UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To
be published as HC 307-iv
House of COMMONS
MINUTES OF EVIDENCE
TAKEN BEFORE
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION SELECT COMMITTEE
CIVIL
SERVICE EFFECTIVENESS
Thursday 10 March 2005
SIR ANDREW TURNBULL KCB CVO
Evidence heard in Public Questions 192-334
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Oral Evidence
Taken
before the Public Administration Select Committee
on
Thursday 10 March 2005
Members present
Tony Wright, in the Chair
Mr David Heyes
Mr Kelvin Hopkins
Mr Ian Liddell-Grainger
Mr Gordon Prentice
Brian White
Iain Wright
________________
Witness:
Sir Andrew Turnbull KCB CVO,
Secretary of the Cabinet and Head of the Home Civil Service, examined.
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 proper meeting was set up to address that issue and with one dissension, who
resigned, they approved that. How bad
is that for cabinet government? The
other question is, 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 Thatcher, through 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 clears a large number of
issues through correspondence. That
structure within Cabinet, which 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.
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 per cent of his time on that and the other
50 per cent he would be the accounting officer for the Cabinet Office. What happened was that he eventually ended up
spending 100 per cent 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
and 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.
Q200 Chairman: The issue is not just about intelligence: the issue, and Butler could not be clearer
about it, was that something went wrong with the way that Cabinet business was
managed. Indeed not only Butler but
your immediate predecessor, now Lord Wilson, says that it will come as no
surprise that he agrees with this judgment on the conduct of government.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: He ran the Cabinet in
exactly the same way as it was operated in my time. I have changed it to some extent, to build back so that there is more
Cabinet activity now than there was then.
Q201 Chairman: I put it to you, that we have two former cabinet
secretaries, one of whom has conducted an exhaustive inquiry into events
leading up to the Iraq war, saying that something went wrong with the way that
cabinet government was organised. I
just really want to know whether you assent to that or dissent from it.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: In relation to the Iraq war,
it is really rather a strange example to choose, to say that this was the best
example of the failings of Cabinet, when in fact it was the issue that they
discussed more often and more intensively than any other. You could make this accusation more
general: is the Prime Minister's style,
working more in small groups, unhelpful? I would argue that you could make that more in relation to issues
other than Iraq, which was actively discussed in Cabinet week after week.
Q202 Chairman: This has crystallised just now, has it not,
around the question of whether the Cabinet saw the full legal advice from the Attorney
General?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: Okay, let me explain the
position there. The Attorney General
was working on this issue about powers, legality, over months probably and then
he got to the point where he had to make up his mind and he then produced his
definitive view. It is set out in the Parliamentary
Question (PQ). He was invited to
Cabinet - at that stage he only came when invited; he now attends regularly -
and he in a sense took Cabinet through the logic of the argument, the so-called
revival argument. He took them through
it and they had a chance to ask questions, so they got direct from him his
conclusion and they had a chance to hear directly from him the explanation, how
the argument was constructed and the chance to ask questions.
Q203 Chairman: But you know, because this has been raised
with you, that the terms of the Ministerial Code are absolutely clear on this,
that when there is discussion of the Attorney General's advice, his full advice
has to be made available.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: He gave his definitive view
at that time. He has said that this was
not a summary of something, it was his view which he had formed at the
time. Now paragraph 23 of the
Ministerial Code says that if you put in a memorandum to a committee and you
have taken the Attorney General's advice, you cannot just pick and choose bits
of it, you have to produce the whole thing. The purpose of that is to ensure that when the Attorney General has
advised a department and that department then puts in a paper to a committee
like DA, his views are accurately represented.
Now this requirement that the Attorney's views are accurately
represented, they are not paraphrased, they are not chosen selectively, was
covered by inviting him personally to attend the meeting. So the problem which paragraph 23 is seeking
to address is a sort of Chinese whispers problem and there was no prospect of
Chinese whispers, because he came personally and he set it out himself.
Q204 Chairman: Paragraph 23 does not say "Oh, by the way, if
he wants to turn up instead, we need not have the full legal advice available". It says "... the conclusions may if necessary
be summarised but, if this is done, the complete text of the advice should be
attached". It could not be clearer.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: He does not regard, and he
has said this, he does not regard the statement in the PQ as a summary, he regards
it as his conclusive view.
