Examination of Witnesses (Questions 125-139)
3 MARCH 2005
PROFESSOR CHRISTOPHER
HOOD, DR
MARTIN LODGE
AND PROFESSOR
COLIN TALBOT
Q125 Chairman: Let me call the Committee
to order and welcome our witnesses this afternoon, Professor Christopher
Hood, Dr Martin Lodge and Professor Colin Talbot, who have come
to help us with our inquiry into the effectiveness of the Civil
Service. Thank you for sending us various pieces of paper beforehand.
Would any or all of you like to say a brief word by way of introduction?
Professor Hood:
Insofar as I have any competency to speak on this subject it as
a result of a study that I conducted with Dr Lodge a couple of
years ago looking at the policy making skills and abilities of
civil servants in relation to the competency framework set out
for the Civil Service. It is on that basis that I think I can
speak to you today.
Professor Talbot: I have been
looking at issues particularly in relation to management and organisation
issues in the Civil Service for a good many years and doing a
lot of international comparative work on that. I can certainly
address some of the interesting management issues that are coming
up at the moment.
Q126 Chairman: Professor, you know all
about this because you have been working on it for years and years
and years. Let us just get our heads round some of this. What
is the British Civil Service good at?
Professor Talbot: Telling us they
are good.
Q127 Chairman: They are good at telling
us they are good, are they?
Professor Talbot: Yes, they are
very good at telling us they are good. They are very good at maintaining—I
was going to say mythology but I think that is probably a bit
too strong—the idea that we have a Rolls Royce Civil Service
(that is the phrase most often used).
Q128 Chairman: Do we not have a Rolls
Royce Civil Service?
Professor Talbot: I think we do
but not necessarily in the way in which they mean it. Rolls Royce
I think is a very apt metaphor because Rolls Royces carry people
round in splendid isolation from the rest of the world with great
status and power and elegance, but they do not necessarily achieve
a lot.
Q129 Chairman: So what we want is a Ford
Focus Civil Service is it?
Professor Talbot: I think so.
Q130 Chairman: How do we get one of those?
Professor Talbot: I think there
are some major issues about the relationship of the Civil Service
to the service delivery element of what it does itself, the relationship
with the service delivery element of the rest of the public service
and also—I think Christopher and Martin have probably got
more to say on this—on the way in which they make policy,
which I think is a rather closed process at the moment despite
all promises about reformed policy making processes which the
new government made in 1998. I do not see a lot of evidence of
that having happened.
Professor Hood: May I say that
a couple of years ago when I was interviewing German civil servants
with Dr Lodge one of the things that those German civil servants
thought that the British Civil Service was very good at was co-ordinating
their policy in Europe. That was the view from Germany. They admired
the British for that.
Q131 Chairman: You sent us a very interesting
paper on these British German comparisons on policy making competency.
I did not quite understand all of it, I must say. That is the
way with academics, is it not? I just want you to translate a
bit for me. This is under "Boundary-Spanning Competencies".
Because I thought you were trying to say something important here
I quite wanted to know what it was. It says, "Policy-making
occurs in many different political climates, modes and circumstances.
But where it amounts to anything more than political signalling,
presentation or judicious `parking' of difficult problems, a crucial
skill for civil servants is to make effective links between standard-setting,
information-gathering and behaviour-modification or implementation.
That link—or the absence of it—is central to the problem
of policy effectiveness in modern government." I am interested
because it says it is "central" but I could not understand
what you were talking about. What are you really trying to say
there?
Professor Hood: The point I am
making is that in the inter-governmental world we are in today
we tend to work in a world where standards are set in one place—typically
in Brussels—the enforcement is often done in another place
by another set of authorities, often local authorities; information
about whether what is happening is good or bad is collected by
another set of organisations. In that kind of world the key skill
is how you bring those different bits together and what I am saying—perhaps
in too circuitous prose—is that the key thing that makes
Civil Service activity effective or not is their ability to do
that and that is why I use the phrase "boundary-spanning",
moving across these different jurisdictions and these different
bits of machinery at different levels that do these different
activities.
Q132 Chairman: Let us think in practical
ways about how some of these activities might be done better.
Given what we know about the environment in which the Civil Service
now operates—which is different than the one in which it
operated 50 years ago or even 30 years ago—if you are put
in charge of a unit to improve the effectiveness of the British
Civil Service what do you start doing?
Professor Talbot: First of all
you have to ask the question: what do you mean by effectiveness?
and there are a number of different roles for the Civil Service.
