Examination of witnesses (Questions 20
- 39)
WEDNESDAY 12 JULY 2000
LORD LIPSEY
and PROFESSOR ANTHONY
KING
20. The weakness is with the advisers, their
leakiness is, in fact, a constitutional boon.
(Lord Lipsey) A measure of leakiness is the oil that
makes the machinery of government work. If it turns into a flood
the machinery drowns and does not work anymore, but a measure
of leakiness is an important aspect. One other change since I
was a special adviser is in the nature of the press—I have
been a journalist since, so I have seen both sides—that
is that things are attributed to sources in a way that I do not
think happened in my day. I have appeared, at least twice, in
newspaper reports, concerning things I have had an interest in,
as a `senior Whitehall source'. I am not senior, I am not in Whitehall
and, I just said it, I was not really a source. The way it was
spun made it look as if the minister's closest adviser was telling
him something. In this particular case I do not think I had met
the minister for several years. One should apply discount to the
kind of remarks one sees attributed in many, though not all, of
our newspapers by many, though not all, of the correspondents
who work for them, and not assume this is the special adviser
holding forth over lunch. It may well be the journalist in the
bath, thinking what might improve his story.
Chairman
21. Can I pick up on No.10? On the good governance
versus conduct issue, I was not sure from your answer whether
you were accepting the view that No.10—I ask you now as
a long serving student of British Government—needed beefing-up
or whether you felt, as David Lipsey in his pamphlet back in 1982
felt, that there was a bit of a hole in the centre and that needed
to be filled, leaving aside questions of conduct and all that
for the moment.
(Professor King) There are two different questions
there. One has to do with whether there was a hole in the centre,
in the sense that there was nobody in the system whose job it
was, or there was no organisation in the system, whose job it
was, to ensure that problems were not considered on a solely departmental
basis. Joined-up Government has been a cliche. I think there was
a hole in the centre of Government in the sense that there was
not enough joined-up thinking about problems that cut across departmental
responsibilities. That is not the same, however, as saying that
there was a hole in the centre in the sense that the Prime Minister
specifically needed more help and that that help should take the
form of an augmented number of special advisers. My own hunch
about that is that is going to depend a great deal on the personality,
the temperament and the character of the individual. Mrs Thatcher
ran her Government pretty effectively and ran it a great deal
of the time from No.10. She ran it effectively, she believed,
in part, because she did not have a Prime Minister's Department
in miniature. The lines of communication between her and the people
whom she needed to influence were very short. This Prime Minister
feels quite differently. He wants to be a strong, authoritative
Prime Minister and he thinks this is the best way of going about
it. My disposition is to think that this will vary according to
the Prime Minister of the day, and that is not a bad thing. If
Mr Blair's successor were to want to run No.10 on quite a different
basis, I would be disposed to let him or her do that.
Chairman: Thank you very much.
Mr White
22. That was going to be the first question
I was going to ask. Is one of the biggest crimes that special
advisers have that they are actually very effective and they have
delivered on what their ministers and the Prime Minister wanted?
That is the biggest crime as far as the position is concerned,
they are effective. How would you judge how a specialist adviser
would be effective or not?
(Professor King) I am sorry to say—and David
Lipsey will have views about this—and to say so often, "I
don't know". We are talking about seventy-one people, of
whom roughly fifty are out there in specialised departments. Whether
the special advisers—I pick these names at random—in
the Department of Health and the Department for Education and
Employment are performing effectively I simply do not know. I
suspect nobody knows except the minister in each department. I
have no reason to think that they are ineffective but I have no
evidence with which to measure their effectiveness either.
23. I suspect that when the Government were
looking at welfare reform, the people that were actually advising
the ministers, not one of them had ever actually been a recipient
of benefits. How do you see the relationship between specialist
advisers, the pressure groups, the interest groups and the actual
customers of the policy changes? What role should a specialist
adviser have in that respect? I am including the task force because
that exists as well.
(Professor King) One of the reasons I would like to
know more about the special advisers, including their educational
backgrounds, and their previous careers, is to know whether any
of them have ever been in receipt of benefit. I am a little sceptical
about whether specialist advisers, as they have existed for a
long period of time, have any special expertise from the consumer
end. As regards their relationship with interest groups, and so
on, if the function of the specialist adviser is, as I think it
ought to be, to serve the minister, then all those relationships
should be somewhat arm's length, it seems to me. The special adviser's
responsibility is to his or her ministerial boss. A minister may
choose to use a special adviser as a liaison person with some
outside group; that is perfectly understandable: "Will you
please keep in touch with Age Concern about this". As long
as it is clear that the special adviser is acting as the minister's
agent, that is all right. If it is not clear, it is not.
