Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
SIR HAYDEN
PHILLIPS GCB
13 JULY 2004
Q60 Keith Vaz: But you have had the
support of the Corporate Board. I gather one of the things the
Corporate Board has done is to give you strategic guidance on
diversity—you have discussed it at these board meetings—but,
if you give us the statistics, they will show that there are very
few black and Asian people at the highest levels of your department
and very few women. In fact, if you look at the board itself,
you only have Clare Dodgson, who is there because she is Chief
Executive of the Legal Services Commission, and Barbara Thomas,
who seems to come from a private company. You do not seem to be
able to promote and retain black and Asian people and women in
the highest levels of your department.
Sir Hayden Phillips: I think if
you just look at the top slice—
Q61 Keith Vaz: What are the figures?
Sir Hayden Phillips: I will ask
for the figures to be found. I think we have a good number of
women in senior civil service in the department and I have no
reason to think the best of those will not come through and go
to the top level. I will give you the figures now. Of the staff
in the senior civil service, 32% are women, and our target for
next year is 34%. We are below target on ethnic minorities: 3%,
as opposed to a target in 2005 of 4.7%; and on disabled we are
at 3% with a target of 4.5%. I know recently, certainly in relation
to senior civil service, we have just recruited two very good
members of staff from ethnic minorities, which is a small breakthrough
which has occurred in the last year. I am in no sense complacent.
You know that. As I say, this has been an intractable problem
for many years. The tricky issue always is taking effective action.
I think we are now going to have to settle down to more vigorously
try to make sure that the general opportunities available are
good, and, secondly, that we do not just concentrate on what I
might call the recruitment process—which is, in a sense,
the most straightforward way in which you increase the diversity
of your workforce—but try to deal better with the stock
of people now in the department, as it were, and provide them
with the opportunities that they may not so far have had. But,
in various jobs, I have found this one of the most disappointing
aspects of development: you can make a great personal effort,
then you go away and leave the scene and the thing drifts back
again and it is no better than it was before we started.
Q62 Keith Vaz: Remind me, did you
create the Executive Board and the Corporate Board during your
time as—
Sir Hayden Phillips: Yes.
Q63 Keith Vaz: Have they been useful
additions to the way in which the department has been run?
Sir Hayden Phillips: Yes. First
of all, the important step we took at the beginning of 2003 was
to reduce the size of the top management team that met regularly
together from eight or nine, or ten sometimes, to five. That produced
a way of corporate working which was invaluable from my point
of view. My experience is that things would drift up from all
over the department and end up on my desk or the Lord Chancellor's
desk or someone else's desk without real coordination having taken
place. That made a real difference. I also tried to make sure
that the jobs at the top overlapped, so that it was not possible
for serious big decisions to be taken without there being coordination
among those key five people—myself and the four directors
general; sadly, none of them women. From that base—which
is a strong base—we have been able to increase the size
of the board now to include the new Chief Executive of the Unified
Course Administration, Sir Ron de Witt, and Clare Dodgson. It
is very important that the Legal Services Commission, which spends
£2 billion of our £3 billion—although it is an
NDPB and we respect their independence in terms of individual
decisions—were a real part of the strategic decision-making
process. The trick then—which is now the current practice—was
to get some non-executive directors who would meet us as the Corporate
Board, not as the Executive Committee—as it were, so we
dealt with big issues when they were there—and they are
there to challenge us and to bring their professional expertise
to bear and we have set out in our note their names and their
backgrounds. The one comment I might make was that it is something
of a breakthrough, as you would realise, to have the Deputy Chief
Justice of England and Wales as a non-executive director of the
departmental board.
Q64 Keith Vaz: This is Lord Justice
Judge.
Sir Hayden Phillips: Igor Judge.
Q65 Keith Vaz: When he criticises,
for example, the civil legal aid provisions and what is happening
on the criminal defence bill, do you take that more seriously
because he is a member of your board?
Sir Hayden Phillips: I hope we
will take very seriously the fact that we will have debated his
reservations in the board discussions before it suddenly emerges,
if that is what he wanted, into the public domain. More seriously,
one of the things I would flag up that we have achieved over the
last six years—and I have played a small part in that—is
a better partnership with the judiciary in managing the system
than had existed before. I think you would get the same evidence
from the Lord Chief Justice and from Igor.
Q66 Keith Vaz: Going back to the
question that Mr Bottomley put to you earlier on, for the last
six years the department has faced a number of crises, and serenely
the department seems to have survived. I think he was making the
point that the reason for this was because you were there and
you were able to steer the department through the problems that
have occurred. Are you sound free?
Sir Hayden Phillips: I have stepped
past Mr Bottomley's dangerous compliment and I think I will step
past yours.
Q67 Keith Vaz: You have been in the
civil service for 30 years.
Sir Hayden Phillips: Thirty-seven.
Q68 Keith Vaz: It has changed a lot,
has it not, in that period?
Sir Hayden Phillips: Yes.
Q69 Keith Vaz: Have civil servants
in your department become more politicised?
Sir Hayden Phillips: No.
Q70 Keith Vaz: How have you made
sure this has not happened?
