Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60
- 79)
WEDNESDAY 22 NOVEMBER 2000
LORD BLACKWELL
AND DR
WILLIAM PLOWDEN
Mr Trend
60. When John Major gave us evidence he said
that if he was returned to power he would have strengthened the
Policy Unit and reduce the number of departmental advisers to
between 12 and 20 because he felt that they were "out of
hand" and that "whatever their individual virtues they
cause more problems these days for governments than they solve".
We have had conflicting views on numbers and what people do. If
I can go back to the early days of this, the CPRS think-tank was
essentially a policy unit in a pure sense, to think ahead, in
particular to think longer term, which politicians find difficult.
Much of that it seems to me has now become a private industry,
has been privatised, and both political parties have a number
of think-tanks which they can actually sub-contract work to, or
indeed get ideas from. The public perception of special advisers
which has grown out of this and mushroomed from its beginning
is that they are much more political figures and that some sort
of limit on them may have to be imposed at some stage. After all,
we impose the number of Government Ministers by law. Is that roughly
how you see it, Dr Plowden?
(Dr Plowden) It is not how I see it, no. Some special
advisers are definitely not political, they definitely are expert
advisers. They are an alternative, a check, on the advice that
comes to a Minister or indeed the Prime Minister from the permanent
Civil Service, which seems to me to be desirable. The point about
numbers needs to be looked at in relation to the question about
the numbers of the Civil Service. After all, the Government today
can make the Civil Service larger or smaller as it chooses. It
simply has to justify those numbers and the size of the consequent
pay bill to Parliament, but it is entirely up to the Government
how many people there are in its employ. I do not see why that
should not apply to sectors within that total, to special advisers
as to permanent officials.
61. Some people would say it is because it is
perceived that they are more politicised even if they are not
really, and therefore it becomes part of the political game and
if some sort of limit on politicians in the Civil Service, ie,
Government Ministers, is set, why should not some limit be set
on their political advisers?
(Dr Plowden) I would deprecate the notion that Ministers
should ever become wholly dependent on their special advisers.
I think that would be a road to disaster. The Civil Service is
there, and it is rather a good Civil Service, to give Ministers
advice based on a great deal of experience and objective analytical
thought. This is where we get into what I describe as theological
discussions about what is political and what is not. After all,
even permanent civil servants working for the government of the
day are helping that government to put its case across to form
policies which will win popular support and will help in the end
(among other things) the Government to be re-elected. I think
one has to try and stop making distinctions between advisers and
civil servants in relation to what is political and what is not,
because you get into some distinctions which are impossible to
sustain.
62. I do not disagree about how we should interpret
"politicised". Richard Wilson felt that the present
numbers were containable and he virtually said that. Therefore,
clearly there is a number which in his view would not be containable
and Lord Neill made the point that a number of professional civil
servants might find themselves marginalised or left out of important
policy discussions because the special advisers were doing that
sort of work instead. There must be a limit at some stage before
you tip the system over and the balance switches to more like
the American system which has its own virtues of course. Is there
no figure which we can entice you to mention?
(Dr Plowden) I do not think there is a figure at which
it tilts really. Even if there were we are a long way short of
that at the present time. I do not see Ministers, the kind of
sophisticated Ministers that we get in British politics who come
up with a lot of parliamentary and as it were various governmental
experience, ever getting into a situation where they simply become
dependent upon the advice of their own political advisers and
ignore the Civil Service. That seems to me to be an unlikely state
of affairs.
63. Perhaps I ought to ask Lord Blackwell: there
seems to be a slight disagreement between you on this.
(Lord Blackwell) Let me try and address this issue.
I think there is a difference between ministries and Number Ten,
but in both cases I start from the point of view that the Civil
Service is and should be the main source of advice on the machinery
of government and it does it on the whole very well. I think there
is a danger if any Ministers, the Prime Minister or other Ministers,
start to get too divorced from the Civil Service itself. They
can and should use the Civil Service to give them policy advice
to develop policies, to advise them and interact directly and
properly with the civil servants in their department. It is what
they are there for and on the whole I think if properly directed
by a Minister they are very effective at doing that. I do think,
having said that, that there is great value in having a small
number of outsiders working with a Minister who can help him review,
check, ask questions and put more of a political spin on the issues
that have been discussed and I think it is helpful to the civil
servants as well in those departments to have a small number of
people there who, when the Minister is inaccessible, can help
them understand or talk to them about some of the political objectives
which, properly, the civil servants cannot assume or presume.
