Examination of Witnesses (Questions 48
- 59)
WEDNESDAY 22 NOVEMBER 2000
LORD BLACKWELL
AND DR
WILLIAM PLOWDEN
Chairman
48. Can I welcome our witnesses on behalf of
the Committee, Lord Blackwell and Dr Plowden. They both bring
great experience of working within government and were very helpful
to us in the inquiry that we are doing on the role of special
advisers. I do not know if you want to say anything before we
start or shall we just kick off and ask questions?
(Lord Blackwell) So far as I am concerned you can
just kick off.
(Dr Plowden) Would it be helpful, Chairman, to say
something in advance in the light of some of your other evidence?
49. I would be interested to turn to your paper
if you wanted to say something about that.
(Dr Plowden) I was going to put a gloss on that in
relation to some of the things that you have had since I wrote
it. You seem to me to have had some very good evidence and some
very good discussions. As you can infer from my short note, I
personally see no problem in the increase so far in the number
of special advisers. Some of the arguments in this context seem
to me to be theological in the pejorative sense of that word:
how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, for example what
activities are or are not political, precisely how many special
advisers is enough, who or what is a special adviser? The one
substantive point I would like to make is that there does seem
to me to be a very strong case for greater transparency and clarity
in relation to Special Advisers, for two reasons in particular:
first, the increase in their numbers and, one may suppose, their
influence; and secondly, I would argue, given the virtual impossibility
of defining or constraining in advance exactly what they do, it
seems to me essential that there should be much greater clarity
and transparency about who they are in practice, what their qualifications
are for the tasks that they perform, what those tasks actually
are. If special advisers cannot, for whatever reason, appear before
you then it seems to me that their Ministers ought to appear on
their behalf. I would have thought that Parliament, which in practice
means the Committee, I think, should be very firm with the Government—any
government—on these and similar points. To expand the point,
if Rhodri Morgan can publicly advertise for special advisers,
I wonder whether there is not a principle there for more general
application.
50. Can you say a little more on the point about
clarity and transparency? The sense I got from your crisp and
extremely well argued paper to us was that there really is not
an issue here. Special advisers perform a useful function so do
not let us worry about numbers. Why now, I wonder, are you saying
that there is an issue about clarity? Reading your paper I would
think that Ministers should just be able to choose who they want.
Why do we need to know who they have chosen?
(Dr Plowden) This is the basic point about accountability
to Parliament and indeed to the public. I think Ministers should
up to a point be entitled to choose who they want, though the
processes whereby they choose them are worth thinking about, but
then I think they have a responsibility to explain, to justify,
those choices. Why did they choose this particular man or woman?
What were their qualifications for the job? What indeed is the
job to be done?
51. You say in your paper that if someone wants
to pick a 26-year old because they can handle Millbank that is
perfectly all right; no need to be an Abel-Smith.
(Dr Plowden) Then I think the Minister should come
before you and say, "I picked this 26-year old because he
or she was fantastically bright and I was impressed by them when
I met them in the corridors of the Party conference".
52. They will do that?
(Dr Plowden) If you let him or her get away with it,
yes.
53. Let me ask you one more thing, which is
that although your argument is that we should not get hooked on
numbers here obviously the numbers game does loom large in these
discussions. But then somewhere you say that you thought that
although Ministers should only have political advisers, that is,
just for the political leg work, you could see no reason at all
why they could not have a cluster of policy advisers. You mentioned
DETR, where they might have four. Do you not get into the numbers
game when you start talking in that way because there you are
talking about the beginnings of a cabinet system, are you
not, which does raise questions about fundamental relationships
between Ministers and civil servants?
(Dr Plowden) Yes, I think it does and one should not
ignore that. If there is a case for a Minister having a policy
adviser, let us say the Home Secretary wants one policy adviser
who can advise him on all the ranges of issues coming up in the
Home Office, which seems to me to be quite a difficult task to
perform, it seems to me that the Head of the DETR would then have
a perfectly good case for having an adviser on housing policy,
on environmental policy, on transport policy, on urban renaissance,
you name it. There is a number of quite distinct policy avenues
where a Minister may I think have a legitimate reason to want
a source of advice other than or in addition to that which he
gets from his permanent civil servants.
54. Could I ask Lord Blackwell on that point
too whether he feels that that extension of the special adviser
role raises no particular problem?
(Lord Blackwell) I agree to some extent with what
Dr Plowden was saying, that it is not so much a question of numbers
as of quality and roles and relationships with civil servants.
