Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80
- 99)
WEDNESDAY 22 NOVEMBER 2000
LORD BLACKWELL
AND DR
WILLIAM PLOWDEN
80. Lord Neill is suggesting there should be
a group like that for each political party. Do you agree with
that? In other words, not only should the Government have a think-tank
but he is suggesting the creation of a fund to enable opposition
parties to perform this role. Maybe you have not read the proposal.
(Lord Blackwell) I have not read it. I can see some
merit in that.
(Dr Plowden) Can I add to that? I do not think there
is a great deal of merit, with respect to Lord Neill, in having
think-tanks which are attached to particular political parties
following parties wherever their star and their sense of electoral
opportunity may lead them. The situation, with respect, is not
as it has been for decades and decades. In the last 10 or 15 years
we have had an outgrowth of some quite effective think-tanks both
of the left and of the right. The quantity question is actually
satisfied, in that there are more than there were. As far as numbers
go, it is not necessarily how many full-time staff there are in
think-tanks. What the Fabians always used to do was to bring people
in to sit on particular inquiries for the purposes of producing
a report, a report which can then after all can be picked up and
run with by whichever political party chooses to make the running
with it or with part of it. It seems to me to be a healthier situation.
81. Dr Plowden, are you for or against a cabinet
type system?
(Dr Plowden) I do not think we need it. What I think
we do need is an effective system of enough political or special
advisers in the Minister's office. I do not think we need the
kind of executive body which is what a cabinet basically
is, which replaces the Permanent Secretary or the top hierarchy,
let us say, of the French Government. The need is not yet there
as I understand it.
82. Why?
(Dr Plowden) Because there is a perfectly effective
Civil Service hierarchy that comes up to a point in the Permanent
Secretary. Where I think we do need the interchange is between
the Minister and that hierarchy and that is why I argued the case
for special advisers of whatever kind, political or specialist
and professional.
83. You were in the CPRS from 1971 to 1977?
(Dr Plowden) Correct.
84. How many special advisers were around during
that period?
(Dr Plowden) I doubt that every Minister had one in
those days. It was certainly not more than one per Minister in
my recollection, and there was a small Policy Unit in Number Ten.
85. How many were in the Policy Unit?
(Dr Plowden) Six or eight I would think.
86. And how many were in the CPRS?
(Dr Plowden) The same principle as Lord Blackwell
has suggested. Lord Rothschild thought there should be no more
than could get round his table on a Monday morning, so I think
our maximum was 18. It was quite a large table.
87. So there was a maximum of 18, plus this
six to eight, plus a very few sprinkled around Whitehall, less
than one per Minister. I think the total number at the height
of all this was in the low thirties, and for part of your period,
if you look back, it would have been about 10, very low. How many
of those would you want to describe—if you can cast your
mind back all those years—as party political special advisers,
that is, people who were primarily fulfilling what you yourself
distinguished early in your evidence as a role of acting to deliver
political advice rather than policy advice?
(Dr Plowden) To the best of my knowledge the advisers
to individual Ministers were party in that sense. They were party
people of considerable ability and they were solid citizens. The
people in the CPRS were partly outsiders and partly civil servants,
which also raises the point about the kind of person you could
appoint as a special adviser. There is no reason after all why
they should not be a seconded civil servant, as long as you met
the bill.
88. So out of that number, half, a third, were
party advisers?
(Dr Plowden) I am suggesting that I think the majority
of the advisers to individual Ministers were partisan, let us
put it that way.
89. There were less than ten of those, so it
is a very small number.
(Dr Plowden) It is a very small number, yes.
90. And of the rest, those people sitting round
this table? It seems this Rothschild table contained most of these
characters.
(Dr Plowden) The people round the CPRS table were
a mixture of civil servants and non-partisan characters. I came
in from the London School of Economics. The people in the Policy
Unit again were led by a partisan but in the Wilson days, the
previous period, they were partly partisan and partly not.
91. So we are talking about literally a handful,
less than a dozen, perhaps even less than seven or eight, partisan
characters out of the total number?
(Dr Plowden) I think so, yes.
92. Do you not see that some people perceive
something quite fundamental to have happened, something fundamentally
different, where there is now not only a huge increase in the
number of special advisers but a huge increase in the numbers
who are quite clearly party political, and only a minority (and
no-one is suggesting otherwise), a relatively small minority,
of the 79 advisers are not party political appointments and not
acting in a party political way? Do you see that distinction?
(Dr Plowden) I see there is a distinction there, yes.
None the less I think there is a role to be performed whether
by a partisan or not in relation to a Minister trying to make
sense of the advice that he is getting from, or the instructions
he is giving to, his civil servants.