24. How do you see the Government's Modernising
Government Agenda, the role of new technology and the role of—I
hate the phrase—joined-up Government affecting the departmental
special advisers and also the No.10 specialist advisers from a
constitutional point of view?
(Professor King) That is obviously a complicated one.
I think we do have to bear in mind that people in the routine
Government machine, even at the top, are often people who have
had very little experience in thinking about these kinds of issue,
in dealing with these kinds of technological challenges. Whether
the people they bring in to serve them are formally special advisers
or not seems to me to be a less important issue than that they
do need such people. I think it was probably true once upon a
time that governments, on the whole, thought that all of the intellectual
and technical resources they needed could be got within Government.
Nobody believes that any longer and they are right not to.
(Lord Lipsey) Can I have a word on the cross-cuttingness,
just from experience. There were hopes that this would happen
under the Labour Government, where I was a special adviser, the
special advisers would get together and stop all these departments
fighting each other and get them to pull together for a common
strategy. Within a few weeks of getting in all the special advisers
mimicked their ministers and became the spokesmen for their own
departments. I would distinguish there with No.10 because a lot
of cross-cutting work in this Government is done by the No.10
policy unit, who I happen to think are a very high class group
of people indeed, extremely well run by David Miliband, extremely
effective and responsible for the successes of the Government,
to a large measure, and it does help with cross-cuttingness. I
do not think even that is the most important thing in cross-cuttingness,
which more affects the changes in the Civil Service machinery,
on the one hand, and, in particular, the creation of cross-departmental
budgeting. Until you get cross-departmental budgeting you will
not get cross-departmental policy making, it is as simple as that.
Mr Townend
25. I got the impression that you felt that
the changes as far as special advisers in the general departments
are concerned have not been very great. The big change is in Downing
Street. I got the impression that you thought we should look at
that separately. As far as Downing Street is concerned, have you
any views on the question as far as the costs that we should pay?
Should they all be paid by the taxpayer at the moment or do you
think because of the large numbers, the big increase, only a proportion
should be paid by the taxpayer?
(Professor King) I know of no-one, although there
may be such people, who thinks that the vast majority of the new
special advisers who have been brought in to No.10 are not performing
proper mainstream governmental functions. David Lipsey has referred
to the people in the Policy Unit; I have not heard anyone say
that they are not doing what it is appropriate for people in the
Policy Unit to do. Nor have I heard people complain about the
role currently being played by the Chief of Staff, Jonathan Powell.
I have no idea whether if Mr Hague became Prime Minister he would
want to go back to the old regime under which a career civil servant
was his principal right-hand man. I think it at least possible
that he would want to bring in Seb Coe or somebody to play the
Jonathan Powell role. It seems to me a perfectly appropriate role
and I personally have no objection to the taxpayer paying for
that. The issues, of course, arise in the field of presentation.
The issues arise in particular in connection with the Strategic
Communications Unit, about which please do not ask me because
I know very little about it, and, of course, about the role being
played by the Prime Minister's Press Secretary at the moment.
One of the reasons that I would be keen for this Committee or
somebody to look specifically at No.10 is to try to work out what
an appropriate role for a politically appointed Press Secretary
to the Prime Minister in an ideal world would look like. I do
not think we should be too desperately pious about this. For example,
when the Conservatives were last in power there was the famous
No.12 meeting and civil servants attended that meeting. I do not
know in what role they attended, I do not know how much they spoke,
but equally those same civil servants, as far as I know, did not
get involved in writing party political speeches. It would be
useful to think that through, not in the broad context of special
advisers but in the specific context of the role of the Press
Office at No.10. I think there are some large issues there. It
might be that one might decide, "Look, the Prime Minister,
whoever he or she is, can have one person who has a licence to
roam free; the taxpayer will pay for one person", if you
like a form of indirect subvention of the political parties, another
small-scale form of state funding. I think the role that Alastair
Campbell is currently playing is a new role; I do not think it
has ever been played like that before. I do not myself regard
it with quite the horror that some people seem to. It is anomalous
in terms of our past experience and I think we ought to think
through what is appropriate and who should pay.
26. Do you think that the numbers should be
capped or should it be left to the discretion of the Government
as to how many people they employ as special advisers?
