Examination of Witness (Questions 280-299)
10 MARCH 2005
SIR ANDREW
TURNBULL KCB CVO
Q280 Mr Heyes: So there is a front office
and a back office?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: There is
a back office, but it is the equation of the people who work in
the back office being somehow being less valuable to the organisation
that is wrong. If you do not get paid, if your payroll function
is hopeless, you are doing as much damage to morale as anything
else. If you are out on the front line, what you really want is
really good support. You want people who will procure good premises
for you to work in, give you good IT systems to work with. So
there is a concept of back office, but it is not a pejorative
term. But it has tended to be used as a pejorative term, in which
case it is probably better to talk about corporate functions or
support functions because it has become rather misused, that is
all I am saying. It is clear that there are back office functions
and front office functions.
Q281 Chairman: So all this banging on
about front-line staff in every speech we hear is a mistake and
it misunderstands the nature of integrated organisations and we
are to hear no more about it.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: You have
to improve both of these. The efficiency of a surgeon can be improved
by his own skill and the equipment that he has, but the people
who organise the flow of patients and the appointment systems
all contribute to his efficiency. It is a team; that is what I
am trying to get across.
Q282 Chairman: All this has really been
a mistake.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: The distinction
has been drawn too abruptly.
Q283 Mr Prentice: Except, in the Cabinet
Office memorandum which came to this Committee on the civil service
effectiveness, Cabinet Office is talking about front-line public
services.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: There are
front-line public services. I am not denying there is a distinction.
I am saying do not allow that distinction to draw you into the
trap of thinking that back-office people are a waste of space.
That kind of equation is too easily made in popular debates.
Q284 Chairman: That is what we have had.
We have had front line good, back line bad. We have been reciting
this all over the place and now it has all been a terrible mistake.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: I am trying
in some ways to redress the balance in departments. Where has
the traditional strength of the department been? It has been in
the people that lead the policy groupings. We want to build up
the HR, finance, strategy, communications and IT functions. We
have been bringing people into the civil service from outside
and that is where a lot of them have gone, because that was where
we needed to reinforce our capability.
Q285 Mr Hopkins: A different theme. There
have been profound changes in government over the last 30 years
and in the Civil Service. Clearly the model you have now is very
different from the model we had 30 years ago; you referred to
20 years yourself. The model in the past was represented, perhaps
in a humorous way, by Sir Humphrey and Jim Hacker in Yes Prime
Minister, with a strong leader of the civil service representing
the Civil Service view to the Prime Minister, giving advice and
when the Prime Minister was perhaps getting it wrong, saying "I
think, Prime Minister, you ought to do it rather differently".
That is the model and now that it has completely changed my impression
is that the Head of the Civil Service, the top echelon are now
part of the Prime Minister's team, telling people down there to
get on with it, not advising the Prime Minister, but making sure
that the prime ministerial teams' views are carried out down there.
Is that unfair?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: Like Yes
Prime Minister it is a caricature, but it is not entirely
without truth. Coming back to where we started with the Ministerial
Code, we serve the duly constituted government, we have to give
it advice, including advice such as "I would not do that
if I were you" or "This is not going to be value for
money" or whatever. However, we should not be saying there
is a kind of Treasury view or there is a Home Office view and
our job is either to persuade the incoming minister to adopt it,
or basically starve them into submission so eventually they will
come round to our view. I do not think that is our job; it is
fundamentally undemocratic to take that view, that we, the Civil
Service, should seek to impose our view of the world on the people
who are elected, who come in.
Q286 Mr Hopkins: I was saying the senior
Civil Service plus the Prime Minister's office together; not the
Civil Service, but this group who are solid with each other, who
are carrying out the wishes of the centre.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: Ministers
form strategies and detailed policies coming out of that. What
the Civil Service is then trying to do is provide a kind of unified
sense of purpose in pursuit of the objectives that have been set
by ministers, rather than wishing they were not doing this and
they will kind of hang around and hope that this will all go away.
That is what delivery is about.
Q287 Mr Hopkins: What I am trying to
get at is that in the past you would be seen as the civil servants'
man in Downing Street. Now you are the Prime Minister's man in
the Civil Service.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: No. I think
I am the leader of an organisation which is there to serve the
government of the day in helping it to develop its policies, in
organising it through the processes of government and in getting
them delivered where we deliver directly or creating the right
connections where we deliver indirectly through other parts of
the public sector or whatever. There is a sense of purpose that
we are there to get things done and make a difference to peoples'
lives, rather than saying that we do not do things like that.
