| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Foster: I expect the hon. Gentleman to be sceptical. Civil servants may be sceptical, despite my
attempt to show that training and development will be central to the management of change, not an afterthought. That is why Labour will put in place several confidence-building measures immediately on assuming office to help restore trust between the Government and their work force.
First, new Labour will affirm its commitment to the public service and reassert the classic civil service values that were once shared by one-nation Conservatives, but are now elbowed aside by the right-wing ideologues who are calling the shots. Then we will make it clear that the British civil service is a national asset, which since the 1970s has been a permanent and impartial instrument for all Administrations. The new Government will recognise their duty to preserve the efficiency, honesty and impartiality of the service for their successors. That is why the Chancellor of the Duchy must be disturbed by the FDA press release, which we have debated. I do not wish to pursue it further, but I hope that, on reflection, he will take it seriously, examine the evidence and make a statement to the House.
Secondly, Labour will halt privatisation. Thirdly, Labour will put a moratorium on contracting out, while instituting a thorough and independent review.
Mr. Nigel Evans:
Yes, let's have another review.
Mr. Foster:
The hon. Gentleman's party would have been in a far less parlous state now had they considered more carefully some of the ill-judged and ill-considered reforms that they have made.
Under Labour, the motivation will not be a dogmatic wish to drive down public expenditure to fund tax handouts. Nor will Labour seek efficiency gains by driving down public servants' wages and conditions of service. Nor will we pursue downsizing as an end in itself. The motivation will be to obtain the greatest quantity of high-quality service from every pound spent, the need to divert resources from declining aspects of the service to expand others and to reallocate resources to front-line services.
Despite pressures from some trade unions and others, there will be no turning back to 1979 in an attempt to restore trust. No one should expect the permanent revolution of recent years to be followed by permanent counter-revolution under Labour. Labour will not try to build a better yesterday--what the country needs is a better tomorrow and a better future.
In conclusion, I have a number of specific questions arising from the White Paper. First, I wish to refer to cost. How much is currently spent on training and development in the civil service? I understand that no figures are collected, but that £260 million was spent in 1986-87, £295 million in 1987-88 and £356 million in 1988-89. Will the Office of Public Service now collect such statistics, as I cannot see how it can drive reform forward and monitor its progress without them? What additional fees are expected to be paid to Investors in People? What fees are currently paid to Investors in People? We know that civil service budgets are currently being reduced by 12 per cent. over three years.
Why has it taken 17 years to produce the White Paper if training and development is so important? Why has the White Paper been published within 10 months of a general election? Is it not true that the plans produced by
Departments and agencies by November cannot be implemented until 1 April 1997? Therefore, is not the White Paper nothing more than a wish list for the Government's successors? The Chancellor of the Duchy referred to "a flexible approach to recruitment at all levels". Will not that substantially reduce promotion prospects at a time when recruitment is low? Will not more external recruitment at middle management level further damage morale and undermine career development for current staff?
The Chancellor of the Duchy mentioned the Civil Service College, and we deserve to have more information about it. Now that it has survived becoming a next steps agency and the threat of privatisation, it should be on the threshold of an important advance. Perhaps Labour should resurrect earlier plans to convert the college to match the Ecole Nationale d'Administration in France, which has an extremely high reputation.
I welcome the White Paper, which is based on sound principles. It is well argued, and has an action plan that deserves to succeed. But I regret that there is no celebration of public service values, and that it does not seek to resolve the clash of cultures of the 1980s and 1990s. There is no strategic vision of where the civil service should go during the next decade, and it fails to engage the commitment of civil servants. The White Paper comes from an exhausted Government who are lacking in direction and drifting to an end. If they are re-elected, further demoralisation and job insecurity must be in store for civil servants as the Government chase the old communist dream of the withering away of the state.
In contrast, Labour has had the confidence to change, and is now poised to invite the British people to join in partnership to change Britain. Civil servants have a crucial role in the management of change, which cannot succeed unless development and training of staff is central to the process. The success of the next Government will largely depend on how successfully they prepare the country, including civil servants, to embrace change and manage it for the benefit of the many and not the few.
Mr. Bernard Jenkin (Colchester, North):
I am grateful for the opportunity to follow the right hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Foster), whose speech filled all of 36 minutes and was a mixture of the miraculous and the miserable. It was miraculous in that Labour now tells us that there will be "no turning back" to the 1970s--a phrase close to my heart and to the hearts of a number of my colleagues. We have been saying "no turning back" for many years in the teeth of the opposition from the right hon. Gentleman and his Labour colleagues. I am now glad that the Labour party has changed so much that it too can utter the words "no turning back". That is progress.
The speech was miraculous also in that the right hon. Member for Bishop Auckland unveiled his five new principles for the future of public administration, and gave
us a great deal of what I might describe as "motherhood and apple pie" management. If the civil service manual could possibly be written in the jargonese of the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr. Mandelson), we heard it this afternoon. There was one endless platitude after another--about change being "embraced" by a Labour Government instead of resisted, and about how training would be moved to the forefront and loved more than ever before.
