Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160-179)
3 MARCH 2005
PROFESSOR CHRISTOPHER
HOOD, DR
MARTIN LODGE
AND PROFESSOR
COLIN TALBOT
Q160 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Can I ask some
specifics on one or two people? Harold Wilson, just before he
retired, called the Civil Service together and asked if there
was a case to split the job down the middle so that the cabinet
secretary and the Civil Service were split. Is that good or bad?
Professor Talbot: I think that
actually raises the issue about whether you split the Civil Service
down the middle. It is about this difference between policy advice
and running the Civil Service in terms of it being a service delivery
organisation with slightly more than 500,000 employees in it.
In terms of the centre of government I am not sure whether splitting
the role of the head of the Civil Service and the cabinet secretary
is that important. I think there is a much bigger issue about
the whole organisation at the centre in terms of the Treasury
and Cabinet Office and Number 10 and the way in which policy is
made within that nexus. I think there are real problems there.
Professor Hood: This has been
done, of course, in the past and the reason why the case was made
for bringing these two roles together was that by locating these
two roles in different individuals you had things that fell through
the cracks between them. That, I think, was the argument for bringing
these two positions together. We have been around this track before
and there is a historical experience of it.
Q161 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Moving on a
little bit further, Sir Andrew Turnbull said that he was, and
I quote, "fed up with outsiders attacking the generalist
culture"; he was talking about generalists and specialists
and he wants that blurred. This is all part of it; it is the bigger
picture. You rightly pointed out that it is the policy making,
the Treasury, et cetera which at the moment does not seem to work
because you have the gifted amateur and the professional. Sir
Andrew then goes on to say that it is all part of the 1988 Next
Steps programme as a sort of extension—which I do not actually
think it is—but is that an idea which is actually Civil
Service speak for actually having to do nothing.
Professor Talbot: I suspect it
is to some extent. I think the recognition of the two main professional
groups that they are now describing as the operational managers
professional group and policy makers professional group is obviously
a continuation of the ideas behind the Next Steps programme, although
it was never as simple as that and there were always policy making
people in the agencies (or at least in some of them). However,
the reverse was not necessarily true and there has been a very
bad experience I think of transferring people who have been good
at operational management and delivering services into policy
jobs in the centre. That is still extremely weak. In that sense
the centre has not changed that much I do not think; it is still
very much the Whitehall Village that was described 30 years ago
by academic colleagues and investigators then.
Q162 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Is Sir Andrew
Turnbull crying wolf: "I want this to happen, I'm fed up"?
Are they crocodile tears?
Professor Talbot: I am not privy
to the sorts of discussions that go on in Whitehall but my guess
would be that the Prime Minister is extremely unhappy with "delivery";
it is not happening as well as he would like and I would expect
a third term Labour Government will want to change that. I have
seen that the Civil Service is to some extent getting the blame
for that and I think there will be an attempt to change things.
I suspect some of what is going on is a pre-emptive move by the
Civil Service. I cannot believe it is a coincidence that you get
that sort of initiative at the same time as three previous heads
of the Civil Service make statements attacking policy making in
government, the role of politicians in government and defending
the Civil Service.
Q163 Mr Liddell-Grainger: I think Nick
Montagu made it quite clear. Do you want to add anything to that?
Professor Hood: Only to say that
I think this particular role of Cabinet Secretary and Head of
the Civil Service, Professor Talbot's argument that civil servants
are only there in a delivery role starts to become limited because
there are constitutional duties, as it were, associated with this
position. If, for instance, the election that is expected later
this year produces a hung Parliament then it will be the person
in this position together with one or two other individuals who
will advise the monarch on what to do in those circumstances.
That is not just a servant role; it is a constitutional role of
obviously key importance. Similarly the issue of the rules about
what counts as party political activity and the activity of the
Government, ultimately these are very perplexing issues but that
is what the cabinet secretary has to cope with. This is a position
which combines, as it were, some constitutional features along
with being a chief executive type of role. It is difficult to
hold these things together.
Professor Talbot: I am not saying
those roles do not exist; I think they do. I think I am beginning
to be persuaded—I am not entirely convinced about this yet—that
actually what Next Steps originally intended to do (which was
actually to separate the Civil Service into two completely different
chunks, one which deals with policy advice and the constitutional
issues and all of that and another bit dealing with service delivery).
The arguments against that have always been about policy makers
losing contact with the delivery aim. I do not think they have
very good contact with the delivery end and I do not think it
necessarily puts a barrier in the way. If you opened up the Civil
Service policy making processes and also the exchange of staff
in the way in which I was suggesting earlier, then I think those
sorts of things could easily be overcome. We have tried all sorts
of things over the last 25 years to try to change the culture
of Whitehall and I really do not think it has changed that much
for all of these attempts that have been going on. I think that
is really something that needs shaking up quite dramatically.