Q205 Chairman: But does this not precisely make the Butler
point, that if you proceed on this kind of informal basis, that is "Could you
turn up and give us a chat about ..." ---
Sir Andrew Turnbull: It was not on an informal
basis. A meeting was deliberately arranged
to address this question. He came
prepared with the advice, he took them through it, he explained it. It was not an informal meeting; it was a
full meeting of the Cabinet.
Q206 Chairman: But you cannot interrogate the advice, if you
do not have access to the full text, can you?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: It was the full text. This was his conclusive view and he not only
gave them that, he gave them an explanation of the thinking behind it and why
he had reached that view.
Q207 Chairman: Did the full legal advice exist on that
precise day?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: That is the full legal
advice; that is the conclusion that he reached.
Q208 Chairman: We know that a summary of the advice was
delivered to Parliament.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: He does not describe that
thing as a summary.
Q209 Chairman: Well it has been described as a summary, but
I guess that he has also described it not as a summary.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: On 25 February he said that it
did not purport to be a summary of his advice.
Q210 Chairman: On the day that this discussion in the Cabinet
took place without the full text, did a full text exist?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: The full text was ... He set
out his conclusions in these ten paragraphs and that is his conclusion.
Q211 Chairman: So there is no full legal advice beyond a
summary.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: There may be other advice,
but this was the conclusion that he finally got to.
Q212 Chairman: Yes, we know about the summary and we know
about the conclusion.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: This is the conclusion that
he got to.
Q213 Chairman: But on the day that the Cabinet had this
discussion, not the full text, all I am asking is whether there was a full advice
somewhere that they could have had access to on that day?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: By the time that he had to
give this advice, we then knew that we had no second resolution to rely
on. He therefore had to give a view and
he gave that view and that is what is set out in the PQ.
Q214 Chairman: I still do not know whether a full advice
existed somewhere on the day that discussion took place. But you did not feel, as Cabinet Secretary,
knowing the terms of the Ministerial Code and everything else, that that
discussion that took place in Cabinet with the presence of the Attorney General
should have had the full text available to Cabinet members at that time.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: What he provided, which was
needed by ministers making a decision, the chief of defence staff committing troops
and I, on behalf of civil servants committing the spending of money, was a
clear view as to whether what they were doing was legal and he provided that
and he provided the rationale for it in that statement.
Q215 Mr Prentice: Well I think this is very
unsatisfactory. You are inviting us to
believe that the country was taken to war on the basis of a little memorandum
setting out the conclusions of the Attorney's advice fleshed out with the
rationale. No larger document was
available, the document was not circulated in advance, which I think is
appalling given the momentous nature of the decision that was taken, and in the
Ministerial Code in paragraph 8, it says that memoranda should be circulated in
sufficient time to enable ministers to read and digest them and to be properly
briefed and then it goes on to say that memoranda should be circulated at least
two full working days and a weekend in advance and so on and so forth. This is just a modest select committee, but
we have papers circulated beforehand so we can read them and reflect on the
issues and feel prepared and here we have the country being taken to war on the
basis of a two-page summary, conclusion, circulated around a cabinet table.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: You had an exchange with
Robin Butler back in October and he said that in the world in which we are operating
and the speed at which we are operating some of these assumptions about how far
in advance papers are circulated are very difficult to sustain and this was an
example of that case. This was a fast-moving
situation. We did not know the previous
weekend what the position was going to be; this was all still being argued out
in New York and in Washington. That was
the reason why it was not done according to this leisurely timetable. This was not a group of people who came into
this thing cold; they had been following this thing developing month after
month.
Q216 Mr Prentice: Yes, but very often not on the basis of
circulated papers. Butler says
this. I characterised it as PowerPoint
presentations, but it probably was not even that; it was kind of sofa decision
making.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: These were not sofa decisions. All these things took place in the Cabinet
room, with all 20 of them sitting around.
Q217 Mr Prentice: We had an exchange on this a year ago when
Clare Short said that you allowed decision making to crumble on your watch and
she alleged that the defence and overseas policy committee had not met. I asked you at the time whether that was true
and you said "No, not really" and then you went on to say ---
Sir Andrew Turnbull: What was not true, what I was
denying, was whether I had allowed Cabinet decision making to crumble. I explained that, from the time that I was
working in Number 10 with Mrs Thatcher and John Major, proceedings of Cabinet
have not changed that dramatically.
