Select Committee on Public Administration Minutes of Evidence



Examination of witnesses (Questions 1 - 19)

WEDNESDAY 12 JULY 2000

LORD LIPSEY and PROFESSOR ANTHONY KING

Chairman

  1. Can I welcome our two witnesses this afternoon, Professor Anthony King and Lord Lipsey, to help us with our inquiry into special advisers. Professor King is a Professor of Government at Essex University, a former member of the Nolan Committee and now gives evidence to the Nolan Committee in important ways. Lord Lipsey who, as plain David Lipsey, was Special Adviser to Tony Crosland in the 1970s and worked in the Prime Minister's office after that. You are both splendidly equipped to help us. Professor King, I wonder whether you would like to say something by way of kick off?
  (Professor King) I would, if I may. First, I would like to apologise to the Committee and to Lord Lipsey for the fact that I have to go at 5.15 to meet some sixth form teachers of politics whom I agreed to meet a very long time ago. Could I make five points very briefly, each one more briefly than the one before? The first is: I have no idea how much time or energy you are going to devote to the specific question of special advisers but I do hope that you will succeed in finding out more, in ascertaining some facts. We know a fair amount about how many there are in Government at the moment and we know a good deal about what they are paid, but I do not think we know enough about who they are, their ages, their educational backgrounds, their career histories. It would be interesting to know something about their subsequent histories, I say in the presence of David Lipsey, Andrew Tyrie and others. I would like to know more about who they are. I would also like to know more about what they actually do. We know that they travel abroad a good deal but what do they do when they get there? People tell me that when they, as the leader of a delegation from a local authority or whatever, turn up in a Whitehall department, whereas they used to find themselves meeting a minister or a civil servant, they now frequently find themselves meeting a special adviser. How often does that happen? What is that all about? That is the first point, desire for more knowledge. The second is: I hope in your deliberations on this particular topic and in your report you will distinguish clearly between what are called broadly issues of good governance, on the one hand—should we be moving towards a cabinet system in Government departments or should we not move towards such a system, should No.10 be as heavily occupied with special advisers as it now is—and issues of propriety and of proper ethical conduct, on the other. For example, is it true, as is sometimes alleged, that some part-time special advisers are taking advantage in the rest of their time of knowledge and contacts gleaned as special advisers? Is it the case that special advisers are spending their time on party political matters at the taxpayers' expense, which they ought not to be doing? I think the one thing that my former friends and colleagues on the Neill Committee got rather wrong, both in their lines of inquiry and in their final report, was the tendency to mix up what I will crudely call constitutional issues on the one hand and, on the other, issues of standards of conduct in public life. I do think they need to be distinguished. The third point is: we make the distinction very familiarly between specialist policy advisers to ministers of the kind that John Gummer was telling the Neill Committee he had, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, political advisers in the narrower sense. Thinking about this over the last couple of days, it occurs to me that one may want to distinguish in addition between all those special advisers who work in line Government departments and who have been there, after all, for quite a long time, as Lord Lipsey can bear witness, and the special advisers who now work in No.10 who seem to me to be quite a different tribe of people. It seems to me not to be very sensible to assimilate No.10 Downing Street to an ordinary line Government department. The fourth point is: at the top of Government in this country we have always had either ministers or civil servants and, when special advisers first appeared on the scene, there seemed to be felt a need to assimilate them either to ministers or to civil servants. They clearly could not be assimilated to ministers because they were not ministers; they were therefore assimilated to civil servants and they were called `temporary civil servants' and given Civil Service-like status although it was not the status of an ordinary career official. It does occur to me that your Committee might at least want to consider whether there should not now be accepted as being in Government three groups of people—ministers, career officials and special advisers—and whether there ought not to be for special advisers not merely their own Model Contract but rules governing their behaviour, statements of their responsibilities and, indeed, statements of what they should not do and perhaps a separate code of ethics relating to them. Especially since there are quite a lot of them in Whitehall they seem to me to be a special category deserving special status. Finally, and most briefly of all, this matter for very obvious reasons has latterly become a matter of party political controversy. I think it is too important for that. I think this is a serious issue. Special advisers have been there for a long time and they are going to be there for a much longer time, they do play a role in our governmental system and I think we should know what that role is and what it ought to be, irrespective of which political party they happen to support.

  2. That is an immensely helpful start. It makes us want to attend your kind of lectures, really, sharp and clear.
  (Professor King) They are much longer than that.

  3. But we know they will be distilled into five clear, crisp points. I wonder if you would like to add something to that, Lord Lipsey?
  (Lord Lipsey) Chairman, thank you. I do not have to leave at 5.15. Indeed, if I had to choose a subject on which I could keep going all night without deviation or repetition it would probably be this one. I might have to leave if a red light starts flashing on that screen. Indeed, I would be grateful if someone on that side of the table could draw my attention to it. The Lords whips are not gentle like the Commons ones.

