Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180-191)
3 MARCH 2005
PROFESSOR CHRISTOPHER
HOOD, DR
MARTIN LODGE
AND PROFESSOR
COLIN TALBOT
Q180 Mr Prentice: We have had a memorandum
from the Civil Service Commissioners and they tell us that there
is a need for a greater clarity about the respect of rules and
responsibilities of ministers and permanent secretaries in the
management of departments. Are you surprised by that statement?
Professor Hood: I think that it
may well be that, certainly according to interviewees I have spoken
to, there has been a tendency—so those interviewees have
told me—over the past couple of decades or so for ministers
to demand more in the way of management ability from permanent
secretaries.
Q181 Mr Prentice: Then why do the permanent
secretaries not say no, that is not their job?
Professor Hood: Should they do
that?
Q182 Mr Prentice: Well why do they not?
Professor Hood: The permanent
secretary might well do so but I think that it may not be quite
so well understood as in the past, that is my point. There is
a demarcation of roles and that may be what is behind that memorandum
that you have.
Professor Talbot: There is a lot
of variability in that and most of the evidence is that you get
some ministers who are extremely laissez-faire towards the internal
micro-management issues and some who are extremely hands-on and
want to get involved in the detail. Derek Lewis's account of the
differences between Ken Clarke and Michael Howard as Home Secretary
is extremely illuminating, where one was very much hands-off and
allowing the director general of the prison service to get on
with it with a broad framework and the other was extremely hands-on
and involved in a lot of micro-management issues. I think there
is plenty of evidence that that is the case. In general there
is always this tension between ministers wanting not just to set
broad policy and broad resources and targets and allow civil servants
and public service organisations to get on with it, but actually
wanting to get involved in the details of implementation.
Q183 Mr Prentice: When Sir Andrew Turnbull
comes before us next Thursday, should I tell him to get a grip
and make sure that permanent secretaries say no to ministers when
ministers are trying to encroach on their territory?
Professor Talbot: It depends.
I interviewed Sir Robin Butler about the arrangements for the
Next Steps agencies about 10 years ago and I asked him about the
fact that despite the fact that agencies had framework documents
which laid down the government's arrangements for the agencies
and what ministers should and should not be involved in and so
on, there was plenty of evidence of ministers intervening in all
sorts of operational decisions which they really should not have
been involved with. Robin Butler's position at that point was
that that is the constitution of the UK. Ministers are accountable
to Parliament for everything that goes on within their ministry
and therefore they have a right to intervene in every issue. I
do not know whether that doctrine has changed at the top, but
I suspect that it has not.
Mr Prentice: You have just reminded me
of Norman Fowler's book Ministers Decide. Has anyone read
that?
Q184 Chairman: I am not even sure that
Mrs Fowler has. Colin, you are arguing very much that we should
get more access to what civil servants get up to. They should
be scrutinised far more openly and directly and that bears on
this last point about political responsibility. Surely we want
it both ways, do we not? We want ministers to be accountable for
what goes on in their departments and we see the dangers, do we
not, that if we simply had civil servants being trotted out so
that ministers could say, "It wasn't me, it was the chap
in my department who screwed up" that would let ministers
off the hook. What would be the gains that we would get from opening
up civil servants in that way?
Professor Talbot: I do not think
that you would get rid of problems about who is directly accountable
entirely; that is always going to be a problem. To some extent
the creation of the Next Steps agencies has opened it up a little
bit and there are obviously gains to be made with that. The Derek
Lewis affair is a very good example; the CSA is another example
actually where we have gone through several chief executives who
have carried the can for what I think are policy failures which
are the responsibility of senior civil servants and ministers.
You will change the game; you will change the way in which these
things are dealt with. One of the big differences is that it will
be much more publicly accountable and we will be able to see what
is going on, you will be able to see what is going on and you
will be able to investigate a bit more. That will not stop people
trying to hide behind, shift the blame and all the rest of it.
That goes on now anyway, but at least we will be able to see a
bit better what actually does happen.
Q185 Chairman: And you were not worried
about the loss of political accountability?
Professor Talbot: I do not think
there is necessarily a loss of political accountability. You might
actually be able to pin people down more. In the Derek Lewis affair
if Parliament had actually carried out its role then Michael Howard
would have gone as well because if you go through the documentation
it is absolutely clear that everything that Derek Lewis got the
blame for Michael Howard had signed off.
Q186 Chairman: At the moment ministers
get into deep trouble if they try to say, "I am not responsible
for what happened; actually it was the responsibility of this
civil servant".
Professor Talbot: That is exactly
what Michael Howard did say. He said, "I am responsible for
policy, Derek Lewis is responsible for operations". This
was an operational failure; Derek Lewis got sacked.
Q187 Chairman: That was in the context
of the agency issue. You are wanting to extend this more generally
so that there is visibility and accountability for policy of particular
civil servants and I am asking if there are going to be great
dangers in that too?