(Professor King) As you know, I served on the Neill
Committee—these people are my friends and I have great respect
for all of them—but, had I still been a member of the Committee,
I think I would have been unhappy about a recommendation that
the number should be capped. That seems to me to be a matter for
the political process, for what you people say in the House of
Commons about the growing numbers rather than for a Committee
on Standards in Public Life to pronounce upon. I happen to hold
the view that the present number is probably a reasonable maximum.
I would be a little disconcerted if the number grew.
Mr Townend: Looking at the Conservatives, the
Opposition now who might be the Government in due course, looking
at the scene as it affects all Oppositions, do you feel the way
it has developed, the increase in advisers and special advisers
and the way many people say the press departments of all the departments
and Alastair Campbell have changed that, has got implications
for the position of the Opposition, whichever party it is? If
Alastair Campbell is going to be paid by the state to be Press
Secretary for the Government, should there be some quid pro
quo for the Opposition?
Mr White
27. You have already got that.
(Lord Lipsey) Can I just come in on this issue because
I want to put a proposal before you. There is money for the Opposition,
Short money. I understand there are some questions being raised
about whether that is being appropriately used but in principle
it is accepted, and rightly so, that you have to have a properly
serviced Opposition. However, what I think is uncomfortable about
the present situation is that special advisers—and here
I really refer to the political breed of special advisers—are
paid just like they were any other civil servant out of the same
pocket without any discrimination. What I would like to see is,
as it were, a vote of Short money for Government where it is not
very much money but it would be subject to proper parliamentary
control and scrutiny and would send a signal to people that these
people are something really quite different from the normal Civil
Service. What I think is the cause of a lot of our vexations in
this area is that we are trying to push everything into a box
called "Civil Service as we have always known it" and
some things do not sit in that box. Rather than try to shove it
into the box, I would rather see a new box in which it fits comfortably
which is open, above board and subject to public scrutiny.
Chairman
28. I am conscious that we need to get you away
to your sixth form teachers but I know that you want to say something
to us about Short money, Professor King. Perhaps you could say
it and then you could leave us, if you have to.
(Professor King) I am glad on your behalf that I have
to go because you will then get to hear from somebody who actually
has been a special adviser, unlike me. I was delighted that the
Neill Committee in its report before the last one did two things.
It said first that the amount of Short money going to the Opposition
should be enormously increased and, secondly, that it should not
be made pro rata with the Opposition Party's performance at the
previous election. It seemed to me quite extraordinary that an
Opposition Party that did badly at an election, even though it
still had to perform all the functions of the Opposition, was
to be financially penalised. I imagine all Members of this Committee
would agree that it is to the Government's great credit that without
much of a to-do, without a great fanfare, the amount of money
was greatly increased and the basis on which it was paid out was
changed. That said, and this really is without prejudice, I have
not been following the arguments about all this at all closely
or, indeed, at all. I would add that clearly when the Neill Committee
talked about these matters, and this is borne out if you go and
have a look at our report, the intention was that the money should
be spent on the Opposition's parliamentary activities. That was
made very clear. Now, parliamentary activities can certainly include
the Shadow Defence Spokesman paying a visit to a British base
overseas or whatever, but certainly the Short money was not intended
to be used for purposes outside these walls.
29. Thank you very much for that. As I say,
I have to protect your interests. It is now 5.20 and you said
you had to go at 5.15.
(Professor King) Yes.
30. I think you ought to go, if I can put it
like that.
(Professor King) I timed the walk from where I am
going to here and I think in reverse it will be about the same
time.
31. Can I say we have had tremendous value from
you. We are very grateful to you for coming in. We shall think
very carefully about what you have said to us, thank you very
much indeed. If you could bear in mind Andrew Tyrie's presumptuous
request.
(Professor King) I shall need a letter. I will have
forgotten by the time I get back from my holiday.
Mr McFall
32. In one of the statements you made, Lord
Lipsey, you said that communication is a problem, it has always
been a perennial problem. I think the mantra of the Major Government
was that the message was okay but the presentation was bad. Is
it not incumbent on any Government, irrespective of political
colours, to make sure that presentation is good? Here special
advisers can occupy a different role from the Civil Service. We
talk about the neutrality of the Civil Service. The special advisers
are in that interface between the politics and the wider community,
journalists and the media environment. If we take all of the hype
away from the issue of special advisers, is there not a case for
saying, "Let us have a special adviser assigned to every
minister, because communication and presentation for every minister
is extremely important". Therefore we can have a career structure
for special advisers, where they lie down side-by-side by Civil
Servants. There is a departmental arrangement with special advisers,
a joined-up government approach.