Sir Hayden Phillips: Because the
cultural traditions of independence, objectivity, non party-political
behaviour remain exactly as they were. I see no difference at
all—
Q71 Chairman: That is not true everywhere,
is it?
Sir Hayden Phillips: -- between
the attitudes of my younger staff and their values from the ones
I held when I joined. One of the things I try to do, Chairman,
is to talk as often as possible to Civil Service College, to groups
of young, new, fast-stream entrants. I do not give them a speech,
I answer their questions. I am always encouraged by that but they
always ask me the question: Has there been politicisation? I give
them my honest answer, that in party-political terms there has
not. I believe that remains absolutely the case.
Q72 Keith Vaz: But you are the most
senior of the Permanent Secretaries.
Sir Hayden Phillips: Yes.
Q73 Keith Vaz: And all correspondence
for the Cabinet Secretary goes to you first before it is copied
to all your Wednesday morning colleagues. The Chairman has tried
to bring in this point: This has not happened in other departments
has it? The civil service has become more politicised. Your department's
whole identity has changed. It has gone from being this 18th century
quill-pen department into a major department of state and therefore
when you drop the façade of the Lord Chancellor's Office
and the department being what it was, you become open to criticism
in a much more robust way. Should that not meant that you need
to be more political?
Sir Hayden Phillips: No. I follow
the points but I do not believe the logic is correct. Indeed,
I am, as I said earlier, encouraged by the fact that young entrants,
whether from my department or more generally, have very similar
values to those that make people want to become civil servants
in the first place, and they are concerned to ask me whether what
they read in the newspapers about politicisation is true and I
give them the straightforward answer I have tried to give you.
Q74 Keith Vaz: As the department's
identity has changed over the last six years, do you think there
has been a failure to communicate your message and your ethos
more effectively to the public because of that change? The Chairman
mentioned the website. That is just one example of perhaps the
technical problem you were having in putting across your message.
Has there been a lack of communication with the public as this
change has gone ahead? Would you have liked to have done more?
Can more be done by your successor?
Sir Hayden Phillips: I would have
liked to have seen more done. I think I particularly felt that
before the changes to 12 June. I thought the Lord Chancellor's
Department had itself changed substantially. I think the creation
of your Select Committee, Chairman, was a recognition of the fact
that it was no longer, as it were, shall we say a 19th century
rather than an 18th century quill-pen thing, that it was not just
simply looking after the judges or repeating what the judges said,
that it was actually trying to relate more specifically to the
public more generally. When, for example, it also gained a whole
ramp of constitutional issues from the Home Office, the Cabinet
Office and the former DTLR, that changed the nature of the core
of the department and gave it many more politically sensitive
issues to handle than it had had before, but I do not think any
of that blew back on any politicisation. I do believe, however,
there is a task which I have not completed and got right, of communicating
what we are about to a wider public—but you then have to
make a careful distinction between that and what looks like just
the ordinary propaganda you get from organisations saying how
wonderful they are.
Q75 Keith Vaz: Sure.
Sir Hayden Phillips: That is not
what you are on about; it is about trying to get hold of the changed
nature of the way we are and what we are trying to do.
Q76 Keith Vaz: Indeed. Let us be
crystal clear about 12 June. You were not consulted or told about
these changes until after they had been agreed, is that correct?
Sir Hayden Phillips: No, I believe
I have always made it clear to the Committee that I was aware
in advance of what was planned. But I have always been very careful
to say the confidences I have around that I will keep.
Q77 Keith Vaz: Was the then Lord
Chancellor aware?
Sir Hayden Phillips: He was aware
about the time I was aware.
Q78 Keith Vaz: Now that we have begun
the process of those changes and we have the department becoming
basically a very big, political Whitehall Department—and
you have mentioned the challenges that you think your successor
faces—is it now the case that this department does not have
to be headed by a lawyer? There is no requirement that the Secretary
of State for Constitutional Affairs should be a lawyer, as there
is no requirement that the Permanent Secretary for the department
should be a lawyer.
Sir Hayden Phillips: This is a
current and highly topical debate, which is taking place I believe
in the House of Lords this very day. The Government's position
has been clear: the Government does not believe that the office
of Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs should automatically
be held by someone who is a senior lawyer, but it does not believe
it should automatically be held by someone who is a Member of
the Upper House. There are a number of Members of the House of
Lords and possibly others who take a different view but that is
the Government's position.
Q79 Keith Vaz: What is your position?
As you come to the end of your 37 years, having had to control
all these lawyers over the last six years and not being one yourself?
Sir Hayden Phillips: I think I
can still, for the next 14 working days, take refuge properly
in the fact that I am here to explain what the Government's position
is. But I make one side comment: If I look back over my 37 years,
I have worked with ministers in other departments from the one
I am now in who were not lawyers but who were as sensitive to
issues about the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary
as any Lord Chancellor could have been, and that is about temperament,
style, intellect and understanding and not about your professional
qualifications. That is my only historical observation.
Chairman: I think we need to move on,
because there are three substantive areas we must try to deal
with and a matter Mr Clappison wishes to deal with, otherwise
we will run out of our permitted time.
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