Professor Talbot: Not necessarily.
If civil servants give policy advice to ministers it is up to
the ministers to decide whether or not they accept that policy
advice. You cannot blame the civil servants for the policy advice
being wrong at policy advice level. You cannot blame civil servants
for giving faulty policy advice. At the end of the day it is up
to ministers to decide and I think you can blame ministers if
they have not taken other sources of policy advice. I think part
of the problem in our system is that we do have this hermetically
sealed policy system where it is actually very difficult for other
policy sources to get into the system.
Q188 Chairman: So far as the Civil Service
is taking steps now to identify policy responsibilities far more
clearly so that people take responsibility for particular programmes
and are held to account in a managerial sense, surely that meets
the objective that you do not have the diffusion of responsibility;
you have very clear management responsibility put in. That is
what we surely need to achieve. We do not need it in the way you
describe it where there is the loss of political accountability.
Professor Talbot: I do not agree
that there is necessarily a loss of political accountability.
Q189 Chairman: You mentioned in passing,
Colin, that you thought the real issues were to deal with the
nexus between the Cabinet Office, the Treasury and Number 10.
I would like to know what you mean that the real issues are to
be found there. What are the issues and what do we need to do
about it?
Professor Talbot: I think it is
essentially an issue about coordination of policy between those
and who drives policy. My colleague, Professor Sue Richards of
the University of Birmingham—who is sitting behind me somewhere—made
this point to the Treasury Select Committee some years ago: you
do not put the finance department in charge of policy; the finance
department is there to help facilitate policy, it is not there
to run it. I think part of the problem we have always had in the
UK is that the Treasury has had an extraordinary role in the policy
making process and I think that has got much stronger in the last
eight years, and certainly that is a view within Treasury and
within Downing Street and the Cabinet Office as well. The policy
making capacity of both Downing Street and the Cabinet Office
is not—as some people have suggested—too strong; I
actually think it is too weak. I think the capacity to actually
shape policy and drive it from the centre is actually fairly weak
in our system.
Q190 Chairman: Would this be remedied
by a fully-fledged prime minister's department?
Professor Talbot: I do not know
whether we need a prime minister's department; we certainly need
something stronger than we have at the moment. I suspect some
people think it might be remedied by the current chancellor moving
into Number 10 and taking some of those powers with him.
Q191 Chairman: We had the question earlier
about special advisors and all that, but do you think if we increased
the amount of politically appointed people for central government—as
we have heard is the case in other systems—that is liable
to increase the overall effectiveness of what the Civil Service
does?
Dr Lodge: That was part of a Germanist
question, may I say. In contrast to political civil servants I
spoke earlier about personal advisors. In Germany political civil
servants are 99.9% people who have an administrative career behind
them so they combine the political rationality of a party but
loyalty towards a particular faction of the particular party plus
an understanding of what an administration is about. In that sense
you do not get an in and out system of people who have never seen
a bureaucracy and do not know how to lead it. They have considerable
experience and bringing in people who have no idea would not occur
in that sense.
Professor Talbot: If you kept
the existing system of policy making and you brought in a lot
more special advisors you would be setting up a situation for
a great deal of conflict and friction. If you changed the system
to a more pluralistic one which was more open to various forms
of policy advice coming into the system and the process was seen
as much more one of collecting different views and bringing them
together in a more open way, then I do not think that would be
a problem, but I do think under the current system if you brought
in a lot more special advisors you would be setting up a system
of conflict between them and the permanent Civil Service.
Professor Hood: In the memorandum
that I put in with my colleague I suggested that there is a need
for evaluation of the quality of policy advice that comes from
the Civil Service by civil servants and I am not sure that it
would always be beneficial to do that in an open way because if
you really want a learning process you may need some space, as
it were, for civil servants as professionals to reflect on their
successes and failures and if you did want to benchmark the quality
of policy that civil servants come up with then there may be an
argument for having an element of discretion in that process just
for the same reason as you have an anonymous reporting of near
misses in air traffic systems or medical systems. I might want
to shade a little what my colleague says. If you really want to
have learning and you want sharing of experience et cetera, not
just a process that will always accentuate the negative, then
you may want to have space for a process that is not completely
open in that sense.
Professor Talbot: The other part
of this is the scrutiny role of Parliament and if you want more
special advisors I suggest you get them in Parliament enhancing
the role of Parliament to scrutinise the executive in the way
it is done in a number of other countries. In the United States
they have a Congressional Budget Office and the GAO working in
a much more activist way than we have here and most of the committees
have quite large staffs. I know it is a different constitutional
system but I do think there is still scope for enhancing that
here. We are very weak at that sort of thing.
Chairman: On the note of giving us more
resources I think we will end. We are very grateful for your time
this afternoon. I know we have covered a lot of ground fairly
thinly but we are very grateful to you for coming and helping
us with our inquiry. Thank you very much indeed.
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