Q218 Mr Prentice: You said that to me a year ago as well, but
in the intervening period, we have had Butler and Butler tells the world that
his committee are concerned that the informality and circumscribed character of
the government's procedures, which they saw in the context of policy making
towards Iraq, risk reducing the scope for informed collective political judgment. Now that is the point, is it not, if you
just circulate the thing?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: If you meet 24 or 25 times,
there is opportunity for informed exercise of political judgment.
Q219 Mr Prentice: How many times did the Cabinet consider the
unfolding legal advice before it crystallised just before we went to war? How many times in these 24 or 25 meetings of
the Cabinet?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: All the time we were working
towards a position in which there was a second resolution of the UN and at the
very last stage it became apparent that this was not going to be secured, a few
days before this event. So what was
required was advice: now that we are in
this situation, what is your - to the Attorney General - advice? Obviously the preference all the way through
would have been to have had a second resolution, in which case there would have
been no problem. But this issue, the
collapse of the coalition in the Security Council, came very late and so a new
situation had arisen. That is why this
view did not emerge before.
Q220 Mr Prentice: Last question on this. Given that we had 24 or 25 Cabinet meetings
on Iraq, why was it, after all this discussion that the Prime Minister was
famously ignorant of the distinction between battlefield and strategic
weapons? Can you explain that? It has always mystified me.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: I am not sure that is a
distinction that meeting in a group of 25 one would necessarily have come
to. The more detailed meeting would
have been the place where this would have been drawn out. Anyway, he did not.
Mr Prentice: I am an innocent abroad
then.
Chairman: I feel this is going into
areas where we have been too many times.
Q221 Iain Wright: I do think the criticism of
yourself, Sir Andrew, by Butler is absolutely astonishing. You said that there were 24 or 25 meetings of
the Cabinet, but Butler talks about the absence of cabinet papers on the
agenda, so that ministers could obtain briefings in advance. He goes on to say that 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. It is all your fault,
is it not?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: But it is not true. I have explained to you that the change I made
improved the support he got, otherwise I would have been doing all this in my
spare time and that would not have been satisfactory. To expect a Cabinet Secretary, who is
addressing the Prime Minister's promise to improve delivery of public services
at a time when the security requirement of the country is rising dramatically -
and you can see that even in what is going on over the road today - to try to
cover both would have been a major failing.
To have said "Well, I'll just carry on with all the responsibilities I
have, I will not reinforce the capacity I have, I will just let it carry on and
hope that I can manage it all" would have been a major error and I did not make
that error.
Q222 Iain Wright: So because of that, because
of this breakdown in the machinery of government for the momentous decision to
go to war, do you think you will be the last traditional Cabinet Secretary? You say that the importance given to delivery
and the importance of giving policy advice to ministers cannot now be done in twenty-first
century government.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: I should be surprised if my
successor were to want to reabsorb the responsibility and become the intelligence
and security co-ordinator and hang on to everything else he has. My preference would be to leave the
arrangement as it is, and indeed, we have appointed a successor to Sir David
Omand who is also very experienced in this area. There is a separate question, an old chestnut, of whether a
cabinet secretary and head of the Home Civil Service should be separated. All I can say is that it has been done twice
before and it was a miserable failure both times. The reason it was a miserable failure was that when you get to
the top of an organisation, you cannot separate out the responsibility for
delivering the business of the organisation from the responsibility for
developing the capacity of the organisation and the third big responsibility
which is maintaining the regime of the propriety ethics, what in commerce they
call the brand reputation, though someone has to bring those all together. If you separate them out, you have to have
someone above that who can bring it all together. You either do not get the proper co-ordination between the current
business and the capacity to do it, or you effectively generate a requirement
for someone else who can bring it all together.
Q223 Iain Wright: It is not working is it? You were busy working on the delivery of services
on the front line at a time when the Cabinet was considering, in a fairly
detailed manner, whether to go to war or not.
You were pulled in two directions.
Surely, these two different things, running the civil service and
providing effective machinery of government, cannot be the same thing.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: I do not run the civil service. I see that it is run. Okay?
There are lots of things which take place which I do not deal with
personally. My job is to make sure that
there are people in place, properly equipped, properly trained, with the right
skills and with the right definition of the task to do it. That is how you run an organisation of half
a million people. In the case of
intelligence and security, that is exactly what I did. Now the question is: what advice did the Prime Minister get? Clearly in the area of intelligence, there
was a failing, but I do not think that was a failing either of me or the intelligence
and home security co-ordinator. It all
goes further back and that is where Butler digs into what went wrong, the group
things of it all.
