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6.32 pm
Mr. Tam Dalyell (Linlithgow): I trust that I shall not be out of order if I refer to two meetings that are in progress at this time in different parts of the Palace of Westminster. The first is being held in the Robing Room of the other place--a commemoration for Douglas Houghton, later Lord Houghton of Sowerby. It can be safely said that, before Douglas Houghton became a Member of Parliament, he was the father of the civil service trade union movement. I am sure that the shade of Douglas Houghton would rather that my right hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Foster) and myself were here to argue the case for civil servants than attending his memorial.
The other meeting is taking place in the Grand Committee Room--a tribute to the late Brian Abel-Smith. I was Dick Crossman's parliamentary private secretary when Brian Abel-Smith was serving in his Department. My hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody) knows well the solace that Brian Abel-Smith gave successive Governments. He was one of the most conspicuously successful academics ever to enter the civil service.
It is the private and public view of Lothian region fire service that a real problem surrounds the rundown of the Fire Service College at Moreton-in-Marsh. It would not be right to say more now, because that matter is more appropriate to an Adjournment debate--but I put down a marker. To save time, I ask the appropriate Department to contact Colin Cranston, firemaster of the city of Edinburgh, to learn of his concerns. The House can return to that matter at a later stage. The training that successive generations of fire officers have received at Moreton-in-Marsh has been extremely valuable. It will be a matter of national concern if that college is seriously run down.
The question that I asked earlier derived from the concise remarks of Lord Bancroft in a debate on Recruitment and Assessment Services in the other place, when he asked:
I shall concentrate on the real concerns surrounding Recruitment and Assessment Services. Hon. Members who are acquainted with Lord Bancroft, whom I first knew as Reggie Maudling's private secretary in 1963, will know that he is not given to overstatement, yet he wrote in The Guardian:
In the RAS debate in the other place Lord Howe, the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, did not make any attempt to answer the succession of heavyweight speeches, by Lord Callaghan of Cardiff, Lord Allen of Abbeydale and even Lord Peyton--who is not exactly a socialist. When such people express concern, this House should be given answers.
This debate should not overrun because another important matter is to be discussed, but I shall conclude with another matter of concern. It is true that Labour Members have either had a brief ministerial career or, as in my case, experience of being a PPS to a senior Minister--while other of my colleagues have had not such experience because of this country's political history.
I wonder whether the hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Mr. Maclennan) and my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich agree that a significant problem will be created if civil servants do not have security of tenure--the feeling of certainty that, whatever happens, provided that they behave themselves, they will remain in their task until retirement. That way, they can give the most precious of gifts--unpalatable advice, in telling the Minister things that he does not want to hear.
I am thinking particularly of those who were with Brian Abel-Smith at the time, not least the chief medical officer, Sir George Godber, Sir Alan Marre and others. I was parliamentary private secretary to Mr. Crossman, and I was well disposed towards him, but he was not an easy man to advise. [laughter.] My hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich laughs, because she knows what I am talking about.
One can understand the position with a number of Ministers over the years, Labour as well as Conservative, in that if awkward matters or important but inconvenient questions are constantly being raised--flies in the ointment, hassle and difficulties--I have a suspicion that those civil servants might be disadvantaged in their careers. However, whether or not they are disadvantaged is not the main point; it is the perception of being disadvantaged. They may say, "I have a mortgage to pay, children to educate and many other financial obligations. Is it worth sticking out my proverbial neck to give Ministers advice that they will not like?"
I will be personal and blunt. One particular Minister who became notorious in that respect was the former Prime Minister, Baroness Thatcher. Go no further than ask William Reid, the present ombudsman. He was turned down for the position of permanent secretary at the Scottish Office on a prime ministerial whim. He was put forward by the civil service and he was the man the Scottish Office wanted at the time, but his face did not fit in No. 10 Downing street. That is a matter of record and fact. It is a situation that could be repeated time and again if civil servants are not certain of their future.
Mr. Peter Mandelson (Hartlepool):
Those of us who have listened to the debate will have benefited enormously from the colossal experience of my hon. Friends the Members for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody) and for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell). I should like to share in the tribute to our late noble Friend, Lord Houghton of Sowerby. I met him when I was a boy--not so long ago, although it seems like an age. He was a distinguished Minister with responsibility for the civil service and, with great distinction, he discharged the thoroughly unenviable task of chairman of the parliamentary Labour party. He did that extremely well.
It is hardly surprising that the debate has focused on the alleged corrupting of civil service standards and values.
Mr. Dalyell:
Lord Houghton was a close friend of my hon. Friend's grandfather.
Mr. Mandelson:
He was, indeed, a great friend and colleague of my grandfather.