It is a small number and in my experience it has in some cases
worked effectively with one and in some cases it has worked effectively
with two. When you start getting beyond two you have to justify
it in terms of there being specialist topics where the Minister
needs somebody that the Civil Service cannot provide. If it starts
to become more than that there is a danger, as I said, that it
starts to cut off the Minister from the Civil Service and indeed
cut off the Minister from other Ministers and the Prime Minister.
So far as Number Ten is concerned, I totally agree with what Dr
Plowden said, that the Prime Minister needs a source of independent
advice. He does not have his own Civil Service Department, although
he obviously has the Cabinet Office to draw on. It is extremely
valuable above all for the Prime Minister to have a group of people
whom he trusts, whom he can talk to, whom he can bounce his ideas
round and who can challenge and brief him on the issues independently
of departmental advice. But I do not think that group has to be
very large. In broad terms it ought to be a group that can get
round a table because you do not actually need to be a great expert
to understand enough about the policy development of any department
to be able to understand and challenge the big issues. The danger
of having too many people in the centre is that you start to get
fragmentation rather than co-ordination. If you have got a group
of people, as I had in the Policy Unit, where you can get them
all round a table (or round the table with the Prime Minister
if necessary) you have got a single conversation covering the
whole of the policy area. If you start having sub-departments
within Number Ten you have just replicated the problem of having
fragmented ministries. I cannot see from my experience that you
need that many people to give the Prime Minister the quality of
advice he needs.
Mr White
64. Is not one of the problems that is forcing
centralisation—the de facto Prime Minister's Department—the
fact that at PMQs the Prime Minister is expected to know the answer
to everything? If he goes on any TV show he is expected to know
the answer to everything and it is that centralised focus in politics
that reduces politics to whether it is William Hague or Tony Blair
who is going to be the next Prime Minister. Is that not part of
the problem?
(Lord Blackwell) PMQs, even when they were twice a
week, only took up a portion of the Prime Minister's time. Most
of Number Ten was not focused around PMQs. There was one Private
Secretary in the Prime Minister's office who took responsibility
for gathering the book of questions and answers and gathered that
effectively from civil servants in other departments. On the whole
I and members of the Policy Unit had very little part in that
particular process. It was largely a fact gathering exercise and
then the Prime Minister with his advisers thinking through what
the main political issues of the day were going to be. I certainly
do not think that of itself justifies any kind of centralised
machinery; rather the reverse. It was a gathering exercise.
65. The special advisers tend to be by department
apart from the special advisers to the Prime Minister. If we were
trying to move away from the silo mentality in the Civil Service
how do you think special advisers should develop, given that they
are allocated mainly to departments?
(Lord Blackwell) What I attempted to do when I was
running the Number Ten Policy Unit was to engage the special advisers
around the ministries as if they were in part of their role an
extension of the Number Ten Policy Unit. We had meetings from
time to time when they were all gathered together and we were
talking about policies or when there was a particular policy area
they would be involved with members of Number Ten who were involved.
I think they could and should see themselves as an extension of
the Government of the day's need to have a clear idea about where
it is going in policy and ensure that what each individual department
is doing links in with that. In practice it very much depended
on the individual and perhaps their Minister to what extent they
were part of that or to what extent they would go their own route.
66. To pick up on the Performance and Innovation
Unit, somebody who was a special adviser has been appointed to
head it up in succession to a civil servant who headed it up before.
Is that a problem?
(Dr Plowden) I thought not. That was a job which as
far as I know was publicly advertised and competed for by somebody
who it seems to me was extremely well qualified for the job. I
do not think you implied that the job which he took at the PIU
was that of a special adviser in the sense that he came to a special
adviser position. I would have thought that special advisers are
perfectly entitled to compete for jobs of any kind with other
people of equal talent.
67. Is not the whole argument that has been
around special advisers a typically British compromise to ensure
that nothing changes, and that if you take something like the
lone parents' problems, none of the civil servants is very experienced
in claiming benefits, none of the special advisers has ever claimed
benefits, and the whole system is set up to prevent real change
happening in this country? Is that not the real system of special
advisers, that it is a sop to stop real change happening in the
Civil Service?
(Lord Blackwell) I would not put it like that at all,
no. Certainly in my experience one of the important roles of special
advisers was to try and create change. On the whole, for very
understandable reasons the Civil Service machinery is not a generator
of radical ideas. Most of the Civil Service have been part of
generating legislation and policies that are on the book and have
been part of at some time in their history defending them. By
their nature their role is not to suggest radical new proposals
to Ministers. Their role is to implement what Ministers decide,
so part of the raison d'être, it seems to me, (and
a very important raison d'être) of having outsiders
coming in to support their Ministers is to add to the outside
stimulus and catalyst of saying, "This is not where we want
things to be. This is not working well. We need to explore some
different policies", and to provide some extra impetus and
muscle to require the Civil Service machinery to go through evaluating
options that, left to themselves, they would not do.
