector.
The prospect of privatisation is causing concern in many other organisations. My hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Mr. Rendel) drew my attention to the Institute for Animal Health. With all the current international arguments about animal health, it is of great concern that that institute is a possible candidate for privatisation. Many such institutions are involved in international committees in which their counterparts are public service scientific bodies. We must be careful that our ability to make our case effectively in international scientific bodies is not impaired because it can be argued that we are represented by scientists from privatised institutions--perhaps commercially sponsored--rather than from organisations performing a regulatory role on behalf of the Government.
The constitutional issues are the other main focus of the debate. Gladstone said that the British constitution
The Government were driven into a civil service code. I sat on the Treasury Select Committee with the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr. Radice) and argued strongly for such a code, but a series of other events eventually forced Ministers to recognise the need for one. Many doubts and anxieties about the code's effectiveness remain, particularly when civil servants have to go through the permanent secretary of their own Department before they can get to the first civil service commissioner.
When people fear that they may be impairing any future chance of promotion by drawing attention to what they feel is improper pressure on them to act in a particular way, they are loth to take such a step. There are people in many walks of life who are prepared to take their case to the limit and perform a public service by so doing, but not many of them benefit their careers in the process. We are often indebted to those who put their careers on the line, in the public service or in private industry, by being prepared to take their case to the limit; but they often suffer for so doing.
The FDA states that one of the main issues about which civil servants have complained to the association under the code has been requests for political briefings--briefings for Ministers to use at party conferences or for answering parliamentary questions. It requires some courage on the part of civil servants to take such complaints right to the top.
The Scott report gives us every reason to fear that the code by itself does not offer sufficient protection. The FDA quotes one cynical civil servant's suggestion that three drafts for answering parliamentary questions will be put before Ministers in future: a draft that accords with "Questions of Procedure for Ministers"; a draft that deliberately withholds information but does not knowingly mislead; and a draft that designedly leads Parliament to believe that one policy is in place when the overwhelming evidence is to the contrary--but does so unintentionally. We wait to see which draft the Minister will choose.
I find it difficult to understand how those who produced the summary of the Scott report issued by the Cabinet Office to the press could possibly have imagined that they were operating within the terms of the code. That summary was tendentious and grossly misleading; it deliberately excluded all items that might raise questions about what Ministers or civil servants had done or about what should happen in future. In no way did it uphold the political impartiality of the civil service.
It was one of the most damaging features of the whole publication of the Scott report that the Cabinet Office should have taken responsibility for a document that was so clearly party political in its purpose and that did not inform recipients of the burden of the report or of the conclusions that might be drawn from it.
The ethical questions that confront civil servants extend more widely than what we know as the civil service. We can no longer talk about a civil service ethic; we have to talk about a wider public service ethic that might apply to the agencies and non-departmental organisations which have taken over so many of the responsibilities of the traditional civil service. It could be argued that the same
is equally relevant to local government, which has developed its own way of tackling those issues, in the form of rules and codes, over a century of facing similar challenges. The public draw no distinction between those various public bodies when they demand fairness, competence, integrity, impartiality and the right to challenge decisions through the democratic process or via an appeals mechanism.
As Government functions have been contracted out to private agencies, the question has arisen: should not public service ethics be imported to those agencies for the carrying out of their functions? Defence contractors have long been subject to the Official Secrets Act 1911 in respect of the Government work that they do. How could any Government contemplate entrusting people's tax records to a private agency if its staff are not subject to civil service rules?
That dispersal of public service functions to a variety of institutions means that it no longer makes sense to talk of a code of ethics peculiar to the traditional civil service. The objective must surely be to encompass all the organisations in a code of ethics and to develop a mechanism to that end. That is why I expressed sympathy with the idea of a public services commission wider than the present civil service commission. We would propose a public services commission with a wider remit, responsible for the operation of the rules governing appointments and terms of service in national, regional and local government. It would be required to ensure that the principles of a politically neutral civil service, appointed on merit, were observed. We would want to insulate the commission from ministerial interference by having its membership determined by the new Public Service Select Committee of the House, to which it would report.
The commission could help the whistleblower's role, by investigating claims from members of the public service of breaches of the regulations governing its operation, and of improper conduct towards officials by Ministers. Such a role would be rather wider in our proposed format than one played by a civil service commission alone. Next steps agencies should be on a clear statutory footing, and the framework documents setting out how they work should also be statutory and considered by Select Committees.
I want also to refer to the wider question of ministerial responsibility, which has come up several times in the debate already. When we debated the matter on a Liberal Democrat motion on 12 February, the public service Minister said:
"presumes more boldly than any other the good faith of those who work it."
Anxieties about the state of that good faith have been manifest. One party has been in office a long time, and it was led for a considerable period by a Prime Minister more noted for her determination to get things done than for paying attention to the processes by which they were done or the condition in which the system of government would be left when she finished. The attitudes cultivated during that period, which are summed up by phrases such as, "He's not one of us," were of potentially long-term damage to the public service. The present Prime Minister entered office with a desire to correct some of those
trends, but I am not sure that he has been entirely successful. We must therefore consider impartiality, codes of practice, and the accountability of Ministers to Parliament.
"While a Minister has full constitutional accountability to Parliament for everything that the Department does, it is manifestly impossible for him to take all decisions, or be personally involved in every action of his Department. It cannot, therefore, be sensibly suggested that a Minister is personally responsible for every action of his Department. It is worth stressing that distinction, because the terms 'ministerial accountability' and 'ministerial responsibility' have tended to be used interchangeably."--[Official Report,12 February 1996; Vol. 271, c. 684.]
In my submission, they can indeed be used interchangeably because there is no proper distinction between the two terms. There is nothing for which a Minister is accountable to the House for which he is not also responsible to the House.
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