It is noteworthy that the Chancellor of the Duchy addressed himself to the allegations made by the FDA. I shall return to that later. It is interesting that those remarks touched such a raw nerve with the right hon. Gentleman. It is not entirely clear why that is so. I think that he still has some explanation to offer to the House for his excited statements earlier.
I do not think that there is anything hidden about the FDA's agenda. It is perfectly open. Its responsibility, for which it commands enormous public respect, is to stand up for and protect the independence, integrity and political neutrality of the civil service. That is what it is there to do and it does it extremely well. It behoves all hon. Members to give the FDA the support it deserves in those objectives.
It would be churlish not to welcome the publication of the White Paper. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Foster) said in his eloquent speech, the Labour party has a strong commitment to education and training. The Chancellor of the Duchy acknowledged our commitment to training and development within the civil service. That commitment is reflected powerfully in the early manifesto that we launched last Thursday, "New Life for Britain".
We endorse the objectives of the White Paper and support the commitment to the Investors in People standard--100 per cent. of civil servants to be employed in organisations recognised as Investors in People by the year 2000. That is an ambitious target, but it is right that it has been set.
It is a step change. In fact, when one considers the Government's performance in this area to date, it requires not just a step but a giant leap of imagination from where we are now. Currently, only 58 organisations, covering 12 per cent. of the civil service, have achieved the standard and a mere 15 per cent. are formally committed to achieving it--a rise of just 4 per cent. in the past 12 months. That is a measure of how far we have to go if we are to realise that ambitious target.
It is a deeply disappointing but not surprising record. In their heart, the Government are no more committed to giving their own organisations the skills they need to do the job than they are to equipping the country, our firms and our work force to face the tough, internationally competitive world in which we need to trade and pay our way in the future.
That is why the White Paper, however welcome in principle, risks being judged not as a great leap forward, but as a rather disingenuous and cynical exercise, long on warm words and short on the measures and resources needed to carry it through. Ministers have tried to master the lingo of training, skills and personal development, and that is a start of sorts. However, coming from the lips of a member of the Government, the phrase "investment in people" sounds more like an exotic fruit or something lifted from a foreign language phrase book than vocabulary that is genuinely meant and understood. The words are mouthed, but the concept is not really grasped.
I acknowledge that it is nice to read the admiring statements in the White Paper about some of the personal training and development achievements demonstrated by individual Departments. It is nice, because it is rare for Ministers to utter a complimentary word about anything done in the public sector. Yet the depth of the Government's commitment remains very questionable indeed.
Paragraph 2.7 of the White Paper says:
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, apparently, has become a recent expert in Houdini economics, or so he claims. It behoves Ministers to say--I hope that the Chancellor of the Duchy will do so in his reply--how much the White Paper will cost and how it will be paid for. At the expense of which other worthwhile training activities will it be paid for, in view of the Chancellor of the Exchequer's desire to drive down civil service costs?
Many will draw the conclusion that, if Ministers have, an agenda of contracting out government, as is constantly proclaimed, they are unlikely to commit resources to investing in it first. As the saying goes, one does not feed a pig in the morning intending to have it for lunch that afternoon.
One has only to contrast Ministers' attitude to in-house training with the Government's increased use of private training programmes, run at great expense by outside consultants. I say "outside" consultants, but in fact groups of civil servants are paying through the nose, with
taxpayers' money, to hear other civil servants lecture them on effective strategies for career management in the civil service, on courses whose only novelty is that the private sector organisers get their rake-off at the same time.
I have seen the course brochure to which the hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Mr. Maclennan) referred. It is about how an individual civil servant can protect his interests, even though the organisation for which he works faces a bleak future. Its appeal to Tory Members of Parliament is obvious, but if I were in the senior civil service, given that I now have one quarter of the chance that I had in 1992 of getting a better job following all the senior management review cuts, I am not sure that I would be interested in paying £1,056 to the so-called Institute for International Research plc for the privilege of listening to a colleague from the Contributions Agency tell me about
Far from investing in people, Government policies have systematically driven good people out of the civil service and out of the Government machine. Indeed, I understand that compulsory redundancies are imminent in the Department of the Environment, in grades 3 to 5. That will add to the 24 per cent.--nearly one quarter--of senior civil servants who lost their jobs between January 1994 and January 1996.
It is highly questionable whether many Departments, weakened by the endless stream of fundamental expenditure reviews, senior management reviews and all the rest of the Government's carry-on, retain the expertise and quality of staff to service the policy functions required by Ministers. That may not matter much to the current crop of Ministers, judging by their performance and the quality of their policies. They may not be fussy about the policy advice they receive, judging by the extent to which they are happy to ignore policy advice from their civil servants.
