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 handshould 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 isand
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 peopleministers, career officials and special
advisersand 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 servicethe 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 beI say this without great emphasis
and without David Lipsey's experience as an insiderrather
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 adviserof whom I suppose the
locus classicus was Brian Abel-Smith in the 1960son
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 detaila one
sheet pagewhich 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 wantI was about to say somebody like
Alastair Campbell but that might be misreadsomebody 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 startedwhich you certainly touched
on and then decided to veer away from and I will bring you back
if I maythat 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 methat seemed reasonableto
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.
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