(Lord Lipsey) Leaving aside whether every minister
needs a specialist adviser, there may be some whose job really
does not merit it, it has been common for some special advisers
to work for junior ministers, although they may not have worn
that label; again, part of the boxy problem we were talking about
earlier. I totally agree with what you said about presentation.
I think it is essential to good governance, not to the success
of any particular government. We live in a world, as we know and
as you know where voters are very cynical about Government, they
want to have more and more say about what is happening without
necessarily wanting to put huge amounts of effort into studying
the full detail of every single policy that is in front of them.
Therefore, it is essential to the good working of democracy that
they should be presented with issues in a way that makes coherent
sense to them. I do think special advisers have a role in this.
I come back to a point I made earlier, it is important that special
advisers work very closely with the civil servants, whose job
it is, and particularly with the Government Information Service.
I worked with some first class professionals in the Government
Information Service, there were and are some. Occasionally we
tread on each other's toes. Occasionally he would ring me up and
say, "I am not sure I got the Secretary of State's political
position exactly right. Is there a party worry where I should
refer something to you", or occasionally I would say, "I
have leaked the Government's Green Paper by mistake to the Evening
Standard", because that has happened in real life. This
was a jolly close relationship and many days, after work, we could
be found in a bar off Marsham Street, me, the Private Secretary
and the Press Secretary having a pint, mulling over the events
of the day. I happen to think, leaving aside the individuals involved,
that is the effective way to work, and not in competition.
33. Things are open. There is a formalisation
about that. A lot of things are focused on Alastair Campbell being
the Press Secretary and the award of executive powers to him.
Is that not just a formalisation of the positions held by previous
incumbents? For example, under Mrs Thatcher, Bernard Ingham mentioned
that John Biffen was a semi-detached member of the Cabinet. If
we go back to Harold Wilson's time, when he appointed Joe Haines—it
is in Peter Osborne's book, and here is a quote from it—he
said, "Joe, I will call you Press Secretary because it sounds
good and helps conceal what you really do." There is nothing
new here.
(Lord Lipsey) There are different kinds of press secretaries,
on the one hand people who were career civil servants doing the
job temporarily, Gus O'Donnell, for example, and Chris Meyer too.
On the other hand, the purely political appointment. It seems
to me a bizarre notion that the Prime Minister of the day should
not be able to choose the person who he thinks will best put over
his point of view and that that person should not be paid by public
funds. He has enough problems getting his view across without
having to work with somebody who is foisted on him or is not on
the same wavelength as him. I have had the experience of working
for a minister whose press secretary was a first class man but
was not on the same wavelength. It was a disaster for Government
policy presentation and it caused a degree of upset far out of
line with what should have happened, which is that that person
should have been told, "This job is not for you now",
and was replaced by somebody who did get on with the minister.
34. If there was a firm purpose we could look
forward to a formalisation of the special adviser's role and an
integration of special advisers within Government. I am thinking
of the Republic of Ireland's Government. A number of years ago
I visited the Republic of Ireland and spoke to special advisers
in the Labour/Fine Gael coalition at the time. All of the special
advisers from each department, along with the Taoiseach's office,
met every morning and looked at the issue of Government and then
went back to advise their particular ministers. It never struck
me, and certainly from the responses I got from individuals, there
was a conflict of interest. They worked that through so that side-by-side
both could work together for the wider aims of the Government.
(Lord Lipsey) That is absolutely right. The degree
of insistence in this country on the absolute purity of the Civil
Service is greater than in most countries, although typically
the reality is not as pure as the doctrine. People have to get
through their days and they get through their days by showing
an element of flexibility about all that. I think the wiser Civil
Service opinion is reflected in Sir Richard Wilson's evidence,
"We do not see specialist advisers as a threat". I think
the wisest of them do not want to have to complete the monopoly
of advice to ministers. I think most of them feel that all of
the aspects of the system do not work terribly well at the moment.
The relationship between special advisers and ministers is not
one of the most serious defects. Can I just finish with one tale?
Sometimes one does hear of civil servants in conflict with special
advisers. When I left the DoE to go to the Foreign Office—because
Tony Crosland, my Minister, was made Foreign Secretary—I
got this panicky call from Sir Ian Bancroft, who was then the
Permanent Secretary of the Department of the Environment, who
said, "Peter Shore has come here today and he says he does
not need a special adviser. You know we cannot work without a
special adviser in this Department. Would you come over and persuade
him he needs one?" I was not getting on very well, I must
say, until he said, "Do you have anybody in mind?" I
said, "There is a promising young lad, who has just become
redundant at the Department of Social Security called Jack Straw".