The basic division usually used is the one between operations
and policy making which partly relates to what Christopher was
just saying. If we start off with policy making I think there
are some interesting issues there. The tradition in the UK has
been very much that as far as possible the Civil Service attempts
to monopolise policy advice to ministers. One of the reasons why
there has always been such friction between introducing political
advisors or special advisors to ministers in the Civil Service
is that the Civil Service see that as usurping their job of giving
policy advice to ministers. They see their role as being very
much having sifted all the evidence, weighed all the pros and
cons and coming up with proposals to ministers which satisfy the
political objectives of ministers. It seems to me that that is
very different from a role of, for example hypothetically, the
Civil Service seeing itself much more as policy brokers or policy
facilitators where they were drawing on a much wider range of
evidence, allowing ministers access to that evidence and not simply
monopolising it to themselves. That has been supposedly embedded
in a lot of the messages that have come since 1997 about improving
the policy making process. I personally do not see very much evidence
of that having happened yet. The Civil Service is very fond of
words like "contestability" and "choice" at
the moment (and the Government as well) but I do not see much
contestability in policy advice, for example. There is still an
attempt to monopolise.
Q133 Chairman: If we were to develop
a contestable model of policy advice, what would that look like?
Professor Talbot: I think it would
involve both the Civil Service having a more open approach to
that which means that we would have, for example, a lot more green
papers before policy was decided upon, hopefully involving Parliament
in that process so that select committees like yourselves and
specialist select committees would have much more opportunity
to be involved in hearings pre policy being implemented, so you
would have a much more open process in advance of these things
happening rather than the way that things tend to happen at the
moment which is that policy emerges fully-fledged from government
and then everybody argues over it.
Q134 Mr Prentice: My experience is that
we are all consulted to death on issues that do not really matter,
but where it does matter the prime minister just makes an ex cathedra
announcement.
Professor Talbot: I think that
is probably true. I think you are right that there has been a
lot of relatively superficial consultation around minor issues
but on a lot of the very big policy issues about how we deal with
education, health and criminal justice it has tended to be that
policy appears fully fledged and we all argue about it.
Q135 Mr Prentice: Is that kind of dereliction
of duty by the Civil Service that the Civil Service should not
allow half-baked policy proposals to solidify into concrete policy
intentions?
Professor Talbot: I am tempted
to say "it was ever thus", that the model in the UK
has always been that the Civil Service is the sole owner of policy
advice to ministers and sometimes it has worked well and sometimes
it has worked excruciatingly badly.
Q136 Chairman: Are you really saying
that the Government should simply contract out of policy advice?
That is one argument that is sometimes put, that the Government
should say that it simply wants policy in a certain area and it
asks people to submit them as we do in all kinds of other things.
That would be a model, would it not?
Professor Hood: I think that one
of the things that I have been trying to say in the paper I submitted
to you and the longer documents it is drawn from, is that it is
actually not possible for civil servants in most cases—certainly
in any technical aspects of policy—to monopolise the sources
of technical expertise. Definitely in the examples we looked at
that was not the case but they do fulfil a very important role
in brokerage in deciding what experts are asked to contribute
and I think that is a very difficult skill for civil servants
to exercise effectively. Often these consultation processes—as
you hinted yourself—are very political and difficult to
manage. However, if I can go back to your earlier question of
what do we need to advance Civil Service effectiveness, one point
that I did make in my paper is that if we look at the current
competency frameworks that the Civil Service itself sets out for
what it thinks are the qualities that make civil servants effective,
they are cast almost wholly in terms of individualised qualities
and our argument—or my argument with Dr Lodge—is that
this is perhaps over-individualised and that much of the criticisms
of the Civil Service and how it works are not about the individual
brilliance or otherwise of particular individuals but their ability
to work together effectively; the system, in short, that does
that. If I had this very difficult job that you are asking me
to take on, it would be that part of it that I would be trying
to deal with, how you can get the working relationships better
rather than necessarily changing the individual qualities of particular
people.
Q137 Chairman: If we start off by saying
that there is a distinction between things that we can do in terms
of skilling the Service in a variety of ways or developing team
competencies in the way you are describing, but there is also
the issue of whether the structural frameworks are right. I think
I would quite like to have you say something about—initially
so that we can just clear the territory—whether you think
there are some structural issues about how the Civil Service at
all levels is presently organised which bears on the effectiveness
question. Can we perhaps just get our heads round that issue to
start with?
Professor Hood: There are large
scale issues about the structural divisions between the different
parts of the public service, whether that be local, central or
what have you. If you accept my argument that the key problem
in modern government is to bring the different bits of the public
service together, obviously those structural divisions may not
always be that helpful. If what you want to do to create maximum
effectiveness is to be able to bring in the right kind of expertise
when you need it for particular purposes, then I think that obviously
there are some structural barriers but in our German/British comparison
we found that the British Civil Service is doing much better than
the German one in that respect, in that it was able to get in
different kinds of expertise on different kinds of contracts in
a way that was not available in the German structure.
Q138 Chairman: Was there a structural
change contained in what you just said?
Professor Hood: What I was referring
to was the ability to bring in individuals on different kinds
of tenure to contribute expertise as and when needed.
Q139 Chairman: Are you suggesting that
we might dissolve the Civil Service into a unified public service?
Professor Hood: If I were re-designing
the structure from new I think I might well consider doing so.
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