Q164 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Following down
that line, the head of the new policy unit is going to be Sir
Brian Bender of Defra, the man responsible for BSE, CJD, TB, ESA
payments which have gone wrong; the list goes on. It is the second
worst performing department I think after Pensions; an interesting
choice to head policy. Do you think that is a fair synopsis?
Professor Talbot: I do not think
you can personally blame him for BSE.
Q165 Mr Liddell-Grainger: No, but he
was responsible for trying to sort it out. Certainly foot and
mouth you can. Gordon brought it up very eloquently that the Northumberland
report ended up being leaked which I thought would be fairly open
policy. Is that the right man, do you think, to head policy?
Professor Talbot: I could not
comment.
Q166 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Moving onto
special advisors, there has been an enormous increase in special
advisors. We have done a report on it in this Committee. Do you
think the role of the special advisor within policy making is
the right mechanism or is it a system which really needs to be
completely overhauled?
Professor Hood: I think that you
find a role of this kind in most parliamentary democracies and
this is rather a small number of politically appointed civil servants
compared to what we see in other comparable countries. Indeed,
I think there are people who have questioned whether we even have
enough of these people rather than too many. I have met and talked
to a number of career departmental civil servants who have no
problem with the notion of special advisors and recognise that
they bring particular backgrounds skills and a particular role
to the job which they value. I do not think there is an in principle
problem with having a political Civil Service of that kind. I
think that obviously there are issues about how well the roles
are defined, but I am not sure that it is obvious that Britain
has too many of these, certainly there are far fewer than there
are, for instance, in Germany. I do not think also that it is
necessarily the case that despite these well-publicised examples
you have given, that they always lead to major friction with civil
servants.
Q167 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Is the reason
in Germany that you have more political parties making up the
government? Secondly, are they constitutionally enshrined? As
you know, we also brought forward a draft Civil Service Bill to
try to bring a lot of this up to fruition. The third point about
Germany, who is responsible for looking after them? Is it the
Civil Service or is it the government of the day?
Dr Lodge: The minister is responsible
for the advisor but not only the minister; if you are a junior
minister you are responsible for your personal advisor. That basically
means you bring in someone from your party with a party background.
The second trend in Germany is that you have increased the role
of young party background people coming into ministries to monitor
a `technocratic' administration. These people often later become
civil servants; there is a well-established role of reward where
if you were a personal advisor you are rewarded by the minister
or the parliamentary secretary of state or junior minister. You
are often rewarded by a permanent civil service post which however
is not constitutional. The role of these people is not constitutional
so official traffic has to go to the civil servant permanent state
secretary. These people only have informal powers of calling on
civil servants.
Professor Talbot: The point I
was trying to make earlier is that the role of the civil servant
in the UK in relation to the Government is so much closer to government
and so much less either legally or constitutionally separate and
independent from government than it is in a lot of other countries.
I think that is actually what produces some of the conflict and
friction when you bring in policy advisors. If you listened to
the programme last week, the revival of Yes, Minister,
the whole point about that little episode where Hacker comes into
office and brings his political advisor with him and the first
thing the Civil Service do is say, "No, the Minister has
lots of people to advise him now; you can just wait out here in
an antechamber". I think that actually symbolises the real
problem which is that there is such a close symbiosis between
the senior Civil Service and the government of the day in the
UK system that the space for political advisors is actually relatively
small within that. In other countries it is much clearer where
there is a clearer division between civil service and the politicians
part of the government and the role of political advisors is much
clearer in those circumstances. I think that is partly what generates
the friction in the UK.
Q168 Mr Liddell-Grainger: How high up
do you think somebody could be brought in from industry? Could
they come in at permanent secretary level? Or would it be a junior
role? Do you think somebody from industry could be a permanent
secretary?
Professor Talbot: From the private
sector probably not, but the way you pose the question is interesting
because that is the way the question always gets posed in the
UK. In Whitehall we have this thing called The Whitehall and Industry
Group which is responsible for doing interchange between Whitehall
and the private sector. They do not even think about the interchange
between Whitehall and local government, for example. There are
plenty of people in local government who could be brought in at
a permanent secretary level.
Q169 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Would you advocate
that?
Professor Talbot: I would certainly
advocate a much greater level of exchange in both directions between
Whitehall and local government and now the devolved assemblies
as well.
Q170 Mr Heyes: My reservation with that
idea is that local government officers are pariahs. The government
policy seems designed to emasculate and dismember local government.
Are you seriously saying we should be trying to find ways of pursuing
this?
Professor Talbot: Absolutely.
We have had one good example—but only one—where somebody
who was a local authority chief executive, Mike Bichard, came
in first of all as an agency chief executive and then as a permanent
secretary. Most people think he did an extremely good job so it
obviously can be done. What is interesting is that he is the only
case that I can think of of somebody coming from local government
into that sort of role. He is even, I think, the only person who
has come from an agency chief executive role into being a permanent
secretary, so even with the Civil Service there is a serious problem.
