CIVIL SERVICE REFORM: A CRITIQUE
Memorandum by Vernon Bogdanor, Professor
of Government, Oxford University
1. The central leitmotif in current proposals
for reform of the civil service is the need to improve its managerial
effectiveness. "Effective performance management", we
are told "is the key";[1]
and this is to be achieved by creating "a well-functioning
business planning system".[2]
In a modern civil service, performance management systems should
both "link individuals' objectives to business objectives";
and "incentivise (sic) people to seek more challenging responsibilities,
develop their competences and demonstrate leadership".[3]
Performance related pay is one way through which these objectives
can be achieved.
2. The intellectual climate in which this
approach has been adopted is not one that has been set by the
present government. It can perhaps be traced back as far as the
Fulton Report of 1968 and the 1970 White Paper on the reform of
central government. Since that time, it became a commonplace to
argue that many of Britain's problems arose because her professional
elite was steeped in an anti-industrial culture, which had proved
a hindrance to the country's efficiency and economic progress.
Thus, the very professionalism of the civil service, which has
been so widely admired in foreign countries, was seen as a handicap
and not an advantage. This critique of professionalism was fuelled
by the work of commentators such as Martin Wiener in his book,
English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (1981),
and Correlli Barnett in his books The Audit of War (1986) and
The Lost Victory (1995), although their conclusions have been
vigorously attacked by many scholars. There is indeed a paradox
involved in the Wiener/Barnett critique. For, while the British
civil service has been the subject of much emulation and admiration,
it is doubtful if the same is true of British management. The
suggestion, therefore, that the civil service would become more
efficient if it adopted the practices of British management seems
somewhat bizarre, and requires, perhaps, more powerful advocacy
than it has yet received.
3. It is, moreover, not wholly clear that
the practices of private industry have been fully understood by
those seeking to make the case for civil service reform. It is
all too easy to visualise managers in the private sector as buccaneering
entrepreneurs, subject continuously to the stern rigours of competition,
and "incentivised" by means of performance pay. In fact,
however, many large companies operate very much like the traditional
civil service. Indeed, in 1993, the Oughton Report, the "Career
Management and Succession Planning Study", argued that Whitehall
already adopted many of the best practices of private industry
and that the case for further change had not been made out.
The Oughton Report discovered that the practices
of private industry were not as many ministers imagined them to
be. Many large private companies, such as Unilever, BP and Shell,
followed civil service practice, and favoured "appointment
to the top jobs from within". They went outside only when
there was a particular skills shortage or a need for a radical
change of direction; and they would then revert as soon as possible
to filling top posts internally. The companies investigated by
Oughton, which included Unilever, BP and Shell, cited as a main
reason for this policy the "adverse effect on staff morale
as an argument against complete open competition".[4]
In Britain, Chief Executives of agencies are
generally appointed on fixed-term contracts. But large companies
tended to use such contracts at executive levels "only in
exceptional circumstances", the most common form of employment
contract in the private sector being the rolling contract. In
general,
"private sector contracts are more often
used at senior levels to increase rather than to decrease security
of tenure and to protect the organisation from unethical or predatory
behaviour. Fixed-term contracts are hardly used except for specific
short-term appointments, and are much disliked both by employers
and those employed in this way."
Therefore, the Oughton Report concluded, "The
policy of fixed-term contracts for Agency Chief Executives should
be re-examined against the background of this evidence".[5]
The Head of the Chief Executive branch of the
State Services Commission in New Zealand, where short-term contracts
had been adopted, suggested that they had "undermined the
broader framework of management development which emphasises the
nurturing of talent against a long-term view of career management".
For, "however confident individuals might be about the renewal
of their contracts, they would inevitably start casting around
toward the end of their term, if only to increase their bargaining
strength".[6]
There was a danger of short-term contracts undermining the independence
of the public service in that they might inhibit officials from
giving free and frank advice to ministers toward the end of their
term in order not to jeopardise the renewal of their contract.
4. The Oughton Report concluded, then, that
the case for further change in the civil service had not yet been
made out. Has the case been made out in the various documents
on civil service reform, summarised in Sir Richard Wilson's report
to the Prime Minister, "Civil Service Reform"? It is
difficult to see anywhere in these documents any empirical argument
or evidence-based analysis which serve to make such a case. The
verdict then must be, at the very least, one of "not proven".