He said, "I will have him". The story makes the point,
I think, that the wisest civil servants know that the relationship
with special advisers has to be made to work and it can be.
Mr Trend
35. Going on from that, clearly there is some
anxiety in the Civil Service. Sir Richard Wilson was very brave
about it, I felt. Lord Butler had a slightly different view, he
felt that the possibility was that there was great anxiety developing
towards a Cabinet system. That did take place. This clearly
is a critical mass. The FDA have written a very good note on this,
bringing up five chief concerns they have. This is clearly one
of the main concerns they have. From a Civil Service point of
view, do you think there is a moment when a critical mass could
come and where it could genuinely interfere with the attractiveness
of becoming a civil servant in the first place, which is what
I imagine worries them?
(Lord Lipsey) There could come such a moment but I
think we are nowhere near it at the moment. It is something that
requires continual vigilance, continuing questioning. One also
has to question the natural, but conservative, Civil Service disposition.
I was pleased to see that the contract for special advisers does
say, "The Civil Service has no monopoly of advice to ministers".
In practice there is a natural human tendency to like to preserve
the monopoly and, therefore, to see this as more of a threat than
it actually may be. My answer to your question is, it is potentially
a threat. There are potential dangers and they must be continually
guarded against, but they must not be exaggerated and they must
not be allowed to interfere with the very important interchange
of personnel between the outside world and Whitehall, which is
part of the key to getting our governance a bit better in this
country.
36. The Civil Service has been open for many,
many years and said they always wanted to encourage greater movement
between themselves and the outside world. Now they think there
is—what we were talking about earlier on, the No.10 civil
servant political adviser—a real possibility that special
advisers who can give commands to civil servants are a different
animal emerging at the heart of Government. Is that right?
(Lord Lipsey) I think you accurately report a concern.
I do not find it a new concern. I heard this a great deal during
the tenure of the last government, that the specialist advisers
were becoming too grand for their own good, and starting to run
everything. No doubt, behind my back, they were saying it in the
Wilson Government. What one has to assess is, has there been a
step change, have things changed? Occasionally it is true that
I hear things that make me wince. I get particularly concerned
if special advisers get too involved in the relationship between
Members of Parliament, Government's responsibility to Parliament
and ministers. I certainly made it a practice when I was special
adviser never to put myself between my minister and a Member of
Parliament. For example, it would be very scary if when a Member
of Parliament wants to make a point to a minister he feels he
has to go to the special adviser because he cannot go to the minister,
to me that would be a very dangerous development. I occasionally
hear of the special advisers having perhaps rather more say than
strictly desirable in the drafting of answers to parliamentary
questions where I think, again, there is a danger of tipping into
impropriety because civil servants, as we know, have responsibilities
under the Code to be open and frank with Parliament and I do sometimes
worry about that. These are more potential worries than actual
worries.
37. The FDA view, to be fair to them, is that
this is a system that could be open to abuse in the future more
than is being abused now.
(Lord Lipsey) The price of things not going wrong
is eternal vigilance, I think that is absolutely right.
38. You do not think that there should be some
formalised system now? There is the order in council. Do you think
that is a satisfactory way of arranging the current position?
(Lord Lipsey) I do not put my trust in formalities
in all this kind of thing, I put it in a degree of openness, such
as when I was describing the way I thought special advisers should
be paid, combined with inquiries such as this kind, even debate
on the floor of the Commons, and that may have an element of political
knockabout, although I do not know whether Mr Tyrie would agree
with that characterisation. I think that is the best way of making
sure that it does not get out of hand rather than a formal set
of rules which, quite frankly, may have less effect on behaviour.
39. May I ask just one last question on another
area of concern. I think they feel particularly touchy on the
question of appointments of civil servants within the Civil Service
and so on and have a feeling that special advisers would be part
of either a formal or informal interviewing process and have access
to civil servants' files, career files. Do you think it is desirable
or not desirable that special advisers should play a part in the
interviewing of career civil servants?
(Lord Lipsey) I think it is broadly not desirable.
I use the word "broadly" because there are certain appointments—
If somebody was about to be made Private Secretary with whom a
senior special adviser simply could not hack it, I think that
would be a consideration that should be borne in mind in the appointment
although not actually a decisive one. I never saw a personnel
file in my life and I would not have wanted to.
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