It is not for us to decide how we do things or what the objectives
are. We have to create a sense of purpose. The Prime Minister
sees himself as leading that process and I am one of the people
who then connect up in turn with heads of departments, my permanent
secretary colleagues, who in turn connect up with their colleagues.
There is a sense that this is the objective which has been set,
this is the policy, this is the target that has been set and we
are trying to deliver that on behalf of the Government. If either
they change their mind or a different set of ministers comes in,
those objectives may change.
Q288 Mr Hopkins: The Cabinet Office targets
seem to relate almost entirely to the Prime Minister and not to
supporting the Cabinet as such. There is an accusation that the
Cabinet has become a cipher, just an occasional rubber stamp for
what the Prime Minister's office and you have decided, and even
that some ministers have felt frustrated by this and have left
government as a result. Is that picture unfair? Is Cabinet just
another annoyance like Parliament?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: I do not
think it is an accurate description of what the Cabinet Office
exists to do. We think of ourselves as having four functions.
One is that we support the Prime Minister in leading the Government
and that is principally the people in Number 10 itself but also
some of the things we, on our side of the door, do as well. Two
is that we are the co-ordinator of government business on behalf
of the Government as a whole. We help it transact its business,
get decisions taken, recorded, acted upon, speedily resolved.
We are a co-ordinating body. Three is that we are seeking to develop
capacity in a number of dimensions: people capacity, the ability
to develop strategies, IT, communications and so on. Four is that
we are the guardians of the constitutional settlement, propriety,
ethics, etcetera. Those are the four functions. When you come
to the targets, they relate to a sub-sector, they do not represent
and they do not capture the full dimension of our work. It is
very difficult to set a target for how good you are at supporting
the Prime Minister in leading the Government. We do have a target
for the proportion of regulatory impact assessments deemed satisfactory.
I am just distinguishing between our four main aims and the targets
which are a not very representative sub-set.
Q289 Mr Hopkins: The Cabinet Office memorandum
that we have received says that the overriding function of the
Cabinet Office is to assist in the delivery of better public services;
no reference to foreign policy, legislation, security and many
other responsibilities in terms of government. The overriding
responsibility is delivering public services. Now that is a very
different attitude to a traditional civil service, is it not?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: Yes, I think
it is. Let us look at an individual department, let us take the
DfES. I think the DfES historically would see itself as part of
the education system and having a particular role: it created
legislation, it provided the funding, set the policy and so on.
Then other people got on and did it: the education system, LEAs
and so on, delivered. Now I think they see that the department
is the leader of the system as a whole. They produce the strategy
and they set targets for educational attainment. We did not have
targets for educational attainment until recently. Historically
we saw ourselves as principally people who set policy, got it
passed into legislation and funded it. Now we are accepting there
is a further responsibility to make sure that the outcomes which
come from all that are delivered.
Q290 Mr Hopkins: Have you not in effect
become a politician yourself? I remember when you last came before
us, you said, almost as a throwaway line, that social democracy
remained now just small corners of Europe and was disappearing
and that you were really part of this new ideology, that the argument
was over and we were now all agreed that this new ideology was
the way we ran things, the business model if you like. It was
very simple. You no longer question whether or not the way we
run things is a good idea. The idea of competing philosophies,
competing ideologies, is now finished. We have all agreed that—
Sir Andrew Turnbull: We may get
an event in a few weeks' time which will put this up for grabs.
Someone could come in wanting to do things in a completely different
way, but we are serving a government which has clearly said that
improvement of public services is a major objective of its policy
and we are helping it to deliver the objectives that it has. If
there is a change of government and they want to set a completely
different set of objectives, much more emphasis on reducing taxes,
for example, much more emphasis on reducing the footprint of the
state, my job or my successor's job is to ensure that they get,
first of all, the advice on how to do that and, once the policy
is settled, the same commitment to deliver that as we are giving
to the pursuit of the current policies.
Q291 Mr Hopkins: What if a government
came in that wanted to increase the footprint of the state, actually
wanted to renationalise the railways, to raise taxes and spend
a bit more on public services, to rein in privatisation of all
kinds and started to go back to something like the world of Harold
Wilson and Jim Callaghan?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: If they put
that before the nation in their manifesto, their mandate trumps
my mandate every time. If that is their policy and it has been
endorsed in an election, they are entitled then to expect the
civil service of the day to assist them in delivering that policy.
That is what democracy is about.
Q292 Mr Hopkins: Indeed I agree with
you. I agree with you very strongly, but you used to sound very
different from Sir Nigel Wicks who was a more traditional civil
servant of the old kind, who saw his role as policy adviser and
carrying out the wishes of government, but not actually being
involved too politically.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: I would not
say that I am involved politically, in the sense that if these
ministers decide to change their policies or a different group
comes in with some different policies, I am there to serve them
and if they have the mandate to do that, then I am not going to
try to sabotage that, or slow it down or whatever.