5. One of the measures designed to improve
the effectiveness of the civil service is to increase the number
of outsiders. At present, the existing proportion of senior civil
service posts advertised to attract people from outside is 20-25
per cent. "This proportion would be expected to rise to 35
per cent." [7]
Anyone who objects to the infusion of outsiders
into the civil service is liable to be met with the rhetorical
question, "Do you want a closed civil service?" It would
not, however, be very sensible to suggest to someone who objected
to unqualified doctors or lawyers, that he or she favoured a "closed"
medical or legal profession. For professions are, by definition,
closed. The question is whether the civil service is still to
be seen as a profession, based on its own particular expertise
of public administration, or as a form of management.
It is worth noting also that in practice the
two cultures of public service and private business have not meshed
very well, but have remained distinct. It is difficult to think
of many successful businessmen or women who have made successful
careers in the civil service, and difficult to think of many senior
civil servants who have proved themselves to be equally successful
in the business world. The same is true, of course, at political
level. It is difficult to think of many top businessmen or women
who have made a success of a political career; and difficult to
think of many top politicians who have been very successful in
the business world. Probably the cultures of local government
and perhaps even of academic life are more similar to the culture
of the civil service than is the culture of private industry.
Yet, while current proposals for reform emphasise reciprocal exchanges
with business and the voluntary sector, hardly anything is said
about exchanges with local government or the universities. [8]
6. Two problems in particular arise with
the infusion of outsiders into the civil service. The first is
the need to ensure that public service standards are maintained;
the second is the need to ensure that the civil service does not
become politicised.
7. The British civil service has been widely
admired, and rightly so, for its very high standards of integrity,
professionalism, political neutrality and incorruptibility. These
standards have been secured by continuity of experience which
served to yield a common ethical basis. Until recently, this ethical
basis seemed so deeply embedded in the culture of the civil service
that there appeared no need for it to be codified.
With greater interchange, however, between the
civil service and the private sector, great care needs to be taken
that public service standards are maintained. Indeed, Sir John
Bourn, the Comptroller and Auditor-General, and Robert Sheldon,
MP, formerly Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, have frequently
expressed their belief that newcomers into the public sector need
to be initiated into public sector standards. It is clearly vital
that civil servants should not think of those with whom they do
business outside Whitehall as potential employers.
Recently, a new appointment as head of Customs
and Excise was announced, following public advertisement. The
person appointed had been a Treasury civil servant for 11 years
and had then moved to a city firm. If appointments of this kind
come to predominate, it will be important to monitor the effect
on morale upon existing staff who see good jobs being given to
those who return to the civil service after undertaking better
paid jobs outside. Otherwise, the whole notion of a career civil
service, of a professional commitment, will come under threat.
8. The political neutrality of the British
civil service flows fundamentally from its career basis, since
if one joins the service for life, one will inevitably be called
upon to serve successive administrations of different political
colours. One is not likely to succeed, therefore, as a civil servant,
unless one succeeds in displaying political impartiality. New
recruits coming in from outside will generally lack the traditional
patterns of experience, such as that of being private secretary
to a minister, which help to socialise civil servants as neutral
advisers. Moreover, someone recruited from outside in virtue of
relevant knowledge is very likely to arrive with political baggage,
policy commitments derived from their previous experience. It
is not clear how far recruitment to senior policy positions in
the civil service can avoid the dangers of politicisation or at
least a degree of prior policy commitment, incompatible with our
traditional notions of political neutrality.
At some point, indeed, when the percentage of
outsiders has exceeded a certain figure, it may be that the civil
service has become fundamentally altered since the policy commitments
of its senior figures will have made it unacceptable to the main
alternative government of the day. For civil service reform is
different perhaps from reform in other areas in that the civil
service belongs not only to the government of the day, but also
to any alternative government which might take office. Thus the
introduction into the civil service of too many people with prior
policy commitments sympathetic to those of the government of the
day could serve to alter the civil service beyond recognition
by politicising it. There can, of course, be no similar objection
to outsiders being brought in as special advisers.
9. There is a fundamental contradiction,
so it seems to me, between current proposals for civil service
reform, and the idea of joined-up, or holistic government, which
has been much championed by the current administration. That is
because holistic government implies shared responsibility, while
the civil service reform proposals imply individual responsibility.