  4. Thank you for that. We shall probably want to end at 5.30, we are in the middle of considering a report and it would be helpful to us if we did that, so things may turn out all right for all of us in the end. I wonder if I could start by, in a sense, taking up one of Tony King's points but actually directing it at David Lipsey to start with. The point I want to take up is about separating out the big constitutional questions involved in this, should we have a cabinet system, from the conduct questions. The reason I want to get to David Lipsey is because I happened to come across this splendid pamphlet which you did called Making Government Work, a Fabian pamphlet from 1982. It is all coming back to you now. This just shows what a vintage these issues have. You brought together some people, including Tessa Blackstone and Gavyn Davies who were in the group who prepared this publication, and you were reflecting upon the experiences of the recently deceased Labour Government and what it might mean for the next Labour Government in terms of how it organises things. If I can just quote a little passage here. Looking forward to this happy day, you say: "There cannot be wholesale replacement of the top ranks of the civil service—the replacements are not there and there are not the same opportunities as in, say, the US or France (in different ways) for the displaced civil servants to find other worthwhile jobs. And change must be carried out in a way which will not lose public confidence in the administration of government." Then it goes on to give an aide memoire for future ministers and it says: "We should like to see the `politicisation' of key posts in department. This change could take several forms: (a) the appointment of more political advisers to act as the eyes, ears, consciences and channels of communication for ministers, senior and junior, within departments and with the party outside them. (b) the appointment of more policy advisers (the distinction between these two categories is important) to act as sources of expert advice independent of career professionals in departments. They must have the right to commission studies by existing civil servants; access to all departmental information; and ultimately to take their case to the minister himself. Both these groups (political advisers and policy advisers) should be integrated closely into the minister's private office machine, where they would be best placed to achieve strategic position in progress chasing, as heads of ad hoc task forces, in generating new policy thinking and, generally, in enhancing effective ministerial control". That is a very powerful case for a move towards a Cabinet system on constitutional grounds. Is that how it is to be read? Do you still believe that?
  (Lord Lipsey) I sometimes find the use of the word Cabinet causes confusion, because it sounds like leaping into being exactly like France, which is a different culture. I would draw that reservation. What I think, and I still think eighteen years after I wrote that, is there is not just a single model based on the way the Civil Service happens to have run itself for the last fifty years. The secret of success in melding the political input into policy making, which I referred to there, with the traditional virtues of the Civil Service, is that the two find the optimum way of working together. Whether you want to call that a Cabinet system or not I do not mind. What I think is uniformly pretty disastrous is when special advisers and regular civil servants are at loggerheads, not working together, not trusting each other, then I think the minister ends up particularly ill-served and ill-able to get the policies that he or she wants.

  5. If you follow this line of argument, instead of worrying whether ministers should have two of these people or whether seventy is too many, on good governance grounds, why do we not just simply say, if the argument is that the system would be strengthened by having a group of such people around ministers, policy making would be more effective and ministerial direction would be better, why do we not just simply go for it?
  (Professor King) I am reluctant to say this, but I am not sure that enhanced ministerial control and better policy amount to quite the same thing. I would like to think that more often than not they do. I am not convinced that they always do. This does seem to me to go to the heart, as David Lipsey has already indicated, of the role you want career officials to play in this country. I tend to be—I say this without great emphasis and without David Lipsey's experience as an insider—rather old-fashioned on these matters. I do not think there has been any widespread or prolonged problem of effective ministerial control in this country. I think that probably most of the time, on balance, having experienced officials as one's policy advisers is to be preferred to having less experienced people do that. That said, it seems to me that the role that policy advisers have come to play most of the time, in most departments, is a highly satisfactory one. For obvious reasons: that they can provide a slant on policy which is different from that provided by civil servants, and on the grounds that the political head of the department will frequently need political help in the form of speech writing, and so on and so forth. I hate this cliche about finding the right balance but I think probably in most departments most of the time the balance has been struck and struck pretty well. I would not see a very strong case, as a general proposition, either for reducing or expanding the role of special advisers. I can be talked out of that view, but that is my tentative view.