This week, the Chancellor of the Exchequer had to acknowledge that the Treasury, which has suffered excessively from staff cuts--I believe that that is widely acknowledged in the Treasury itself, following its "delayering" exercise--had lost £12.5 billion from public finances.
Future Labour Ministers will be more demanding of their Departments. They will expect more. They will certainly be a darn sight more careful about public finances. They will want to draw on a first-rate civil service, capable of handling the more complex policy issues that tomorrow's problems will pose. I stress policy problems and issues: the legitimate matters for Government; the things that civil servants should really be concerned about in their daily business, and what they are paid to do, not what some Ministers increasingly involve them in, if the claims and the revelations supplied to the House by the FDA are anything to go by.
I make no apology for returning to that important subject. Some very serious allegations have been made about the way in which public officials, publicly funded
civil servants, are being drawn by Ministers into party political activities in their Departments. Every hon. Member should be appalled by the findings of the FDA: that civil servants are being asked by Tory Ministers to work not for the nation's good or for the public's benefit, but for the party political advantage of the Conservative party. That misuse of civil servants is a disgraceful attack on their neutrality and impartiality, and it is right for their association to blow the whistle.
The FDA survey makes alarming reading. Twenty members--those who were daring enough, some might say conscientious enough, to respond to the survey--is a large number to have complained of being asked to do work that compromised their neutrality, and that is in addition to the four or five serious cases with which the association is already dealing. It is intolerable for such demands to be made. The hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland referred to that.
I do not know how the Chancellor of the Duchy can possibly defend civil servants being asked to prepare material for election manifestos--that is what is happening, under the auspices and guidance of the No. 10 policy unit. Or they are asked to alter official reports to provide a party political slant; or to provide briefing on the political response to Opposition policies and speeches made by Opposition politicians. By all accounts, civil servants are working overtime, with enormous pressure being put on certain officials in certain Departments, to examine the proposals in the Labour party's manifesto, "New Life for Britain", issued last week.
In the vast majority of cases, requests for political work come from the Minister directly or from his or her political adviser--a fast-expanding species of political operator in Conservative-controlled Whitehall. That is an abuse of the civil service, of ministerial position and of taxpayers' money.
It is no secret that government is being closed down in readiness for the election, and that Departments are being turned into one big propaganda machine. [Interruption.] Conservative Members scoff at what I am saying. Was it not the Deputy Prime Minister who was reported in the Financial Times on 11 January 1996 as saying:
"what credible capability will remain . . . for ensuring the integrity of the systems used by the mass of departmental recruiters--the vital executive and clerical officers?"--[Official Report, House of Lords, 18 March 1996; Vol. 570, c. 544.]
The Chancellor of the Duchy said that he would address that question. Perhaps he will do so when he winds up.
"To put it bluntly, open competition, supervised by an independent body itself protected against interference from any quarter, has been the bedrock of civil standards for more than a century."
11 Jul 1996 : Column 618
With the sell-off of RAS, will the civil service ethos be maintained? That ethos is one of the last remaining safeguards. Lord Bancroft expressed the opinion that sooner or later
The full effect may not be known for 20 years or more, when the careers of the individuals selected under the new arrangement will have borne fruit.
"the absence of an in-house public service selection organisation for graduate and fast-stream entrants will result in a dilution of public service attributes and standards."
"implementing IIP can mean a sizeable investment, not only in money terms, but also in time and resources."
But there is no hint of how those demands will be met or how the Government intend to pay for their wish list of targets, and no explanation of how the aims of the White Paper will be fulfilled, in the light of the Chancellor of the Exchequer's insistence on freezing the running cost of the civil service.
"preparing employees' career development plans to enable them to feel more secure within the new civil service career reality".
Some security. Some career. I think that I would already know quite enough about this new reality not to waste my money, and would prefer to go straight off to the headhunters instead, where I suspect that I would get a readier and more helpful welcome. That is precisely what too many civil servants are doing, to the great detriment of the Departments from which they are fleeing.
"The Conservative party will increasingly become a fighting machine as opposed to a Government administering the country."?
Ministers and civil servants are being openly orchestrated by Whitehall political advisers and Conservative central office officials--although sometimes we could be forgiven for not noticing, for all the good their orchestration does them. When I drive along Whitehall early in the morning, on the way to my office, I see central office officials scurrying down Whitehall and into the office of the Deputy Prime Minister. It is not to play tennis; it is to organise--with the Deputy Prime Minister, civil servants, Government press officers and the like--the orchestration of so-called Government information. It is a thinly veiled exercise to orchestrate what is not Government information, but Conservative party propaganda.
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