---

Dr. Spink: Will the hon. Gentleman favour us with a list of privatisations that a future Labour Government, were we unfortunate enough to have one, would reverse?

Mr. Mandelson: If this was a debate about all privatisations I might do so, but it is a debate about a specific privatisation against which I am arguing.

What of the putative safeguards for the civil service following privatisation, which were advanced rather weakly by the Chancellor this afternoon? We were told that the actual selection of recruits would continue to be in civil service hands. That might be so ultimately and technically, but what about the prior stages of processing and testing? How would the principles of selection by merit and fair and open competition be safeguarded once the agency had passed into private hands? Perhaps the Parliamentary Secretary, Office of Public Service can tell us that.

Apparently, civil servants will continue to have only an indirect involvement in--not control of--the preparation of some but not all exercises to ensure that they are a true "reflection" of civil service work. However, there will be no central co-ordination, no protection of confidentiality, no leak proofing or other security.

What about enforcement of private sector contracts if the measure goes ahead? The answer is that Departments will "monitor" the contracts as they go along. In the background, we gather, is the notion that the performance of the private owner will be subject to--wait for it--periodic audit. Will there be an ultimate sanction if contracts go wrong? Apparently, the simple desire to win future contracts will be a powerful encouragement to perform well. I hardly think so. All in all, the Government's idea of enforcement amounts to little more than a small feather duster to keep the private owners in line unless, of course, the threat to cancel a contract altogether is carried out. No one, however, has a suggestion as to what the civil service and its fast-track recruitment would do then--presumably it would hand out leaflets in the street.

As so many senior and experienced Members of the other place argued in a debate in March, the whole exercise is completely contemptible but, tragically, it is quite in keeping with the present Administration's destructive attitude to the civil service.

22 May 1996 : Column 341

No one who comes into contact with civil servants could fail to admire their professionalism, tenacity and commitment to the job. I have to tell the hon. Member for Harrow, West that we are not criticising members of the public service when we attack what is happening inside the Government machine--we are criticising members of the Government who are responsible for inflicting such wanton damage on the civil service.

Mr. Robert G. Hughes: That is not good enough. The hon. Gentleman must reread in Hansard the previous speeches that he made from the Front and Back Benches in which he specifically accused civil servants of acting improperly, not by name but in general terms. He is not attacking the Government by doing that, as he seems to believe: he is attacking civil servants who cannot answer back.

Mr. Mandelson: The hon. Gentleman is absolutely wrong. I have never said that civil servants act improperly. I have, however, suggested that Ministers are guilty of enticing and encouraging them to act improperly, which is quite different. Conservative Members may rejoice in their temporary colonisation of the civil service, but it is bad for Government when Ministers seek to reduce the public service to a rump, there only to reflect the Government's political prejudices. When that is allied to asking civil servants to distort or suppress information or statistics that are inconvenient to Ministers or to accept the blame when things go wrong because Ministers will not take responsibility for their failures--one thinks of the prison service, the Scott report or the Child Support Agency--a bleak picture emerges of eroding standards and morale in the civil service.

It is not surprising that many civil servants feel undervalued and undermined. For that reason, we should not be debating changes to the recruitment agency today. We need urgent action to restore a public service whose problem is not recruiting good members, but losing them once they have joined and become thoroughly disillusioned.

If we were to go outside the Chamber and engage a passer-by in conversation, we would find much that would interest him or her about our debate today. People are understandably and properly concerned about the state of our public services and about what is being done in their name. They are concerned about the quality and ethical standards of those employed by their taxes to act in their name and to deliver their services.

The inadequacy of many public services on which our people and their families depend, the lingering mistrust of officialdom, the notion that people have little say over the powers that be, and even perhaps a general awareness that the traditional standards seem to be under threat are all of great concern to the people whom we represent, and we should have focused our debate on those concerns this evening. But the last thing on their minds--in fact, I cannot see that such a thing would ever cross their minds--would be the idea that any of their practical concerns might be addressed by the privatisation of the civil service Recruitment and Assessment Services, the Occupational Health Service Agency or Horticultural Research International, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Mr. Howarth) and the hon. Member for Gillingham (Mr. Couchman) referred.

22 May 1996 : Column 342

Those are the obsessions of a Government who can think of doing nothing more for the quality of our public services and for the standards, performance and morale of civil servants than to pursue these tawdry and mean-spirited privatisation measures simply to satisfy their own lust. That is the message that we must take from the debate. The Government, in attempting to prove that they have not run out of steam, are presenting us today with the political equivalent of a campfire kettle, brewing up a thin and tasteless brew that no one wants to drink. That is why their pathetic measures should be rejected and why we should ask the Public Service Select Committee, as our amendment states,

"to conduct a thorough independent review of all recent Civil Service reforms"

so that we can achieve the public service that we deserve and need. I invite the House to vote for that tonight.

6.44 pm

The Parliamentary Secretary, Office of Public Service (Mr. David Willetts): I begin by assuring the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr. Mandelson) that our reforms are not motivated by lust. Many arguments are made about the motives for our reforms, but I have never previously been accused of being motivated by lust when it comes to public sector reform.

The debate has focused on an issue--the ethics of the civil service--raised by the right hon. Members for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Foster) and for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith) and by the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr. Radice), the Chairman of the Select Committee who, I understand, cannot be here for the winding-up speeches. If the Government were in any way guilty of politicising the civil service, it would be inconceivable that we would have produced the codes, the guidance and the independent arrangements for the civil service commissioners that we have introduced in the past five years.

When I was serving as a civil servant, we had nothing like the code of conduct that is now issued to every civil servant. The code makes clear the ethical basis on which civil servants are expected to operate and sets out more clearly than ever what a civil servant can do if he is in any way unhappy with his circumstances. We have produced so much guidance and so many codes of conduct, and so much has been brought out into the open that was not available before, that we recently produced guidance on guidance. I cannot understand why the Opposition believe that somehow we need even more published guidance and codes of conduct. That is exactly what the Government have been doing in the past five years. We have brought a new transparency to the monitoring of public services of a quality that did not exist before.

Mr. Garrett: No Opposition Member has argued for more guidance, publications or codes of practice. We asked for an enforceable system, established by statute.

Mr. Willetts: The civil service code states that if a civil servant believes that the response that he has received to a complaint

"does not represent a reasonable response to the grounds of his or her concern, he or she may report the matter in writing to the civil service commissioners."

22 May 1996 : Column 343

The role of the commissioners, who are now responsible for hearing and determining appeals under the new code, is close to a statutory right.

The hon. Member for Norwich, South (Mr. Garrett) asked about training in the civil service, and delivered a speech that I am sure he has been giving ever since he served as an adviser on the Fulton report all those years ago. The hon. Gentleman has only to wait a couple of months for the training and development White Paper that will set out an ambitious programme of reform of civil service training and will set out how the Government's objectives of achieving investment in people and standards across the civil service will also raise the level of skills, particularly in the areas that he has been calling for all these years, such as science and technology. We will ensure that there is more use of relevant qualifications in the civil service, such as national vocational qualifications, accountancy or personnel qualifications. We will ensure that the civil service is better qualified in those technical areas to which he drew attention. That is an area that the White Paper in July will address.

---