Civil servants are bound to have to consult
more with their colleagues and with those outside Whitehall, than
members of other professions such as, for example, doctors, accountants
or schoolteachers. In the words of Sir Edward Bridges's classic
Rede lecture, "Portrait of a Profession", published
in 1950, "Few of them [civil servants] are ever completely
responsible for the work they are doing—Through the nature
of his work, therefore, he [the civil servant] has much less consciousness
than other professional men that the work he does is his own individual
achievement, and is inevitably far more conscious than others
that the work he does is part of something greater than himself".[9]
There is a danger that current proposals will undermine this consciousness.
10. Holistic, or joined-up government, has
two crucial features. The first is that it is designed to deal
with highly intractable and difficult social problems, such as
social exclusion, drugs, community health, and so on. The aim
is to re-create social capital and restore community ties. Success
in this endeavour is likely to be very much a long-term affair,
and not such as can be made subject to any regime of "incentivising"
or performance pay. Such a regime might well encourage those subject
to it to treat means as ends, to treat, for example, educational
deprivation as a matter solely of test scores and attendance records,
rather than the involvement of families in the educational process;
or to judge the police solely in terms of law enforcement rather
than on the wider basis of community safety; or to judge the National
Health Service by how successful it is in curing illness rather
than in preventing it. A regime of incentives provides too many
incentives to cut corners, to dispose of difficult problems by
dumping them on some other department. Schools, for example, can
improve their position in the league tables by expelling difficult
pupils. These pupils, however, then contribute to the statistics
on youth crime, so that the criminal justice system is seen to
perform less well. That is precisely the kind of juggling which
holistic government has been designed to prevent.
11. Second, holistic government implies
an end to defensive compartmentalisation and turf wars. It implies
co-operation between different parts of the governmental machine,
between the departments of central government, and between central
and local government and local agencies. How, under such a dispensation,
will it prove possible to distinguish and disentangle various
contributions so as to estimate how much each element contributes
to the whole?
12. There is, then, a deep-seated conflict
between the ethos of the new public management, which lies behind
the proposals for civil service reform, by which government is
broken down into discrete or separate units of accountability,
and the idea of holistic government whose central theme is that
there is a social context of interdependence to many of our most
intractable problems.
13. There can, in the last resort, be no
real analogy between the civil service and private management.
For there is no real analogy in the private sector to the central
constitutional principle of ministerial accountability to Parliament.
The business of a government department must, inevitably, be scrutinised
in a different way from that in which shareholders of a public
company judge the operations of their firm. In the latter case,
the net financial outcome of all of the firm's operations over
a period of time will be evaluated at the annual meeting of shareholders.
Parliament, however, may scrutinise any single operation carried
out by government at any time, and may do so some considerable
time after the operation in question has occurred. This has obvious
implications for record-taking and for the avoidance of risk,
and it makes the conduct of public affairs by civil servants a
profession and not a business. It also forms the basis for the
traditional contract by means of which civil servants are offered
job security in exchange for levels of pay generally lower than
many of them could command elsewhere. That contract, and the basic
principles which have undermined the British civil service, have
remained unchallenged until recently. Some might suggest that
they have come under challenge today, not so much because the
civil service has been shown to be inefficient, but because, since
the time of Sir Edward Bridges, there has been a precipitous decline
of national self-confidence, and the civil service has become
its latest victim. Yet an institution which has on the whole served
this country well should not be undermined by default, but only
after it has been shown, through the most rigorous analysis and
scrutiny that its performance is in fact inadequate. That analysis
and scrutiny has not yet been forthcoming.
Vernon Bogdanor
February 2000
1 Cabinet Office: Performance Management: Civil Service
Reform, HMSO, 1999, paragraph, 3. Back
2 Ibid, paragraph, 4, i. Back
3 Ibid, paragraph, 12, i, ii. Back
4 Cabinet Office: Efficiency Unit: Career Management and Succession
Planning Study, HMSO, 1993, pp. 40, 41. Back
5 Ibid, p 5. Back
6 Ibid, p 134. Back
7 Cabinet office: Bringing in and Bringing on Talent, p 30. Back
8 Ibid, p 37. Back
9 Sir Edward Bridges: Portrait of a Profession: The Civil Service
Tradition, (The Rede Lecture 1950), Cambridge University Press,
1950, pp 26-7. Back
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