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Mr. Nigel Evans: My right hon. Friend may know that I am a bit of an IT junkie, if not a bit of an anorak. How much learning is there, not just from the sharing of information with other British civil servants, but through contacts with civil servants overseas? We can learn from them, as they can learn from us.
Mr. Freeman: My hon. Friend is right. I am glad to confirm that civil servants and those on secondment from the private sector in the central IT unit have been travelling around the world recently, looking in particular at north America and what is already available through information technology.
My personal wish--it is not yet a view expressed by the Government in the Green Paper--is that Britain should become the first major country in the world to use IT to the full, not only in improving the interrelationships between Departments but in serving the consumer--the citizen--electronically as opposed to doing so through written communication. There are tremendous challenges ahead, and we should grip them--
Mr. Bernard Jenkin (Colchester, North):
As any business man knows, the fastest way to implement new technology in a business is not necessarily to buy and own every piece of equipment and to employ every person necessary to the process. The Social Security Select Committee is concerned at the vast quantity of computing that is owned and employed directly by the Government. Is my right hon. Friend considering privatising what are in effect fantastically large businesses, and ensuring that we have faster and more effective technology transfer through the civil service as a result?
Mr. Freeman:
I agree with my hon. Friend. I made the distinction between services and systems. Systems can be provided and financed by the private sector, but the Government must decide what services are to be provided to the citizen. Then we can either privatise, contract out or finance in the private sector the provision of the systems necessary to deliver those services.
Mr. Peter Bottomley (Eltham):
My right hon. Friend is coming towards the conclusion of a very interesting speech on an important subject. In the document, "Development and Training for Civil Servants", paragraph 1.15 on page 7 states:
Mr. Freeman:
I can so confirm. Indeed, I would like the college to develop further, and to train and develop more civil servants. For certain courses, it can do so with other bodies, such as universities here and abroad and other training organisations. We should not view the college as an isolated organisation entirely within the civil service, which has no connection or interchange with the private sector.
I pay tribute to Dr. Stephen Hickey and his staff for what they have achieved. My right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Sir E. Heath), the former Prime Minister, launched the college almost 25 years ago. A great deal has been achieved, and there is a great deal more to be achieved.
I want to conclude by talking about recruitment. Staff development can provide many of the skills and much of the awareness needed. The reductions in the numbers of staff at all levels of the civil service is bound to have an effect on recruitment. However, the Government want to ensure that the movement towards wider use of open recruitment to meet staffing needs at all levels is maintained.
The White Paper includes several initiatives. One is a new push to increase external recruitment at middle management levels to bring in at least an additional 50 middle managers in the first year of an interdepartmental scheme to be launched this autumn, and 80 by March 1998.
Another is to broaden the appeal of the fast stream competition, increasing the proportion of such recruits with science qualifications, and improving the tests for numeracy. We would like to increase the total share of recruits with scientific backgrounds from 20 per cent. to 30 per cent. by the close of the 1998-99 competition. I announced that revised fast stream development programme to the House on 12 June, and we have set targets in key areas against which to measure progress.
Mr. Peter Bottomley:
I welcome that statement. Some 45 per cent. of our graduates have qualifications in science, maths, engineering and medicine. Therefore,
Mr. Freeman:
We should fall into the trap of developing an anti-arts bias. Several hon. Members here today have arts degrees--I recognise at least three. There is nothing wrong with an arts degree. However, we want to recruit more scientists and specialists, who should be able to reach the top of the civil service and become permanent secretaries.
It is extremely important that we recognise that the old image of a double first in Greats at Oxford or Cambridge being the only passport to becoming a permanent secretary of a major Department is out of date, and should be out of date. We want to replace it with a meritocracy drawn from many different skills.
Mrs. Dunwoody:
I am glad to hear such a sterling statement of a real revolutionary management future. The right hon. Gentleman was a Minister at the Department of Transport when large numbers of highly trained scientists in the research laboratories, who had spent their lifetimes working for the Government, were told in their middle years, "Thank you very much. We like you very much, but we think you are too expensive. If you cannot be sold off to someone who has a very specific commercial bias, we will throw you out on the streets." I do not mind the right hon. Gentleman believing that it is his view that specialists are welcome in the civil service; he just should not expect the House of Commons to believe him.
Mr. Freeman:
I do not accept the argument that, simply because an agency or an organisation is privatised for good reason, somehow that is the end of life. It may be for the individual--
Mrs. Dunwoody:
They lost their jobs.
Mr. Freeman:
The hon. Lady may say that. The right hon. Member for Bishop Auckland and I have debated--and no doubt will do so again in due course--our privatisation programme in the Cabinet Office for parts of the Office of Public Service. I firmly believe that the careers of the civil servants affected will be improved rather than diminished by working in the private sector. It is one reason why the hon. Lady is sitting on the Opposition Benches, while I am sitting on the Government Front Bench.
Mr. Dalyell:
In a debate in the House of Lords on 8 March, Lord Allen of Abbeydale--formerly Sir Philip Allen--raised a point about people getting back into the civil service after privatisation. Have the Government focused their mind on the way in which people who have left the civil service can get back into it, because I gather that often the door is shut?
Mr. Freeman:
That is an important point. I have just referred to a specific recruitment programme of up to 80 middle managers. They could include those who have left the civil service but wish to return. They would not be part of the usual recruitment process, where we typically start at the bottom.
More importantly--I did not have time to refer to this in the White Paper--we want to extend the principle of advertising posts in the civil service. That does not mean that all posts will be open to external applicants, but we want to ensure that roughly one third of the senior grade posts are advertised, with about half being filled by people from the private sector. That means that one sixth of all the opportunities available are filled in that way.
If the hon. Gentleman is interested in the statistics, perhaps I could answer a parliamentary question on the subject and give him more details. I am interested in his question. There could be expertise, skill and experience that is worth re-recruiting back into the civil service, and under our reforms we are widening those opportunities.
Mr. Derek Foster (Bishop Auckland):
I am grateful to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and to the usual channels, too, for making the debate possible. Obviously the Association of First Division Civil Servants--the FDA--has stung the Office of Public Service and its Ministers rather badly. Only a couple of lines in my speech refer to the findings in passing, yet the right hon. Gentleman devoted most of the first part of his speech to the subject. It is quite wrong for Ministers to assume that we have colluded with the FDA and that it issued its press release so that we could refer to it in the debate. Nothing could be further from the truth.
"The Civil Service College will have a continuing role in the provision of training and development programmes".
I speak for many people across the political spectrum and outside who recognise the central role of the Civil Service College in protecting the ethos as well as the continuity and improvement of civil service training. We must recognise that the civil service often gets ordinary people to do ordinary things, to achieve extraordinary results for the public. Can my right hon. Friend assure the House that there are no plans to privatise the college?
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