Examination of witnesses (Questions 980-984)
WEDNESDAY 24 JANUARY 2001
THE LORD
SIMON OF
HIGHBURY, CBE, THE
RT HON
DR DAVID
CLARK MP AND
THE RT
HON MICHAEL
HESELTINE, CH, MP
Chairman
980. But, Michael Heseltine, in your book you
say, "Let no-one ever naively think that officials strive
assiduously to serve the Government of the day when they believe
that Government is wrong, especially when they perceive the Civil
Service interest to be at stake." You are a Tony Benn man
on this, are you not?
(Mr Heseltine) I was going along with what you said.
You got the last sentence wrong. All human life is there. I have
been as constructively admiring of the Civil Service today as
I have long since believed to be the case, but I agree with the
comment that has been made already that in the main you reason
it out and one of the great thrills of public sector service for
me was the intellectual quality of the discussion on virtually
every subject. In the end hopefully you are able to sum up the
meeting with the conclusion as to what you want and lay down a
timetable within which it will be delivered and it will happen.
It is just as well to keep an eye on it of course. But there are
all sorts of tricks and they come in different categories. The
battle to appoint Peter Levene as the Chief of Procurement I remember
was an historic battle and Mrs Thatcher in simple language had
to say to the Civil Service Commissioner that she was going to
do it and that was without competition. The guy had been in the
department for six months and was self-evidently better than anybody
we could dream of finding anywhere else and they wanted to put
the job out to competition, so Mrs Thatcher explained that was
not how it was going to happen. I wanted to privatise the Civil
Service College, which was another one of these jolly things in
the Cabinet Office and it was not doing a particularly good job
and it was very much a culture in the public sector and I wanted
to mix the culture to be public and private and overseas and everything.
Robin Butler wrote round his Permanent Secretaries asking for
evidence to resist what I was doing. I got on very well with him
but the fact is that it was unfortunate for him that I got hold
of the letter. Leaks are not always outside the Civil Service;
they are sometimes within the Civil Service. I can remember in
the Ministry of Defence when I wanted to introduce competition
I had three meetings and they were all arguing and in the end
I said, "I have had enough. This is what we are going to
do", and I dictated a conclusion. It makes a huge difference
what level you are. Junior ministers are much more important today
than they were when I was a junior minister. Then you were literally
the dogsbody and you were privileged to be allowed to sit in on
the Cabinet Ministers' meetings. Now the delegations are much
more widely spread, largely as a result of what Peter Walker did
in the 1970s. As a junior minister you really were the office
boy and you had very little power. Even as a Minister of State
there was an element of that, but I did notice when I became a
Cabinet Minister that there was a very limited amount of resistance
within your own department. They had wonderful tricks if they
did not agree with you. I do remember when I was in the Ministry
of Defence once. I cannot remember the precise example, and it
does not matter, but it was quite obvious the weight of opinion
was against me in the department officially, and I was determined
to win, so I gave these instructions summed up in the conclusion
to the meeting the way I wanted it. I thought, "That is marvellous;
I have won". The next day there was a letter from one of
my ministerial colleagues in the Treasury which began, "Dear
Michael, I have been wondering about the problems affecting such-and-such"—which
was exactly the issue which I had summed up the day before—"and
I think this is something we ought to investigate and consider
in government." Obviously they had rushed off to the Treasury
and said, "The guy is barking. Send one of your ministerial
letters in there and we will get it kicked up to Cabinet and stop
him."
Mr Trend
981. No wonder you wanted the Treasury abolished.
(Mr Heseltine) It is a great game. Life is like that.
We are all human beings in there. I am an instinctive admirer
of the overwhelming result but every so often it falls a little
short of perfection.
Chairman
982. Is there anything else we can ask you in
our search for inspiration? Is there something we have not asked
you, any of you, that you would like to say to us before we end,
or have we covered all the ground, do you think?
(Mr Heseltine) I do think you should get rid of these
political advisers. There is a world of difference between the
special adviser and the political adviser. The special adviser
is the guy that you find who is excellent in his field, a specialist,
and certainly all the ones that I had, it was-tear-jerking how
well they worked with the Civil Service. They loved the Civil
Service and the Civil Service came to admire and respect them,
Tom Burke, for example.
(Lord Simon of Highbury) I know him very well.
(Mr Heseltine) This guy was one of the most sophisticated
operators in the country. He is an environmentalist. He is in
the business of pushing the environmental agenda, quite rightly.