  6. If the argument is, as expressed very clearly by David Lipsey back in 1982, the desire for more politisation, the concern of the Neill Committee is with the dangers of politisation. Here we have a firm advocacy of more politisation being a requirement of more effective Government. That is not an argument that you are wanting to recommend today.
  (Professor King) No. Again, I would not insist on the point, but you could have a greater degree of politisation without having corruption. After all, our system with civil servants playing such a large role within Government policy-making is an unusual one as the world goes. In most countries there is a greater degree of politisation. That is separate from the issue of corruption. Does our system need to be more politicised? That does seem to me to be a matter, largely, for empirical judgment. Had there been large numbers of cases in which ministers have not been either able adequately to exercise the kind of control they have a right to exercise over their departments or, alternatively, there have been large numbers of cases when the policy has gone wrong because a group of officials which has got used to doing things in exactly the same way over a very long period of time just goes on doing that when circumstances have changed, I do not see a general case for enhancing the role of special advisers under either of those headings. I repeat, I could be talked out of that view by people who have more experience than I have.

  7. One final preliminary question, one of your other points is we need to be clear about who we are talking about. There may be different kinds of these people. I am not sure whether the conclusion that you are inviting us to consider is that because of that they should be treated in different ways, this subspecies, whether they might be provided for in different ways, contracted for in different ways; or whether it is just analytically useful to separate out the different varieties and they should all still come under the same type of heading.
  (Professor King) My hunch is it is more than analytically useful. I think there is not much point in trying to distinguish between a specialist policy adviser—of whom I suppose the locus classicus was Brian Abel-Smith in the 1960s—on the one hand and the more political oriented adviser on the other. Their roles do overlap. I do not think there would be much point in pursuing that as a distinction. However, although I have not had time to think about this properly I have a hunch that, if one did pause to think about it, one would decide, as I indicated before, that there is, at least, analytic distinction between special advisers in the line departments and the people who now occupy some of the offices in No.10. I have a feeling that that second group, the No.10 group, probably ought to be considered and looked at separately and possibly with different rules, and different indications of what was appropriate behaviour for them being worked out.

Mr Tyrie

  8. I found your opening remarks absolutely tremendous and very, very helpful to us in guiding us on how to approach this subject. One of the many things you said was you would like us to find out some more information. I have been at that for some time, and that has been quite hard work, because it is information in our political system that is not readily available. Parliamentary questions are not always answered very directly and accurately and when they are they are answered minimally. In this inquiry we are going to be calling some ministers, I hope, to give some evidence. We ought to ask them some questions. The first thing I would like to ask you is that rather than give us the list now, would you be prepared to jot down a list of questions and send us that list of the sort of things in more detail—a one sheet page—which we could then ask the executive for?
  (Professor King) There is an easy answer to that question. I am going on holiday in about thirty-six hours. If you want it within the next fortnight plus a couple of days the answer is, no, sir. If you can wait a little bit longer, the answer is, sure.

  9. Okay, let us wait for a fortnight.
  (Professor King) I will need a letter to prompt me.

Chairman

  10. It is a presumptuous request when you come here to give evidence to us but we are very grateful for your answer nevertheless.
  (Professor King) Any list you get will be without prejudice, as they say.

Mr Tyrie

  11. I learned to be presumptuous in my adviser days. You have raised so many questions I hardly know where to start. First of all, you said that advisers are substituting for ministers and officials in Whitehall to some degree and you mentioned the experience of somebody who has been there.
  (Professor King) Can I emphasise that I did not say that on the basis of personal experience, of which I have none? So much of the evidence in this area is anecdotal. I can only report that several people, people going to see ministers from local authorities or interest groups or whatever, have told me that rather to their surprise they found themselves talking to a special adviser rather than, as they used to, either to a minister or an official.

  12. We will not pursue the anecdotal stuff any further. One of the tensions you raised was between two generic types of question, one about good governance and the other about ethical questions, and in that connection you raised the question how much party political work is it legitimate for an adviser to do. This is obviously a very difficult question but do you have a view about that? Do you have something more that you would like to say about that?
  (Professor King) I have a sort of meta-view in the sense that if one came to think of special advisers as being a third and separate type of person in Government, as a type of person who was not a temporary civil servant, given that these people would presumably still be paid for by the taxpayer, one might then proceed to try to draw up some guidelines as to the amount of party political activity they could engage in. I think you told the Neill Committee that when you were working in the Treasury you were gleaning information of use to the Government in countering the Opposition but that you did so under certain kinds of constraints. My hunch is that if one came to think of special advisers as a special sort of creature then one might be able to work out some consistent guidelines that would, on the one hand, enable special advisers to operate politically, which is part of what they are there for, but, on the other hand, preclude them, for example, from being seconded to party headquarters for considerable periods of time. As must be evident from my answer, I have not thought this through in detail; I only began to think about it at all yesterday. I think that would be the direction in which I would be inclined to go.