68. Does the model contract inhibit that role
that you have described?
(Lord Blackwell) I am not aware of any way in which
it inhibits that.
(Dr Plowden) Just to pursue your examples, this is
surely up to the Minister concerned. After all, the beauty of
the special adviser system as we have at the moment is that the
Minister can choose his or her own special advisers clearly unencumbered,
and if the Secretary of State for Social Security wants to choose
somebody who in every respect is indistinguishable from his mandarins,
that is up to him. If he wants to choose someone that (a) knows
about the benefit system but (b) has been on benefit themselves,
then he can do that equally.
69. One of the things that is different from
when you started is that the whole experience of Europe and its
cabinet systems is now much more widely understood than
it was 25 years ago. Presumably there has been an interaction
between the different systems around Europe as we have got more
involved in the European Union. Has there been in the experience
of either of you any interaction between different systems that
happened round Europe, in other words picking the best practice
from other countries?
(Dr Plowden) What happens in cabinets has been
that the idea is held up for examination every few years and looked
at and then put down again with a "No thanks, it would not
work here". There are a number of people now in the home
Civil Service who have actually worked in cabinets in Brussels
so they have got some experience of them. The idea does not seem
to have made much progress despite that.
(Lord Blackwell) Personally I think the cabinet
system comes from a rather different culture which is more of
a technocratic government culture rather than a ministerial driven
government culture and therefore, going back to the point I made
first, it would be a significant shift and not one that I personally
would approve of to go that route in the United Kingdom.
Mr Tyrie
70. Could I pick up something you said a moment
ago, Lord Blackwell, which accords with some of my experience,
when you said that civil servants have got themselves entrenched
in certain views as a result of attesting the same policies over
the years to successive governments. That points to quite a major
lacuna in the way we develop policy in this country, does
it not? Does it therefore lead you to support the proposals of
Lord Neill for some form of policy development fund, a fund that
can enable political parties to create small teams of people to
try and think about long term policies?
(Lord Blackwell) I declare an interest here as Chairman
of a think-tank. I think policy thinking outside of the Civil
Service is very important and could form part of the political
process, and I think that kind of activity needs to be seen as
an important part of the process and to attract sufficient funds.
I am always slightly dubious about handing out public funds for
that purpose on the grounds that it introduces a kind of public
patronage which has its own dangers.
71. Could you say what those are?
(Lord Blackwell) Somebody has to decide which organisation
is going to get money on what grounds and on what criteria.
72. Lord Neill was suggesting that political
parties hire people, to do this role.
(Lord Blackwell) I confess I have not studied his
recommendations and I should not comment on that specifically.
If there is general encouragement for what he is saying, that
we need to recognise the role of policy formation from outside
sources, that is okay.
73. But you are saying that you do not like
the idea of state funds for political parties to perform this
role. You are declaring an interest as Chairman of a think-tank
and thereby suggesting we can carry on as we have done for the
previous many decades, getting this advice from semi-independent,
largely private funded think-tanks. Is that your view?
(Lord Blackwell) My view is that this is not a question
of volume, it is a question of individuals and inspiration, and
that you do not necessarily get better or more insightful policy
advice by having a hundred people working than you do by having
three smart people working. It is more that the leaders of the
political parties—leaders in the general sense of leadership,
groups in political parties—need to recognise the importance
of stimulating and encouraging people in the wider community to
be active in that.
74. Do you really think three people working
for a political party can, even if exceptionally clever, do enough
to develop long term policies across the whole gamut of government
activity?
(Lord Blackwell) I was not suggesting three across
the whole gamut. I was meaning three in a particular area.
75. So how many do you think a political party
needs to do this job?
(Lord Blackwell) I would rather have a lot of clever
people spending some part of their time than—
76. How many man year units do you need? I am
trying to get to a number.
(Lord Blackwell) Tens rather than hundreds.
77. Low tens or high tens?
(Lord Blackwell) Low tens. I think inspiration does
not necessarily mean large volumes of—
78. So you think about ten to 30?
(Lord Blackwell) Yes.
79. I am not putting words into your mouth?
(Lord Blackwell) No. I think the Policy Unit, if I
could answer it in this way, which had between six and ten people
was a group that was quite capable with that size of understanding
and thinking about the major policy areas that run across most
of government policy. It was able to tap into other people but
I do not think you need many more than that.
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