93. If I may say so politely, you are drawing
that conclusion, not on the basis of your experience but on the
basis of what you have heard about since you left, since you did
not work at a time when there was serious politicisation of the
special adviser process. Indeed, by the time I became a special
adviser, already the numbers were double the numbers we have just
established were extant in the 1971-77 period. Therefore, are
you not really drawing your conclusions on the basis of what you
suspect might be right rather than what you actually experienced?
(Dr Plowden) I think that is perfectly fair, yes.
After all, I have had no first hand experience in government for
a number of years.
Mr Turner
94. May I carry on a little bit the point Andrew
was making about the need for political advisers beyond Government,
in other words for the Opposition. You both seem to be saying
that you are opposed to that. I think what he was trying to get
at, and what I would support him in, is that there should be a
sum of money available to political parties to dispense with as
they wish so that they can get good advice. Would you see that
as reasonable? You seem to be saying that they should not have
a political policy unit necessarily. I am sure there are a large
number of organisations they can draw upon, but those organisations
follow their own line of thought rather than what the political
party might want.
(Lord Blackwell) I think it is reasonable for political
parties to have their own policy development. The Conservative
Party certainly has a research department that plays that role,
as I assume the Labour Party does. There are other organisations
which are not tied to parties which do policy development and
contribute to the thinking. I certainly think all that is important.
My only question in response to Mr Tyrie was that as on most areas
of party funding I would need to be persuaded that that funding
should properly come from the state as opposed to coming from
contributions either to the party or to the think-tanks. That
is a broader issue of whether it is appropriate for parties to
get their funding from that source for that and indeed any other
purpose.
95. You do not see a parallel then between advisers
to Government and advisers to the opposition parties?
(Lord Blackwell) The Government is in a different
situation in as much as it is running the Civil Service, and the
role that I was describing for special advisers in government
is helping interface with the Civil Service and helping Ministers
in their job. Even when a party is in government there will typically
be policy development going on by people who are sympathetic to
the Government but are outside the Government. Think-tanks do
not stop just because the party they are sympathetic to is in
Government. There is a different requirement for the Government
to have advisers from those who are in opposition.
96. I agree with that but I think Dr Plowden
put his finger on it in his paper when he said that we have policy
advisers and political advisers. It is really that element of
political adviser that I am looking at. That seems to me that
if political parties are an important part of our constitution
and the democratic process then they should have the ability to
have political advisers to a degree at the same rate as the Government
do.
(Lord Blackwell) I accept the point but, as I say,
personally I need persuading that public funding should be used
for that purpose. I think advisers in government are most effective
when they are primarily dealing in the substance of policy but
dealing in policy in a way that reflects political objectives
or political aspirations. That is a thing that they can add that
the civil servants are properly wary of, that is, understanding
and trying to define political objectives of the policy, but that
is different from purely political advice.
97. Dr Plowden, you said in your opening remarks
that you wanted more transparency in the way that people are appointed,
that Ministers should come and prove that the person they had
appointed was the right person or that it had been done properly.
It seems to me that in that case we need some way in which we
can make a difference between the policy adviser and the political
adviser. It almost begs the question that those two are black
and white people rather than shades of grey. Do you think that
we could in some way get a form of words which would clearly identify
somebody as a policy adviser as opposed to being a political adviser?
(Dr Plowden) I think the words would be those that
would be given by the Minister in answer to your questions. If
we take Mr Tyrie's line of questioning just now, you would need
to ask the Minister why he had appointed this 26-year old to the
job of his special adviser.
98. You are very ageist on this 26-year old!
(Dr Plowden) There is quite a lot of talk about the
young special advisers and some denigration of them which may
be justified in some cases. Let us suppose why he has appointed
this or that person as an adviser to him. Is it because that person
had written a splendid thesis about the development of the private
sector in housing, or because they had deep experience of working
in the party organisation? I would have thought that the Minister's
answers to these questions would soon reveal precisely what set
of qualities it was that the adviser brought to the job and therefore
whether they could in your judgment be described as broadly political
or broadly policy. I do not think it is very useful to try and
make these definitions in advance although Mr Tyrie has indicated
that many of them are in his view more political than policy at
the present time.
99. Lord Neill suggested that rather than have
a numbers limit on Government advisers there should be a cash
limit on it. Would you take that as being a reasonable way of
getting out of this political impasse that we seem to be in?
(Dr Plowden) I would not really. As I said earlier
on, the Government of the day can decide how much it is going
to spend on the pay budgets to cash on the Civil Service as a
whole, and I do not see why it should not decide how much it spends
on special advisers as one category within that total. I see no
particular benefit in trying to impose arbitrary limits in advance
on what the executive wants to do. I think the justification has
to be retrospective. It has to come down to a committee like this
one or to the floor of the House of Commons and explain why it
was that the cash cost of special advisers has doubled or tripled
over the last X or Y years.
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