Then we had the miserable. Labour would halt privatisation and contractorisation, as if it were possible to turn the clock back to the end of the 1970s. In his derision for anything to do with the private sector's increasing involvement in public administration, the right hon. Member for Bishop Auckland gave away the fact that the old resistance of the Labour party lives on in new Labour. The dangers of new Labour are as evident as ever.
If he thinks that it is possible to continue to manage an effective, efficient and evolving public service with bland policy statements such as "a halt to privatisation" and "an end to contractorisation", he is deluding himself and the House--although we do not believe him. He tried to offer a civil service nirvana to those civil servants who might study his words, but he would offer only sclerosis. He offered to embrace change, but he would halt change, and therein lies the danger.
The right hon. Gentleman was right about one aspect. The great challenge for every politician in every party in every country is how to help the people who work for the Governments of the world, and the citizens of the countries of the world, to adapt constructively and positively to an ever-faster pace of change. Politicians should use every means at their disposal, but they should not, as the right hon. Gentleman suggests, abjure privatisation and contractisation for dogmatic party reasons or to satisfy the cravings of outdated trade union interests.
I join my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and the right hon. Member for Bishop Auckland in paying tribute to the civil service. A picture is often drawn of a machine that is under pressure and under-performing, but I do not recognise that in the dealings that I have had with civil servants, in various Departments, since I joined the House in 1992. Civil servants are always willing to help, to serve Ministers impartially and to do their best for the public. The descriptions that one sometimes hears do not ring, true and I have nothing to complain of in the conduct of any civil servant that I have ever met.
Civil servants are doing their best to adapt to change, and the White Paper is a step in the right direction. It must be good to draw the attention of the decision makers in the civil service and of civil servants themselves to the need for permanent training and career renewal to ensure that the civil service is as adaptable as possible.
I wish to address my remarks especially to the civil service and the deregulation initiative. I am not sure that the White Paper addresses deregulation as one of the main concerns for the civil service. Deregulation has created a new pressure on civil servants: I ask the House to consider carefully the impact on the modern civil service of not only the huge volume of legislation that we generate, but that which we, here, expect civil servants to generate in the form of regulation which we consider only cursorily,
if at all. Many regulations pass into law, sometimes when Parliament is in recess, without any direct scrutiny by Members.
The civil service is now in a peculiar position. Civil servants are not only implementers of ministerial decisions. So many decisions have to be made that they are authors, advocates, explainers and implementers of those decisions. The very professionalism that civil servants traditionally bring to implementation is also being brought to the creation of regulation, and that may be the source of the criticism that civil servants now invite from commentators, such as Christopher Booker in his book "The Mad Officials". We expect civil servants to act with pristine efficiency and effectiveness, so we can hardly be surprised if the regulations they produce tend to be of the Rolls-Royce variety and are implemented with the same zeal with which we expect them to attack any task. We must ask how those decisions can be tempered more effectively to avoid over-regulation.
We have presented civil servants with an entirely new challenge in the conflicts between the legal inheritance of this country, as enacted by Parliament and implemented by Ministers, and the entirely new raft of law that is gradually being imported into our constitution from the European Community. The two legal systems are not compatible and they leave our civil servants in a cleft stick.
Our law is drawn up in black and white and in fine detail so that officials know where they are, as do those individuals who are subject to the various regulations. Businesses and individuals can go to the law and find out where they stand and we expect to find ourselves either inside the law or outside the law. We do not have an administrative tradition that relies extensively on the discretion of individuals--politicians or bureaucrats--to decide, for example, the safe level of some compound in the working environment or the correct material for a chopping board in a butcher's shop. We expect those details to be specified in regulation, but that is not the way that European law works.
European law, as drawn up in directives and regulations, tends to deal with broad objectives, because it is based on the traditional administrative system of France, known colloquially as the "Code Napoleon". Under that code, legal instruments contain broad objectives and it is left to individual officials to fill in the gaps in the drafting by making a reasonable interpretation and to implement the law. That is why European Community law translates so uncomfortably into United Kingdom domestic law. The broad objectives set out in a directive are refined and defined in our regulations so that a directive of a few pages finishes up as hundreds of pages of United Kingdom regulation.
A further problem arises from the insistence in our tradition that someone is either inside the law or outside the law. We define the directives in our law to the very limits of their interpretation, and people then complain that we gold-plate our directives. We tend to gold-plate our directives because, if civil servants do not obey and implement the law to its fullest extent, in our tradition they are personally liable. The result is that we put civil servants in an intolerable position when we start to advise them that they should not fully implement European Community directives.
Ministers may take that political responsibility themselves--I note great caution about under-implementing directives that are completely against Government policy, such as the working time directive or the beef ban--but it is unreasonable to expect civil servants to exercise their discretion and to put themselves at variance with the law if they fail to fulfil the objectives of a directive, interpreted as it might be by the courts.
I invite my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, as he considers how our civil servants work, to consider also the interface between our civil service and European Community law, especially as he is also responsible for the Government's deregulation policy.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |