Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1045
- 1059)
WEDNESDAY 28 FEBRUARY 2001
SIR CHRISTOPHER
FOSTER AND
SIR ROBIN
MOUNTFIELD KCB
Chairman
1045. On behalf of the Committee, can I welcome
our witnesses. I am sorry we are at the moment a little bit depleted,
but we hope to be reinforced before too long. It is very kind
of you to come along and help us with our inquiry into Making
Government Work. Sir Robin Mountfield is a former Permanent Secretary,
and Sir Christopher Foster is a seasoned traveller around the
worlds both of Government and of business, who has I think been
a special adviser to Governments of both persuasions?
(Sir Christopher Foster) I have been
a political adviser to Labour Governments, in the past, and a
non-political one to Tory Governments; both special.
1046. There we are; so, between you, a reservoir
of experience and expertise upon which we would like to draw.
Now I think that, Sir Christopher, you would like to say something
before we start?
(Sir Christopher Foster) If I may.
1047. If you would, please?
(Sir Christopher Foster) I am very grateful to the
Committee for giving me the chance of an opening statement, just
to say something about what seemed to me, having studied the transcripts
of quite a large number of your sessions, to be six key aspects
of the issues you are studying. Most particularly, I gather that
you would rather hear from us about civil service reform than
machinery of government. Though I speak for myself and from my
own experience, I also was the Chairman of the Steering Group
of the Smith Report into civil service reform, which came out
at the same time as "Modernising British Government".
I had the honour to lead a very distinguished group, with two
ex-Cabinet ministers, in Shirley Williams and Roger Freeman, Lord
Haskins, Chairman of the Regulatory Impact Task Force, two ex-Permanent
Secretaries, James Cornford, who was David Clark's special adviser,
among others and two eminent professors. A number of my points
are very much as much theirs as they are mine. My first point
is to agree that we need more openness in the Civil Service, if
it is to remain a lively and become a more effective body. I think
that is absolutely essential. My second point is to agree with
Lord Simon that to get it, we need more flexibility in pay and
conditions than we now have, not only to recruit new people but
also to retain those being groomed for the highest responsibilities.
Once, social prestige, being close to ministers and the many intellectual
fascinations of the job compensated for lower pay, but those compensations,
for various reasons, have waned greatly in recent years. Moreover,
there has been such an explosion of comparable top people's pay
in the private sector that one must start to pay real market rates,
at least for the most demanding public sector jobs. One may regret
this necessity, but the cost of neglecting it, I think, will be
tremendously adverse on the morale of the Civil Service and the
effectiveness of the machine. Third, despite the need for greater
openness and what that implies, Government cannot, and should
not, be run as if all that was needed were private sector competencies.
Among the nine key differences between the public and private
sectors that the Smith Report identified, let me remind you of
the more important. They were that civil servants operate in an
environment much more constrained by law and regulation, are directly
or indirectly accountable to Parliament, have much more complex
objectives than the profit motive, and have to operate with ministers
of widely different experience, interests and aptitudes. Fourth,
one consequence of these differences is that we recommended, and
I strongly believe it myself, that we need a Civil Service which
is largely permanent. It is impossible to put an exact figure,
but perhaps from about 80 to 90 per cent should be permanent,
that is, should spend all, or most, of their lives in the service
or on planned secondments from it. We need that permanence, I
believe, for the robust maintenance of such Civil Service values
as political impartiality, continuity between administrations,
fairness in dealing with the public, as well as such demanding
requirements as to be non-discriminatory between employees and
members of the public, and, as important as any, to retain high
standards of truth-telling to Parliament and to the public, indeed.
But also there is another very important argument for permanence:
there are, as I found from my own experience, considerable risks,
if you bring in too many people from outside into any organisation.
You know them much less well. In my judgement, in one out of three
cases, you probably later wish you had not done so. It is very
important, for morale-building and for quality of life in the
Civil Service, that there remains a tradition of a career for
life for both these reasons. Five, an important further aspect
is the strong desirability of maintaining tenure as the norm,
both as a protection against overpoliticisation and as a vital
protection against corruption. We have, rare in the world these
days, a Government—ministers, civil servants—which
is not corrupt. Virtually all evidence on the subject suggests
that the way to keep a Civil Service as good as ours is, and as
incorruptible as ours is, is first through paying decent salaries,
but also providing tenure, for the avoidance of pressures that
can arise from poor pay and insecure jobs. My last point. In my
opinion, there are reforms needed, very profound and fundamental
ones, to bring the Civil Service into the 21st century. Among
the most important concern aspects of training. The Smith Report
argued, and I agree, that the old category of generalist needs
sub-division into its own kinds of specialisation. Government
is becoming so much more complicated, in particular ways, so that
specialised kinds of generalists, are becoming very much more
needed. The first and most obvious is finance. Even more now we
have resource accounting, we need a cadre of people trained to
have a much stronger financial background than is normal among
civil servants who are in finance posts. The second arises from
the huge growth of legal constraints on government and therefore
the need to get to the bottom of many complicated legal problems.
In my judgement, again, it has created a need for specialists
who are good at handling lawyers, which requires particular skills.
Handling lawyers, trying to secure that Bills are in good shape
when they get into Parliament, dealing with legal opinions, handling
them as clients when representing the private sector on a large
scale means that you need to develop specialists of this kind.
With the huge growth of lawyers advising Government, you need
specialised generalists, as a bridge, to help ministers handle
legal issues. The third is that we also need officials who are
trained in understanding science, in relating different sciences
to each other and assessing probabilities; we have had BSE, we
have now foot and mouth, there are many such problems, and they
are not going to get any fewer. They raise difficult scientific
and technical issues, which require people with a specialised
expertise in risk assessment. Fourth, on implementation, the Civil
Service has always been very good at what it understood to mean
by policy implementation, which was turning policy into prose:
into White Papers and into Bills. But the further skill, the importance
of which I think is not fully recognised and it is one of the
worries behind the Government's concern about the public sector's
effectiveness, is that one needs to be able to turn that paper
into mechanisms, machinery, organisation, that actually works.
The trick here, which I am happy to develop, if anybody wants
me to, is to recognise that, in a sense, what one should be trying
to do and design is some kind of contractual or quasi-contractual
base, by means of which various ongoing activities run in an altered
way, as well as new activities in a new and well-designed way.
As such it is a form of procurement. The Civil Service, like the
private sector, for that matter, has, in my judgement, a huge
need for more trained procurement specialists, in effect, who
have these skills. They are very distinct and buyable skills,
but because scarce it also needs to train its own so as to help
turn policy into definite programmes, agreements, things which
can be seen to work, which can be monitored and whose effectiveness
can be judged. Forgive me for that statement.
1048. Thank you very much indeed, that is very,
very helpful. I wonder if I could ask Sir Robin, would you like
just to be our first respondent?
(Sir Robin Mountfield) First of all, I would just
like to comment that it is two years since I left the Civil Service,
after 38 years, and the caravan moves on surprisingly fast, so
some of my perceptions may be rooted a little bit in past experience.
1049. We asked you because you are a free man!
(Sir Robin Mountfield) Relatively free; the contract
cannot be broken, even in retrospect. I agree with much of what
Chris says. I agree particularly about the need to acquire additional
skills. I also agree with the need to open up the Civil Service,
by which I assume he means not the open government thing, which
is a whole different debate.
(Sir Christopher Foster) No.
(Sir Robin Mountfield) But the question of recruiting
additional skills, and particularly experience, from outside.
I think that is an extremely difficult area, and it seems to me
that the correct balance between a permanent, career-based, non-political
service and the acquisition of additional skills from outside
is a thing that needs to be judged very carefully indeed. If one
carries it too far one will move, as I think some politicians
of both parties, in office and out, have favoured, to a model
which is purportedly stolen from the private sector, where a "hire
and fire" existence takes place, where people are recruited
by open competition, on fixed-term contracts, and so on, which,
of course, never really exists in a major way in the private sector.
You may recall the Oughton Report, of about 1994, or thereabouts;
in my view, an extremely mature and important assessment of this
question of opening up the Civil Service. Oughton effectively
debunked the concept that the private sector used fixed-term contracts
and open competition in a major way. He said that large, stable
organisations, typically, the phrase he used was, "grow their
own timber", and then, with an inelegant mixture of metaphor,
he said, "but it needs to be ventilated;" and that is,
in my view, absolutely right, that the balance between those two
elements is crucially important. And I personally think we have
gone a little too far, in the Civil Service, in recruiting from
outside for particular posts, very often on a fixed-term contract,
and I would very much rather see regular infusion of new experience,
right through the career profile, in other words, in mid-career
as well as at the beginning and the end. Because I think the acquisition
of the culture and the skills of the Civil Service and the proper
melding of that with outside experience is more effectively done
before you reach the top posts, where you need very detailed knowledge
of the way the parliamentary machine works, the Civil Service
machine works, and all the cultural continuities, and so on, that
are involved. Now I hope that is not interpreted as meaning that
I think the Civil Service should remain closed. I think we went
through a dark period in the sixties and seventies, after a very
open period during and after the second world war, when a lot
of additional talent came into the Service, and I think it closed
down on itself; and I think we are now, rightly and belatedly,
in the process of reopening our doors, not only in terms of people
but in terms of ideas and influences. And I think that balance
is the crucially important thing for modernising the service.
1050. Do you broadly accept Sir Christopher's
line, which is that 80 to 90 per cent permanence; would that be
the sort of benchmark that we are talking about?
(Sir Robin Mountfield) I do not think I would be able
to put a particular figure on it, because I think it may vary
from place to place and time to time. I think there are some areas
where the Civil Service is seriously short of important skills,
IT skills are very obvious, finance skills are also very obvious,
where it may be necessary to recruit on a shorter-term basis.
I do not altogether agree with what Chris says about generalists;
generalism is a professionalism of its own, and, particularly
if we are seeking to develop the concept of joined-up government,
actually you need in your teams a number of people who have moved
around between a lot of different specialisms. Because the ability
to weigh and balance a lot of expertise is itself a specialism
that the Civil Service has traditionally been strong in, and I
do not think we ought to lose that skill, but you need to balance
teams with a lot of different skills, of which that is one.
1051. You seem to be saying though that the
tendency to advertise, for example, permanent secretary appointments,
is something which is not to be favoured; is that right?
(Sir Robin Mountfield) I do not want to comment in
a particularly categorical way. I think there is a danger in that
becoming the absolute requirement. Apart from anything else, I
think there is a bit of kidology involved, that gives the impression
that all these posts are going to be, in fact, open to outsiders,
because the number of people who have actually been recruited
to non-specialist permanent secretaryships straight from outside
is very small. I would much rather see a larger number of people
reaching permanent secretary rank with a substantial private sector
or voluntary sector experience but having had a number of years
at a lower level in the Service and worked their way up, and I
think that is a much more fruitful way of opening up. The question
of competition is a thing that applies, of course, not only to
outside appointments but it is becoming absolutely the norm for
acquisition of jobs within the Service. The culture of job advertising
is actually very popular with staff, at least with the successful
staff. But I think that itself has become a quite serious problem,
which people throughout the Service are beginning to worry about,
that we seem to have jumped from an old concept of career development,
where you deliberately place people, over a period, in a series
of jobs that will develop their suitability for the highest office,
to one where, each time, you look at who is the best person for
a particular job, without reference, necessarily, to the team
in which they are going to be interpolated, whether the mix of
skills in a team is right, whether this is the right post to develop
somebody. And I think that balance between career development
and job advertising has not been got right, and we need to reassert
the significance of career development, particularly for the future
leaders of the Service.
(Sir Christopher Foster) Can I just comment quickly
on two of those things. I said 80 to 90 per cent permanent; an
arbitrary number, but by which I mean a large proportion. The
exception you gave, Robin, I would not actually agree with. I
think the reason we have short-term IT people and in part why
we have had so many IT disasters, is that we do not pay IT specialists
enough to come in and give long, loyal service. I do believe,
here, as much as anywhere else, one benefits from having some
people coming in and out but also from having a substantial number
of long-stay people. I know of no successful private firm, at
least in my judgement, that does not feel it needs a very substantial
cadre of people who are long-term and loyal; moreover, I do not
know any that does not believe that career development of the
cadre is important. You try to train your own people because you
know them, you know their strengths and their weaknesses. You
go outside when you have not got the right person inside. You
go out with some trepidation, because you know the risk of getting
someone who appears good but isn't, particularly in this era of
very poor references, that past employers tend to give. It is
all very problematic. So, of course, you go outside, but you go
outside, primarily, in my judgement, because you are sure you
have not got the right person inside, or because there is a job
with some definite need for an outsider.
1052. How far have we moved on? If you go back
to Fulton, 30-odd years ago, was not that just saying the same
things, that is, we need more specialisms, the old generalist
model does not quite work, we need more interchange, and all that?
Here we are, 30-odd years on, still saying the same kinds of things,
without having made an awful lot of progress. Does that not suggest
that the Civil Service is remarkably impenetrable to reform?
(Sir Robin Mountfield) I would not agree that we have
not made any progress. I would like to speak separately about
policy work and management work, of course they intertwine, they
are not completely separate, but they are the two ends of a spectrum.
I think, myself, that in the policy area we have not advanced
as far as we should in the last 30 years. I do not think skills
have deteriorated but I think the world has changed around us
and I do not think we have adjusted as well as we should have
done to that. The world where the Civil Service was the monopoly
provider of advice to ministers has gone. We live in a much more
multiple world where ministers, quite properly, look for ideas
and advice from think tanks, from universities, from pressure
groups and from their own party machines to a much greater extent
than they did 30 years, 40 years ago; and that is entirely good.
And, I think, if there is a monopoly function left with the Civil
Service, in policy work, it is as a professional policy synthesiser,
and I do not think we devoted enough effort to that until fairly
recently. I think the creation of the Centre for Management and
Policy Studies is an indication of the seriousness with which
that is now taken, and absolutely right. It is high time we devoted
much more effort to the training of senior officials and those
who are going to become senior officials in policy analysis and
all the related things, encouraging them to open themselves to
ideas that were not invented here; that has been one of the traditional
weaknesses. In the management area, on the other hand, I think
we have made far more progress than we have actually been given
credit for. I think there are signs that Fulton did not lead to
a managerial revolution, and it was not until the early eighties
that that began, with the FMI, and subsequently delegation and
Next Steps, and so on. But, I think, if you look at the experience
of the big employing battalions of the Civil Service, the productivity
improvements, for example, have been vast. Between '92 and '98,
or '99, in my judgement, and it is very difficult to get really
satisfactory statistical evidence, because there is not a single
measure of output, but if you accumulate evidence from the big
battalions and look at the aggregates of Civil Service employment,
the signs are that productivity has improved, after allowing for
privatisation and outsourcing, by about 3 per cent per annum,
cumulative, over seven or eight years. Now, if that is true, and
I am pretty confident it is about the right order, that is significantly
more than the growth of productivity in the private service sector.
So this is by no means a negligible performance. And it has been
associated with significant improvements in the quality of service
and, as anyone who reads the annual Next Steps report can see,
measurable improvements in the quality of service. Now I think
we have got an important next step to move on to the current joined-up
government agenda, which we can discuss perhaps later on, but
that is a significant achievement and I think we need to pay recognition
to that.
(Sir Christopher Foster) I see it slightly differently
from Robin. I acknowledge absolutely the huge strides in the improvement
of management that have taken place, I do not know whether we
are going to talk about that, but I think there are many more
that still need to be taken, for example, the whole way of turning
PSAs from acts of faith into real management documents, real business
plans. A lot has been achieved, I know, in the last couple of
years, but, as far as I can judge, there is still a long way to
go, as quickly as possible. We must not be smug about it, in any
way whatsoever. On the other matter, Fulton, I think one has heard
quite a lot about Fulton's recommendations, but that is history:
it was still related to a largely paper-producing culture; it
did not really understand management issues. The distinction it
made between the generalist and the financial/economic administrator
was a pale reflection of what I think is needed these days: for
example, I do believe that the time has come to have a very much
more developed finance officer cadre, with a whole new raft of
skills than Fulton had in mind. Moreover, procurement is actually
a large part of what the Civil Service is about these days. It
is about drawing blueprints, tying down business plans, with local
government, with departments and agencies, with joined-up mixtures
of agencies. These skills are of an enormous intricacy and complexity,
which Fulton never dreamed of. In those days, lawyers were not
very important to government; of course, government had its lawyers
and very often they were very able people, but ministers had far
more freedom to decide the content of Bills and Regulations, were
far less challenged than they are now. I am not saying that we
do not need generalists and specialised professionals as well,
but, in my judgement, in between there is a layer of people who
need to be specialist generalists, because I do not believe that
the old-fashioned generalist can easily comprehend all that is
required really to cover all these very different expertises .
. . take science, for example, this is going to be of the most
enormous importance, it is already important to assess the evidence
coming in from all kinds of scientific and advisory committees.
It requires more people who can look across different sciences,
who are not completely cocooned in one particular scientific or
technological area. It requires people with a very considerable
grasp of probability theory and risk assessment to protect ministers;
that is an area which, in my judgement, needs a lot of development.
And, in one sense, you may say nothing has advanced from Fulton,
I think that untrue, for the reasons that Robin gave. Rather,
I think our understanding of the detail of what is needed to modernise
the Civil Service is racing ahead all the time.
1053. Thank you for that. Before I hand over
to a colleague, can I ask just one further question, which gets
into different territory, which is the joined-up area. Now I gather,
Sir Robin, that you claim authorship of this phrase, which is—
(Sir Robin Mountfield) Not uniquely, I think others
probably claim it as well.
1054. Well, it would be quite a claim, and a
responsibility.
(Sir Robin Mountfield) If I had a pound for every
time it has been used in ministerial speeches, my exiguous civil
service pension would be supplemented very comfortably.
Chairman: Indeed, well, we are going to contribute
to this fund now.
Mr Tyrie
1055. We have asked for more pay.
(Sir Robin Mountfield) It won't apply to pensions,
I fear.
Chairman
1056. Here, clearly, is, at least in language,
a development that we need to explore. Now, as the putative author
of this, could you then actually tell us what it is; could you
tell us also what was unjoined-up before, and then, in essence,
what we are joining up now, and how we should do it?
(Sir Robin Mountfield) I may claim authorship of the
phrase, but I certainly do not of the idea, which has clearly
been around, in one form or another, for a very long time. But
I do think it is a distinctively new emphasis in the last few
years, not uniquely under this Government, I think it was happening
to some extent towards the end of the previous administration.
And I think the way I view it is, there were huge advances in
the quality of management, not of policy but of management, as
a result of delegation, vertical delegation down clear hierarchical
lines, with specific objectives and a degree of management freedom
that was undreamed of 20 or 30 years ago within individual units;
and that has all been benign. What, however, I think it has done
is expose more than before the problem of the horizontal linkages
across government, and the joined-up concept. To my mind, again,
this is a spectrum rather than a black and white thing—one
could look at the policy area and the service delivery area, and
there is a big area in-between of implementation of policy. In
the joined-up policy area, I think, the progressive introduction
of things like the Performance and Innovation Unit, the Social
Exclusion Unit and other bodies in other sectors, organised a
bit differently, these are all concentrated on the idea of trying
to get the linkages between policies more sensibly worked out.
Departments have always worked in little pockets; the tendency
has always been to devise policy within a departmental framework.
The process of interdepartmental consultation and cabinet committee
discussion is rather like a sort of dispute resolution procedure,
aimed at reaching a least common denominator solution, a compromise
solution; and the so-called "wicked issues" do not always
respond adequately to that. And I think the idea of taking people
out of their departmental loyalty, but with their experience,
for a period of three or six months, mixing them with specialists
from outside the Civil Service, and putting them in a room and
telling them to get on and produce a solution, which may be more
radical than any other solutions that are put forward by individual
departments, getting that accepted by ministers, if it is, and
then put down into departments for implementation, with the authority
of the Cabinet, that seems to me to be potentially a very promising
approach. It is not absolutely revolutionary, but I think the
extent to which it is being used is a distinctively new emphasis.
Now, equally important, in my view, is the area of service delivery;
this is sometimes characterised, and, indeed, may actually be
implemented, in physical terms, as a one-stop shop, but that is
actually shorthand for a lot of other things. But the idea, for
example, a case that struck me was when my late father-in-law
was in hospital, recovering from a stroke, not able to face one
public service with any competence but actually needing to deal
with a whole range of them. There is absolutely no reason why
a single public service provider, supported by the right IT equipment,
and so on, should not be able to put in place, for example, the
ambulance to take the person home, put the pension back in payment,
make sure that the `meals on wheels' arrangements are delivered,
the care packages with the local authority and the voluntary agencies,
and so on, all those things are perfectly capable of being packaged.
You register a death at a registry office, there is no reason
at all why the social security implications and all the other
bits of communication of government should not be done through
that single channel. Now the image of wide use of web-based services,
I think, is probably a bit far-fetched for many people, for the
foreseeable future. But with IT in the hands of the provider,
through a call centre, through a post office, whatever it is,
this joined-up concept is a really powerful idea, and, interestingly,
works with the grain of the public service ethic, whereas Next
Steps and delegation, to some extent, work against the grain;
and I think that is an immensely powerful, potential development.
In-between, there is a whole range of activities; if I could give
one example, which is the anti-drugs programme. Quite early on
in the present administration, a slug of money was given to the
so-called drugs czar to distribute among the various agencies
and departments dealing with drugs; he did that in consultation
with all the departments, money was then allocated from that horizontal
budget to the various ministries and agencies concerned, controlled
and monitored with a degree of flexibility, accountable still
through the vertical channels but influenced by this horizontal
co-ordination. In the last Strategic Spending Review, one saw
16 or 17 areas of government approached in that same way, a range
of possible solutions, from merged budgets through to extended
collaborative arrangements, some of them at the national level,
some of them at a local level, some of them just within central
government, some spanning central government, local government,
National Health Service. And we are right at the beginning of
what is, to my mind, a development at least as significant in
its time for the next 10 years as Next Steps and the New Public
Management was ten years ago, a hugely exciting and very powerful
concept.
1057. I think that is the most elegant and compelling
statement of all this that I have ever heard, actually. Could
you go just a little bit further now and tell us, on the basis
of that, where do we go next?
(Sir Robin Mountfield) I do not think there is a single
solution. I think, just like Next Steps and the New Public Management,
it is a long, long haul. And, I think, if I may say, one of the
problems about modern government—and perhaps old-fashioned
government too—is the disjunction between the political
timescale and the time it actually takes to turn this supertanker
round; and the expectation that you can quickly "modernise
government" seems to me to be quite a problem. There are
many, many levels at which this needs to be addressed. I think
it is being addressed in a very interesting and innovative way
in the policy formulation level at the top, and I think that is
quite promising; it is too soon to reach firm conclusions about
whether it is working, but it is a very promising approach. On
the ground, I think there are a number of signs that local authorities
and the health service and the education services and central
government agencies are beginning to collaborate, but there is
an enormous amount of scope to increase that, sometimes following
the initiative and enterprise of individual managers at the local
level, sometimes by national initiatives. There is a danger, of
course, of letting too many flowers bloom, and the proliferation
of Action Zones, I think, is a very obvious example, where they
grew up very quickly, they were not co-ordinated, not joined-up,
in fact. Individually they probably made good sense, but some
of them did not work effectively with each other, or even with
themselves. But I think we may have to accept a certain amount
of trial and error in this area. There are huge technical problems
along the track; one of them is accountability. You are dealing
with agencies, some of them are central government agencies, accountable
and auditable through the usual channels, up to Parliament, some
of them are quangos, some of them are NHS bodies, with their own
accountability complexities, and some of them, of course, are
local authorities, or even Welsh or Scottish Governments, which
may be of a different complexion, political complexion, at some
time in the future. So we have great problems of that kind. And
you have different audit agencies, the NAO and the Audit Commission,
for example, both of them, incidentally, showing, as I understand
it, great willingness to experiment in that area and to find ways
through these accountability problems; but it is a long haul,
it is technically difficult stuff, and it needs a lot of goodwill
and a lot of consensus that this is the right way to go, but I
think it is happening.