In my experience special advisers have played an extremely valuable
role where they are a working interface between the Minister and
the civil servants and can expand the amount of political input
that is put into the decision making process by just being around
more than the Minister can be himself. I think there is also a
role, as Dr Plowden said, to have people who have some specialisms
in some ministries, particularly those which span a large number
of different areas. Social security, for example, covers a huge
gamut of complex issues. I think the problem of numbers comes
when you start to get too many. Then there is a danger that their
role changes and they do become, as you suggest, more of a coterie
or cabinet round the Minister and they start performing
roles that are not just interfacing or inputting but displacing
some of the civil servants' roles, or they start to get into very
active communication type roles and then the numbers in a sense
means that their role is expanding into areas where I think it
is less effective.
55. Thanks for that. Can I just open it up to
one other area which I know colleagues are interested in. The
experience of both of you has been in different ways at the centre
in government, the Cabinet Office, the think-tanks of the policy
review style, and then Number Ten. The great growth in special
advisers has been at Number Ten. Does that raise particular difficulties
or can all that simply come under the same umbrella? Should we
talk about that in a different way from the way in which we talk
about the advisers that departmental Ministers want to assemble
around themselves? Was there a particular problem about Number
Ten, the lack of a strategic centre that required a substantial
increase in special advisers to beef all that up, or is that not
right?
(Lord Blackwell) I personally do not think it is a
problem that is solved by numbers. I think it is an extraordinarily
difficult task to be a Prime Minister and work with your colleagues
in the Cabinet across their different ministries and draw them
all together behind a common programme, a common plan, a common
set of objectives. I think the primary way that effective Prime
Ministers do that is in their working relationships with their
Ministers. Ministers are there to be appointed to be part of the
Cabinet and part of the Prime Minister's close circle of advisers.
The danger, it seems to me, in trying to grow the staff in Number
Ten to perform that kind of co-ordinating, planning, directing
role is when it starts to create a wedge between the Prime Minister
and his Ministers. It creates an alternative structure which is
the Prime Minister to his staff at number Ten and then his staff
at Number Ten out to the Ministries. I think that is a less effective
and less healthy way of government than having a Prime Minister
working closely on policy ideas and on policy direction and presentation
with his Ministers directly. Given the choice again, if I were
back in Number Ten, I would want to stick with a relatively small
Policy Unit but a high quality Policy Unit that, as I tended to
do in my time there, was working with the Ministers around Whitehall,
working with Ministers and their advisers and helping the dialogue
between them and the Prime Minister rather than, if you like,
being an alternative department.
56. That is very interesting. Would you like
to add to that, Dr Plowden?
(Dr Plowden) I think there is a point there, Chairman.
I have watched Prime Ministers of both parties now and 20-odd
years ago working with the then newish Number Ten Policy Unit.
I think that if Prime Ministers are going, as they seem to be
doing, to try to exercise more influence over government as a
whole, I would rather that influence was based upon good, sound
advice which they know they can trust. The problem that Prime
Ministers traditionally face is that most of the advice coming
up within the Government machine is not what you might call theirs.
It is their colleagues' advice, the advice that they get from
the Minister for X or the advice that Minister X and his civil
servants have put together and decided it is proper to place before
the Prime Minister. I think what Prime Ministers need, in exactly
the same way as Ministers and departments need, is some alternative
point of view against which they can test what they are being
told by their colleague, the Minister for X, whose agenda may
after all sometimes be rather different from the Prime Minister's
own.
The Committee suspended from 4.46pm to 4.56pm
for a division in the House
57. Had you finished your answer to us?
(Dr Plowden) I had.
58. In that case let me ask a supplementary
before I hand over, which is, if what you say is so, and I know
there is a disagreement between you here, why do not we just stop
being coy about it and go for a fully fledged Prime Minister's
Department and then we know what we are talking about?
(Dr Plowden) I think that may well be the direction
in which we are going. I personally would not have any objections
to that. I think we have been going de facto towards a
Prime Minister's Department for at least the last 25 years and
I think the sooner we acknowledge that that is what it is, albeit
that part of it is the Cabinet Office, then I think we should
be clearer about what we have got.
59. And the problems that Lord Blackwell identifies
are ones that do not cause you any problems with contaminated
lines of relationships with colleagues?
(Dr Plowden) They do not cause me personally any problems,
no.
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