Q171 Mr Prentice: Can we just stick with
this because I was rather taken with what you said earlier about
the relationship between senior civil servants and the government
of the day and serial monogamy. Does that mean that the senior
people just cannot say "no"?
Professor Talbot: I think like
any marriage there is probably a certain amount of negotiation
going on over specific roles. The point I am trying to make is
that it is a very tightly organised arrangement whereas in many
other jurisdictions senior civil servants are also accountable
to the legislature, for example, and can be scrutinised by the
legislature in a way in which we do not do in our system.
Q172 Mr Prentice: You have been giving
me the impression that the problem is that the senior civil servants
just roll over.
Professor Talbot: No.
Q173 Mr Prentice: Is that not the case?
Professor Talbot: We do not know
for certain; there is not enough evidence about exactly what does
go on. I suspect there are cases where that does happen and I
expect there are cases—and I know of individual cases—where
permanent secretaries have stood up to ministers and said, "No,
Minister".
Q174 Mr Prentice: Can you tell us about
those?
Professor Talbot: No. I have been
told in confidence about some of these instances.
Q175 Mr Prentice: You need not name names.
Professor Talbot: I can think
of an example of a ministry which had just been through a big
internal planning exercise, had a set of plans about what it was
going to do which had been approved by the previous minister;
a new minister comes in and says that he wants to have a ministerial
action plan of his priorities and the permanent secretary has
said, "No, Minister. Go back and re-do the plans for the
ministry as a whole in order to incorporate them, but we are not
having two different sets of plans for the ministry". To
the politician's credit that advice was accepted. I do not know
how much that happens; there is not enough evidence about that
sort of thing.
Professor Hood: One of the realms
in which this can happen—and we know sometimes does happen—is
in the role of permanent secretaries or their equivalents as accounting
officers in which they are independently accountable to Parliament
for the legal spending of public money and we do know that there
are instances in which permanent secretaries and accounting officers
have declined to spend public money according to ministerial instructions.
Q176 Mr Prentice: It does not happen
very often.
Professor Hood: No, it does not
happen very often but we know that it happens sometimes. Again,
you will excuse me if I do not name names, but civil servants
to whom I have spoken have indicated that they have raised that
issue from time to time in their careers.
Q177 Mr Prentice: We will have Sir Andrew
Turnbull in front of us a week today. Is it the case that permanent
secretaries are part of the problem?
Professor Talbot: I think the
culture at the top of the Civil Service is part of the problem,
about the whole way in which the whole senior Civil Service is
recruited, trained and inducted into the culture of Whitehall,
and the lack of training and lack of going out into the rest of
the public sector. I would be very interested to see a senior
civil servant sent out and asked to run a local authority for
six months as a chief executive or a deputy chief executive and
see the experience that that would give them. I do think there
is still a problem. It has got better over the last 15 years;
there are more people coming in from outside; there is slightly
better training. There is certainly more diversity in recruitment
to the senior Civil Service but I still think we have an awfully
long way to go to get away from the predominant model of Oxbridge,
fast stream, straight into the top.
Q178 Mr Prentice: And it lets the country
down, that is the impact of what you are saying. When I asked
you to identify policy blunders at the very beginning you mentioned
Butler and Iraq. Do you think that was a very serious dereliction
of duty by the senior Civil Service?
Professor Talbot: I am not saying
one way or the other; I am saying what Butler said. Butler's conclusions
seem to be that there was a group-think creeping in and that is
one of the problems about the closeness of this relationship.
Butler was on that Yes, Minister programme last week which
William Hague did and one of the things that I thought was rather
neat was his description of sitting with the minister waiting
for the outcome from the Arms to Iraq Inquiry, the Scott Inquiry,
and the civil servant and the minister were sitting there together
waiting to write the reply to the Scott Inquiry. In a sense that
is a picture of the relationship between the senior Civil Service
and ministers in the UK. Yes, there is always a tension and in
certain circumstances senior civil servants will say no to ministers,
but generally speaking they have a very close relationship.
Professor Talbot: First of all,
I am not sure that it is true that there is a single type of permanent
secretary, certainly in interviews I have done in Whitehall. It
has been put to me that permanent secretaries can operate very
different styles; some are obsessed with policy and would really
like to be ministers; others are more concerned with shepherding
their sheep, as was once described to me. That is one point I
would like to make. The other point that I would want to make
would be structural or constitutional and this might come back
to your point in that if a senior business executive were to come
into the role of permanent secretary he or she might be surprised
by the fact that they are not really able to sign off on policy
in a way that can sometimes happen in other comparable systems,
so this is a role that in some ways seems very powerful but in
other ways is limited.
Q179 Mr Prentice: They can sign off in
some kinds of policies, can they not? Internal management of the
departments and so on, but we cannot have civil servants deciding
whether the country goes to war or not.
Professor Hood: No, I would agree
with that.
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