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Mr. Peter Mandelson (Hartlepool): The hon. Gentleman protests too much.
Mr. Hughes: With respect to the hon. Gentleman, the reason why I protest is that he has made some disgraceful remarks on the Floor of the House in previous debates.
Mr. Mandelson indicated dissent.
Mr. Hughes: Oh, yes. He has suggested that the civil service has been politicised, of which he should be ashamed--but he is not. To suggest that is a calumny not on the Government but on civil servants.
One reason why the Labour party thinks that the civil service has been politicised is evident in local government. The Labour party does not understand the difference between politicians and council officers. That is why there is such switching between Labour councillors and officers and councillors in one authority and officers in another. That is not good enough. It is dangerous nonsense if the Labour party thinks that that is the way in which the civil service should be run.
We have heard much talk about advice given to Ministers and which answers are given to questions. If Labour Members think that things have changed under the Government, they should read the book "How to be a Minister", by the right hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Kaufman), which is as true now as it was when he wrote it after leaving the previous Labour Government.
Let us be clear: Ministers are politicians; they give political answers. Civil servants give the information on which those answers are based. The Minister is responsible for the answer, and if the answer is highly political, it is because the Minister has chosen to give such an answer. That has always been true, and always will be. To suggest that somehow politics will end and answers will be based merely on information provided by the civil service is nonsense.
The speech of the right hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Foster) proved that the Labour party is the captive of the unions. It can move sideways or backwards, but it has no mechanism for moving forward. It will not dare to be radical about the civil service, for fear that it would further widen Labour rifts.
Of course, Members of another place who were senior civil servants or Ministers years ago think that Recruitment and Assessment Services is essential to preserving the civil service's integrity. Indeed it used to be, but thinking that is a throwback to many years ago, when, if one wanted to recruit a junior secretary or a clerk to any far-flung branch of the civil service, one had to go to the Civil Service Commission.
Mr. Hughes:
It is not like that any more. That is what those in the other place believe. Characteristically, the hon. Gentleman thinks that he knows better. The service is not needed. It has talented staff, and such talent should be more widely available. Of course, those staff will do well in the private sector. Many of the organisation's trumpeted successes have been achieved because it employs private sector headhunters to bring in people they want to recruit.
All large organisations have to tackle the enemies of change. We have heard the speeches of such enemies from the Labour Benches. It is suggested that many dragons have to be slain--traditionalists, xenophobes, devil's advocates and technophobes. I do not think that there are any dragons to slay in this debate. We have heard speeches from the same old Labour carthorse--not a dragon, but one old carthorse. For all its new Labour razzmatazz, the Labour party cannot disguise the fact that that carthorse is out of date, does not think very clearly, moves too slowly to be of any use, and is terrified of change.
Mr. John Garrett (Norwich, South):
It is a gross discourtesy that there is no Minister on the Front Bench to reply to the debate. If that is a trend, it is quite deplorable.
For the past 30 years, since I was a consultant to the Fulton committee on the civil service, I have worked in, worked for, written about and generally shadowed developments in the civil service. In recent years, I have done so with mounting dismay. In addition, I have a constituency interest, since more than 2,000 of my constituents are employed as civil servants in scientific research establishments, Her Majesty's Stationery Office and the CCTA.
I have seen nothing less than the literal disintegration of the civil service. Twenty years ago, there were about 25 mainstream Government Departments in the civil service.
Each was responsible for policy and its implementation. From the Minister and permanent secretary and the policy decision, to the delivery of service to the citizen through local and regional offices, there was a fully integrated national civil service.
We are now well on the way to a disintegrated Government, consisting of 25 headquarters Departments, more than 120 agencies, 4,000 quangos and countless private contracts. That conglomerate structure makes for inadequate control, as many policies cross unit boundaries. It will end the concept of a national civil service, and it wrecks parliamentary accountability, because Select Committees cannot keep track of such a large variety of executive and policy organisations. Quangos and contracts encourage too much patronage. The disintegrated structure will massively complicate performance measurement and appraisal, and lead to wide variations in the quality of service.
It is true that the civil service of years ago was too hierarchical, with administrative mandarins lording it over professionally qualified specialists and executive-class managers. There was far too little scope for upward movement for talented people who did not have the right social and educational qualifications. That is still largely true. The civil service maintains the discredited and elitist administrative fast stream, which guarantees a route to the top for Oxbridge arts graduates--white, male, public school Oxbridge arts graduates--while boasting of its progress in the development of management and opportunities for managers.
I cannot see any justification, if there ever was any, for an administrative fast stream. When the Treasury and Civil Service Committee considered the matter, civil service management said that the administrative fast stream in the civil service was no different from graduate entry arrangements anywhere else. The management used arrangements at British Petroleum as a comparator.