What he used to do is that he would go to the Government and talk
about what the Government was doing. He would give them a bit
of advice, whatever it was, and then he would go to the Liberal
Democrats and say, "Look; I think the Government are likely
to do this but if you were to do that you would just get a bit
further ahead." Then he would go to the Labour Party and
say, "The Liberal Democrats are going to respond this way.
I think if you do that you would get a bit further ahead."
He would then come to me and he would say, "Look; these three
parties are going to do this and I think the real clever way is
to do this", and so he bid the whole thing up. After four
years working with this guy I came to the DoE and I said to him,
"Tom, you have been doing all this advice and clever manipulation
of the system. Come and get your teeth in the raw meat" and
I took him into the DoE and he stayed there under three Cabinet
Ministers. I think he was there until the Tories went, if I remember
correctly, very close to the end anyway. He was an expert. He
knew more about environmental policy than any official could know,
and he was totally dedicated. There were never any leaks or rows
or anything like that. Peter Levene had run a defence industry,
made a successful company and so, coming in to take over responsibility
for the Procurement Executive, it was taking a poacher to get
hold of the gamekeepers. He saved billions on the expenditure.
Tom Baron got our housing programme going because he was a house
builder. These are special advisers and they have nothing to do
with party politics.
Mr White
983. Do you put the drug czar and people like
that into the same category?
(Mr Heseltine) I am only talking about using people
who will want the public sector experience. You can use them extremely
effectively in the public sector. That is totally different from
taking some sort of know-it-all university case straight out of
wherever it was who knows how to run the world and goes around
in a little cohort. What actually happens—you see it all
the time—is that the ministers build up these little teams
and the teams become completely passionate in favour of the ministers'
careers, and all the leaking and the back-biting is about, "My
Minister said" and "My Minister did" and "Your
guy is no good" and the journalists are all there feeding
on this stuff. These guys have never had any experience of running
anything. They have never run anything in their lives. They have
just got a lot of textbook knowledge. The idea that you improve
government by doing this—what is the evidence? This Government
does not get better publicity because it has 70 more political
advisers. Once the economy goes wrong these guys will become a
liability. I am delighted you have got so many but, I tell you,
you will pay a high price for them.
984. You have lured us into this territory.
We are just about to produce a report on special advisers and
we have had evidence given to us that if ministers want these
people—and I am talking now about the political advisers,
not the specialist advisers—and they find they can be more
effective ministers in having them, they should have them. We
have had people, including, if my memory serves me right, the
Cabinet Secretary, tell us that these are rather helpful beings
because they defuse some of the sensitive areas that otherwise
civil servants might have to get their hands dirty with. They
come with a fairly universal endorsement so why are you so antipathetic
to them?
(Mr Heseltine) Because they do not add anything in
my experience. I was there before we had them and then I saw what
happened. I think it was just another layer of activity. The civil
servants were brilliant at handling these issues when I look back
on it in my early days. First of all, the Permanent Secretary,
who was always a very talented guy, would produce for you a private
secretary who he knew would be sympathetic to you. That is not
to say he was of the same party because they often were not, but
they would be people you could get on with. The civil servants
were perfectly capable of saying and occasionally did say, "I
think this is more for Central Office than it is for our press
department" and they were always right. They knew when to
deal with it politically. But you did not need armies of people
wandering round the departments thinking about the party political
aspect. I suspect that it blurs—I do not want to use the
word "corrupts" although if I were on a party platform
I would probably use the word "corrupts"—the proper
administration of government. Too many things are done with a
party political eye.
(Dr Clark) I disagree with Michael on this one and
can I take issue with it because I do feel—and time will
see who is right and who is wrong—that if you take the Policy
Unit in Number Ten, we have made no bones about it in the Labour
Party that we wanted to have some strategic thinking there and
we meant strategic political thinking because we are politicians
and it is not the job of civil servants to think strategically
politically. I hope that we will benefit from that as a government,
that one will have an ongoing political agenda. I do not say it
is absolutely necessary because I think Mrs Thatcher had an agenda
all the way through, but I think it is an aid and an asset to
politicians to move it forward. Certainly, as I say, I do have
two political advisers, both very different: one a young gopher,
very good, highly intelligent, the other one much more balanced,
well known to this Committee, I am sure. I felt that was the right
balance and I think the civil servants found it quite useful to
bounce ideas off these people.
Chairman: I regard that last exchange as a footnote
to our inquiry into special advisers and it may surface in the
report that we make. We have had an extremely interesting session
which will repay some very close reading. We wanted shamelessly
to draw upon your collective expertise, which I think we have
done, and when we come to the report we shall be able to reflect
on the things you have told us. Thank you very much indeed for
coming along.
|
