Examination of Witness (Questions 192-199)
10 MARCH 2005
SIR ANDREW
TURNBULL KCB CVO
Q192 Chairman: May I call the meeting
to order and welcome our witness this afternoon, Sir Andrew Turnbull,
the Head of the Home Civil Service and Cabinet Secretary. We are
very delighted to see you as ever; this may well be the last time
that we have an occasion like this, so it is a good moment to
ask you some questions about how you see the Civil Service developing
and how you see the state of the reform programme that you have
put in place. As you know, we are having a general look at what
we call Civil Service effectiveness, so it is particularly good
to have you at the end of your tenure. I do not know whether you
would like to say anything by way of general introduction.
Sir Andrew Turnbull:
No; we sent you a memo and we will work with that.
Q193 Chairman: Yes, we had a memo. First
of all let me just clear away some of the stuff which is in the
air at the moment, lest we get bogged down in it later on. Your
tenure, in some respects has been a fairly turbulent one in terms
of some of the reflections which have been made on the role of
the Cabinet and the Cabinet Secretary and obviously the Butler
report had some fairly devastating things to say about all of
this. Something went wrong with Cabinet government, did it not,
in the run-up to the Iraq war? What do you think it was?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: Am I accepting
that proposition? It is rather paradoxical that Cabinet met 24
or 25 times and discussed Iraq over a period of a year and discussed
it more than any other item. I do not think it is true that Cabinet
members lacked the opportunity to express their view. There is
a phrase in Butler about bringing to bear their political wisdom
or whatever; they were certainly not short of opportunities to
do it. It is also true that most of the diplomatic and military
planning took place in a separate smaller group—that is
not necessarily surprising—with the Foreign Secretary, Defence
Secretary, Chief of Defence Staff, Head of SIS, Chairman of the
JIC and so on. They met regularly; they also must have met 20
or 30 times. They were not constituted as a group with a name
or a number and the Prime Minister has said that if he were doing
it again he would do that. That group had the papers, had a lot
of information in front of them and I do not think they failed
the test of not having the information to hand. A lot of this
was done in a very public way; people could see it on their television
sets every night. No-one was short of any kind of briefing or
knowledge of the diplomatic to-ings and fro-ings in the UN. At
the key point, just before the decision on whether to engage or
not to engage in military action, knowing by that stage that they
did not have a second UN resolution to rely on, a special Cabinet
meeting was set up to address that issue and with one dissenter,
who resigned, they approved military action. How bad is that for
cabinet government? If you look at Cabinet in general, that I
do not think the way Cabinet has worked has changed dramatically
in the last two or three years. Back in the mid-1980s, they were
meeting about 40 times a year and only taking 10 or 15 papers.
That was a pattern which had been established late in Mrs Thatcher's
time, through Mr Major's time and continues to this day. The major
work of clearing policy has been in the cabinet committees, committees
like the DA, which the deputy prime minister chairs, which is
a very active committee. It meets probably at least once a month
and it also clears a large number of issues through correspondence.
The role of Cabinet, whereby it is not the forum for detailed
decision making, is something which has been around for at least
20 years.
Q194 Chairman: You have put all that
on the record, but the problem is that we have the Butler report,
which tells us with authority and documentation that something
went wrong.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: Something
went wrong, but was it necessarily the way Cabinet was meeting?
He said something to the effect that cabinets will operate in
different ways and can be operated in different styles and I am
not concluding that the way that Cabinet is now run is any less
effective than it was earlier.
Q195 Chairman: Come on.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: He said it.[1]
Q196 Chairman: He said that the informality
caused a problem and he said that the changes to key posts at
the head of the Cabinet secretariat lessened the support of the
machinery of government for the collective responsibility of the
Cabinet in the vital matter of war and peace. I mean, he is pretty
strong.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: He is then
talking about the creation of a post of intelligence and security
co-ordinator and I do not agree with him on that.
Q197 Chairman: You are not dissenting.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: I am dissenting
from that. I do not agree that the splitting of my post would
deprive the Cabinet of any advice to which it was entitled.
Q198 Chairman: This is not, by the way,
the Butler suggestion. That was the Butler suggestion, but what
I am putting to you now comes out of what you have just said,
which is that it has been said, that one of the problems is that
you were given the delivery task by the Prime Minister and that
somehow the fact that you went off to do delivery meant that you
took your eye off the ball as far as the kind of normal underpinnings
of the Cabinet Secretary role. You would clearly reject that suggestion.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: Under the
previous arrangement, the Cabinet Secretary also had responsibility
for delivery and was trying to cover intelligence and security.
My contention is that after 9/11, this would have become unmanageable.
The intelligence and security portfolio became a great deal more
important and it was not something which should be dealt with
in a sense as the second string of the Cabinet Secretary; it should
have someone devoted to it full time. The arrangements I made
were designed to improve the coverage of the advice that was available
on intelligence and security. When I came in, I agreed with David
Omand that he would spend roughly 50% of his time on that and
the other 50% he would be the accounting officer for the Cabinet
Office. What happened was that he eventually ended up spending
100% of his time on that and we then created a separate post which
we called the managing director, who is the senior manager of
the Cabinet Office. That is a sign that this portfolio needed
someone very senior, very able, working full time. That created
the possibility of improving the service and advice which ministers
received and I believe it has done that.
Q199 Chairman: Just so we have this clear,
are you wanting to dissent from the broad Butler judgment that
something went wrong with the way in which the cabinet system
operated?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: The thing
that went wrong was that the intelligence was not as good.
1 Note by Witness: "We do not suggest that
there is or should be an ideal or unchangeable system of collective
Government, still less that procedures are in aggregate any less
effective than in earlier times . . .". Butler Report, para
611. Back
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