I worked for British Petroleum for a number of years, and noticed how it was possible for an accountant or an engineer to get on the company's board. It is far more difficult--in fact, virtually impossible--for an accountant or an engineer to become a permanent secretary in Britain, even in a technical Department such as the Department of Trade and Industry. Top management in the civil service is still recruited as a political secretariat and not as a management cadre, as Fulton pointed out 30 years ago.
I have always been impressed by visits to the Ecole Nationale D'Administration in Paris to examine the formation of the French higher civil service, especially its output of people who combine political, economic and technical skills. That professional civil service has ensured France's success in the past 25 years. It is unbelievable that ENA has half a dozen professional staff, and that most instruction is carried out by serving top civil servants, who consider it an honour.
ENA is criticised in Britain as elitist, but in fact it is much less elitist than our system, because its entry arrangements allow junior civil servants to qualify and progress thereafter. The arrangements also allow for mature entrants who are aged about 40. Its top management cadre is not confined, like ours, to a particular social background.
I have always considered Sunningdale a white elephant. An enormous amount of money has been spent on it. One could call it an Oxbridge college with rhododendrons.
It is totally divorced from the way in which the rest of the country is run. It would be far better for civil servants to be trained in Glasgow or Liverpool and to get some acquaintance with de-industrialised Britain. They should be action-trained in finding solutions to the problems faced by our fellow citizens.
The particular scandal of our disintegrated Government service is the quango. However, there is a certain amount of sense in having agencies. They were proposed by Fulton in 1968 as budgetary responsibility centres within Departments, and the idea was further developed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Mr. Sheldon) and myself in a Fabian pamphlet of the early 1970s called "Administrative Reform--the Next Steps". That is why, I assume, the agencies are called "next steps" agencies.
However, the information systems required to establish the managerial accountability of those agencies were never put in place, although they were needed to measure not only their operational efficiency but, much more importantly, their effectiveness in meeting public needs. The most obvious example of that lack of effectiveness is the Child Support Agency, where performance in respect of clients is nothing short of a disgrace.
What is needed is a system in which civil servants are originally employed in agencies, and are then promoted on merit to the policy division of the parent Department. That would close the experience gap between operations and policy-making.
Some, perhaps many, agencies are merely stages on the way to privatisation, as HMSO in my constituency has been. We have discussed HMSO several times recently, so I shall not dwell on the issue. However, the fact is that an effective operational arm of Government and Parliament is likely to suffer grievous damage as a result of privatisation, with massive job losses. Speaking as a House of Commons Commissioner, I believe that there is absolutely no guarantee of the long-term maintenance of services to Parliament. That could lead to the greatest embarrassment to Parliament in future. The privatisation will, I believe, be seen to be a mistake.
I am glad to see that the Minister is back in his place. Can he tell us about the future of the CCTA, which is also in my constituency? Will it be privatised, and what will be the likely consequences for computing expertise in Government?
I do not have the time to discuss public sector research establishments, as I wanted to do, partly because the information arrived so late. Here we have a number of scientific research establishments which have made a tremendous contribution to scientific policy-making, to discovery and to innovation. We now read that the presumption is for privatisation. That will lead to the disbandment of some of the finest research establishments in western Europe, with no gain for the public.
The growth of the quango has often been commented on. Essentially, quangos involve a function of Government, funded by Government, being carried out by a corporate body, the board of which is constituted by the patronage of a Minister. Training and enterprise councils are a good example. I cannot see how such organisations can be allowed to continue so free from democratic control in a democratic form of government. I trust that a Labour Government will reintegrate the quangos into
central and local government wherever possible, and that they will make their boards and their recruitment practice as open as possible.
It has always seemed wrong to me that the governance of the civil service should be under the royal prerogative, without statutory force. The White Paper contains a remarkable observation on that issue:
The responsibilities of civil servants are specified in code and memoranda, not in law. The relationship of civil servants to Parliament and its Select Committees is specified in the Osmotherly rules--which, on the whole, say, "Don't say anything"--and not in law. The conduct of Ministers is laid out in a Cabinet paper which has no statutory force.
It is clear that we need a civil service Act which defines a civil servant, sets out the duties and responsibilities of civil servants to the Crown and to Parliament, and provides redress against the abuse of power and deception by Ministers. The penumbra of secrecy which surrounds so much of our policy-making--which Ministers, especially in this Government, so eagerly exploit--should be ended, or greatly reduced, by a freedom of information Act.
"The management of the Civil Service is one of the aspects of the Prerogative which is exercised by Ministers on behalf of the Crown . . . The Prerogative in this context resembles the power of other employers to employ without special legislative authority."
Employing civil servants is different from other employment; after all, they serve the Crown. The use of the royal prerogative gives them virtually no redress for a series of possibly adverse decisions against them. The most obvious is the ban on unions at GCHQ. We have a so-called code of practice which still does not cover major issues, such as the relationship of the civil service to Ministers, Parliament and the public.
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