Select Committee on Public Administration Minutes of Evidence


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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