Q293 Mr Hopkins: I am trying to get to
my conclusion and I am taking rather a long time about it. My
impression, and we have talked to colleagues here and met public
servants at the local level, is that they are acutely conscious
that there is an ideological drive coming from the centre about
how things are now done and there is a nervousness about this;
certainly I know this is true of the health service. We have moved
dramatically away from the old world which was pluralistic, with
competing institutions if you like, and where local responsibilities
were quite strong, local councillors were independent—democratic
with their own strong finances. That is no longer the case, that
we have moved toward a world, and it is very strange, a world
that I think Lenin would recognise much more than perhaps an old
pluralist like me.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: Is Britain
a highly centralised place? It is a highly centralised place and
you regret that, but that is the democratic choice that people
make. What you have to remember is that I worked for many years
in the Treasury when privatisation and market testing was absolutely
the thing of the day. If we have a government which is giving
a strong lead as to what it wants, it can rely on the civil service
to pursue that with commitment. I do not think it is just the
commitment: what we are getting better at is actually just doing
it.
Q294 Mr Hopkins: My final question is
about this pluralistic idea. There now seems very little opportunity
to make any effective challenge to the all-pervasive neo-liberal
ethos, if you like. Civil servants who do not fit, civil servants
who are perhaps sceptics about the current philosophy are squeezed
out, marginalised and are no longer welcome, particularly at the
top. If things go wrong and if things are not working, there is
no-one with an alternative model, because they have all been squeezed
out. The great advantage, would you agree, of our old system,
was that at least there were alternatives? They were coherent,
with highly intelligent people supporting both sides of an argument.
Nowadays that has all gone because opposition has been combed
out and the Civil Service unified within one ideology.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: I am quite
confident that if we have a change of direction, most of the skills
that we have learned about delivering things better will be useful.
You need project management skills, where the project is to build
something up, or the project is to reduce it. It is not our job
to decide which of those two alternatives it is, but whichever
it is, we have to be competent and effective at doing it.
Mr Hopkins: We are talking about the
effectiveness of the civil service and I could pursue that theme
at greater length, but it would probably take too much time.
Q295 Chairman: You have just explained
how genetically promiscuous civil servants are, that is that they
will work for anybody really. It has often been said that in the
run-up to 1997 civil servants were in the mood for change and
they were very supportive of the idea of a new government coming
in, the change of direction you talked about. You are saying yes,
to that, assenting to the proposition.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: No, I am
saying that I recognise the question.
Q296 Chairman: Oh, I thought you were
recognising and assenting to it. In terms of what you say about
how civil servants respond to different directions, how would
you read the mood now?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: 1997 was
a bit like 1979. There was a sense that change was going to happen,
the people wanted a change of direction. The Civil Service, half
a million people, is a huge sample. MORI tends to sample about
2,000 people at the most; here we have a sample of about half
a million people. It is not surprising therefore, if the mood
of the nation is that it is time for a change, that the mood of
the Civil Service, as a very large sample of it, would be pretty
much the same. However, you could have said that about 1992, when
one expected there to be a change of government and there was
not. I would hope that that government would say "We got
the same quality of service and commitment, even though we were
rather surprisingly returned".
Q297 Chairman: You are closer to it than
the rest of us. Is the mood one of continuity at the moment or
would they like a change of direction?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: I do not
think I should comment on that. The answer is that we will operate
with commitment whoever comes in.
Q298 Iain Wright: Paragraph 5 of your
memorandum on this is one of the most political things I have
read in months "A great deal of progress has already been
made. Hospital waiting lists have fallen dramatically". I
could just show that to Michael Howard or my Conservative opponent
and say "There you go". Surely you are very political.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: I think each
of those statements—waiting times did come down—can
be objectively justified.
Q299 Iain Wright: So when we talk about
the Opposition, it is false. If Michael Howard stands up at Prime
Minister's Question Time and talks about the effectiveness of
the National Health Service or the fact that crime is not coming
down, quite rightly the Prime Minister can turn round and say
that the civil servants have shown us this. You are a political
vehicle for the governing party, are you not? You are providing
the evidence there. You are providing the ammunition that the
Prime Minister can throw back at the Leader of the Opposition.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: We are. There
is a phrase "Are we serial monogamists?". We are serial
monogamists, but we have to do it in a way which demonstrates
to the Opposition that they can have the same confidence, that
if they form the government they will get served with equal commitment.
We can objectively justify each of the statements here about the
targets we have been set.
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