(Sir Christopher Foster) I am not going to try to
match Robin's eloquence. His was an absolutely marvellous statement.
I agree with him that it is a very important development and is
moving ahead, in most respects, extremely well. I think we are
beginning to reach some understanding of what joining up is easy
and what is less easy. You made a point that joined-up policy,
though not always easy, is easier than joint delivery. When you
come to information systems, it ought to be relatively easy to
join them up, it requires very good specification by ministers
of what they want and then not changing their mind (which is all
too tempting). Thereafter very good IT design and delivery. With
ongoing services it becomes more difficult; it is difficult enough
within the health service getting the doctors, nurses and other
staff to co-operate. When they belong to different agencies, ongoing
joined-up collaboration is not easy. One sometimes has to recognise
that you cannot get the improvements in productivity, either in
terms of quality of work, or in terms of reduced effort, that
you can in a more vertical environment. So, of course, we have
got to do a lot more joining up, but do not do it unnecessarily.
Where one can locate an activity within the boundaries of a department
or an agency, then try to do so. Where the benefit from joining
up is marginal then do not do it. If you try to do too much joining
up, I think you will make it much more difficult, particularly
for ministers to carry through and concentrate on the things where
being joined up really matters most.
Chairman: Thank you for that.
Mr Tyrie
1058. I am fascinated by what I have heard,
and I would really just like to ask some questions, first of all,
of clarification, particularly with respect to the issue of how
much interchange there could be between the Civil Service and
other walks of life, and the extent to which we need a permanent,
career-based cadre of people. First of all, Sir Christopher, you
said that we must keep a core cadre and that it is absolutely
essential to do so, but you also said that the private sector
are well aware of this and they do so; so, therefore, why cannot
private sector practice be used to maintain a public sector core?
(Sir Christopher Foster) I think it could be, but
it is not. I think too great a requirement to advertise posts,
to be absolutely honest, has made better career development a
little too difficult. One needs to have a better balance between
those one can develop and promise from within and those posts
one really needs to advertise from without. Moreover I think openness
and planned secondment are two different things. I am a great
believer in planned secondment, in and out of local government
and agencies. Virtually every civil servant would benefit from
something of that kind, once, certainly, possibly twice or three
times during their career, but, there again, it is absolutely
vital you pick the right person to come in from local government,
as well as the right job for the person at the centre who goes
out. It really ought to be part of their career development, not
the rather chancy business of answering an advertisement. Quite
different from secondment is when you find that you have not got
a good enough person within the system for a post. Then, most
certainly, you should go outside to fill it. Where you want someone
who is innovative or has a particular outside skill then you should
go for it. But to do so should be a result of a sort of strategic
judgement, departmentally or by agency, about the skills you cannot
get except through advertisement, rather than a drill you go through
all the time.
1059. What proportion of the core should be
permanent, career civil service?
(Sir Christopher Foster) I said 80 to 90, to indicate
I believe it should be a high proportion. I do think, in the private
sector, you might get as low as 60 per cent. There is no exact
figure which is best; it varies from place to place. I think it
needs to be high, both for career development and because the
public sector is not like the private sector. There are particular
values, there are relationships with politicians, and other differences.
If you have too few people who are permanent you will find, as
is happening in America at the higher reaches, that a lot of those
important standards begin to fray.
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