  13. Which was going to be another question. Do you think that we have now reached a point where we should probably lay down more formal rules to provide clear guidance on what constitutes legitimate and illegitimate activities by an adviser?
  (Professor King) Sadly I do. I am not very keen on rule books for all kinds of obvious reasons but the fact is, however, with the growth of special advisers and their increasing role in No.10 we have entered a new phase of Government in this country and I think we have to adapt to those circumstances. Under these new circumstances it can be radically unclear for the most honest, upright, honourable special adviser or his or her Permanent Secretary what is appropriate behaviour. Yes, I think there ought to be, if not an elaborate set of rules then at least some guidelines.

  14. Could I ask you about No.10 because you have just mentioned it. You described them as a different tribe altogether and when it comes to the numbers game out of 67, I think it is, senior position level officials in No.10 Downing Street, 27 of them are advisers, or 28 of them are advisers. That is a tremendous shift from the days when there were about 55 in No.10 of whom seven or eight were advisers. I feel this is a step shift. First of all, do you agree that this is a step shift?
  (Professor King) Yes, I do. It is not clear how permanent it is going to prove. I have a hunch, but it is only a hunch, that Tony Blair's successor and Tony Blair's successor's successor is rather going to take to the idea of having a No.10 operation which to a very considerable extent is his or her operation. I doubt whether this is going to go away. My hunch would be, for example, an incoming Conservative Prime Minister would want somebody like Jonathan Powell. I have a hunch that an incoming Conservative Prime Minister would want—I was about to say somebody like Alastair Campbell but that might be misread—somebody acting as Press Secretary playing a more political role, a more explicitly political role, than has sometimes been the case in the past.

  15. Do you think that the creation of this team constitutes what one might call a Prime Minister's Department in miniature?
  (Professor King) Yes.

  16. Do you think that has any implications for cabinet government?
  (Professor King) Yes, although the implications arise out of the different ways in which different Prime Ministers do their job. There was not a great deal of collective cabinet government in Mrs Thatcher's time even though she did not have this number of advisers at No.10.

  17. There were very vigorous cabinet committees.
  (Professor King) There were very vigorous cabinet committees and, of course, there were very vigorous extra-cabinet committees. Mrs Thatcher was not enormously given to going through the usual channels when they did not suit her purposes.

  18. Do you think this has implications for cabinet committees? Cabinet government died 30 or 40 years ago. I think most people agreed it died at the time that Mackintosh was writing his textbook and that sort of stuff. Perhaps I should have said, to be more precise, modern cabinet government as defined by the creation and use of widespread formal and informal cabinet committees. Do you think that the creation of a No.10 Prime Minister's Department in miniature has implications for that style of government?
  (Professor King) I cannot answer that question; I simply do not know enough. I take the point of your question. Quite obviously the change at No.10 could have the kinds of effects you allude to but whether it is having them and having them on a wide scale I simply do not know.

  19. My last question is do you think that the huge emphasis that has started—which you certainly touched on and then decided to veer away from and I will bring you back if I may—that it is said advisers are now paying to presentational matters in particular, the whole media outfit in No.10 headed by Alastair Campbell, represents a step shift in the way advisers are being used in this administration in comparison with the previous administration?
  (Professor King) Again, I have not studied it carefully enough to have a pat answer to that question. When you have special advisers who are committed to their ministers and their ministers' careers, and when you have journalists ready to take them to lunch, I really find it very difficult to believe that at any time at any place you will not get special advisers pointing out with great regret to the person who is taking them to lunch that, unfortunately, their minister is having to spend a great deal of time cleaning up the mess left by somebody else. It may be that the special advisers in this Government do a bit more of that than was done in the past. I find it very difficult to believe that there has been some quantum change under that heading.
  (Lord Lipsey) Might I just come in on that. Yes, I think special advisers do a great deal of presentation and more and more with the passage of time but this is largely filling a vacuum. I have great respect for many of the strengths of the British civil service but presentation sure ain't one of them. Their Deformation professionelle is an addiction to secrecy and therefore it is not surprising that communication is not their principal skill and that ministers will turn to those to whom it is a principal skill. So far as these so-called "briefings" are concerned, I used to do mine over lunch on behalf of Tony Crosland with a good deal more relish than Tony King has described, largely saying what I think my Minister would have said had he been at the lunch. Quite often he would pull out of the lunch at the last minute and send me—that seemed reasonable—to try to represent his view. I do not think you will ever stop that kind of thing, however elaborate the codes are that you have. The public would know a great deal less about what was going on in Government and about the personalities of those who sought positions over them were there not a bit of this.


 
previous page contents next page

House of Commons home page Parliament home page House of Lords home page search page enquiries index

© Parliamentary copyright 2000
Prepared 20 October 2000