Q224 Chairman: The intelligence and security co-ordinator,
with that role having been hived off, was not attending Cabinet. You were.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: He is in the next-door office. We meet and talk frequently. He reads the Cabinet minutes. The fact that he is not actually in the room does
not mean that he does not know what is going on. He is attending the JIC meeting every week. He is actually very well plugged into all the
discussions that are going on around the dossier, the developing intelligence
picture. He would get that. Cabinet is not the place to go and pick up
the emerging intelligence view. You are
much better off, which is what Sir David Omand did, being integrated into the
JIC and the work of the agencies.
Q225 Mr Prentice: May I ask you to what extent the government
has implemented the recommendations of the Butler report? Just a few days after Butler was published,
the Prime Minister said that the recommendations were going to be implemented.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: There is a project which is
coming to fruition shortly - I think it is called the Butler implementation
group, known colloquially as BIG - which is looking at a host of
recommendations around the intelligence area.
He has said that if he were in the same position again, he would
formally constitute the smaller group with a proper identity. He has not done that because we have not had
such a situation. However, if there
were another campaign in some other part of the world, that is what he would
do. We have also built back, through
papers and particular presentations to Cabinet, the amount of discussion that
goes on in Cabinet. If you were simply to
measure it by the number of minutes each meeting takes place, it is now a lot
more than it was in 2002-2003, because more secretaries of state are coming
forward and there is a five-year strategy for, say, local government or DTI or
whatever, public health, a whole variety of them, and that is then presented to
Cabinet. If that were the only time,
chance, they had to address this issue, it would be unsatisfactory, but in
addition the detailed texts of these documents are then going round, typically sometimes
at meetings and sometimes in correspondence at the DA committee. So ministers are getting two bites of the
cherry, one a kind of second reading debate kind of thing, which is the
presentation; and the other is a chance
for their departments to see this and put in their own departmental view.
Q226 Mr Prentice: Just a very quick question. Butler reported on 14 July 2004, nine months
ago, something like that. When is this
little group that you just told us about going to report on which
recommendations are going to be adopted by the government and which are going
to be rejected? You made it clear on
the question of Sir David Omand and yourself.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: He did not actually
recommend that we reverse that. He drew
attention to it as an issue. I do not think
it is one of those issues that is formally a recommendation, in other words printed
in bold. He drew attention to it as an
issue. I do not happen to agree with,
not the conclusions that he drew on, because he did not draw any conclusions
---
Q227 Mr Prentice: I understand all that and no-one wants to get
sucked into the details of the Butler report, but my simple question is when is
this committee ---
Sir Andrew Turnbull: I do not know the exact
date, but they are getting quite close.
I have seen drafts of some parts of this report, so it is around.
Q228 Mr Prentice: A very leisurely timetable, is it not?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: It depends how big the task
is. If you are looking at the
resourcing and structure of analysts in SIS, this is not a kind of two-week
job, this is a serious piece of work.
Q229 Mr Prentice: And papers will be circulated beforehand?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: The report will be
circulated to all those who have a relevant interest, yes.
Q230 Chairman: Just before we extricate ourselves from this
area, I just want to have one more go at trying to find out what happened about
this wretched legal advice. We know, as a matter of fact, that when the Cabinet
had the discussion that day, the Attorney was there, he discussed it and there
was, not a formal summary, but something existed, two pages that they could
refer to. I asked you before and I
would like the answer to this. Was
there a complete text that existed at that time that they could have seen if it
had been made available to them?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: There is not a longer
version of that advice. He is dealing
with a moving situation over several weeks.
He then gets to the position where we know that we have no second
resolution and he then says "I am being asked for advice; all sorts of people
need it. These are my conclusions". He does not describe that; they do not
purport to be a summary of his advice.
It was the definitive view that he had reached; in his view sufficient
for his colleagues to be assured that he thought there was a legal basis for
military action.
Q231 Chairman: I am getting awfully puzzled; I am sure it is
my fault. We have a statement, which
may or may not be a summary that was provided in a Parliamentary Answer, made
available to us. That is not the
statement we are talking about that the Cabinet discussed on that day; we are
talking about them having access to another.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: No.
Q232 Chairman: It is the same statement.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: Yes. What was tabled was the text of the Parliamentary
Answer.
Q233 Chairman: Well in that case, why did Lord Butler tell
us, when he came to see us, that he had trouble getting access to the full
advice and indeed he had said that he might even have to go public on his
inability to get access to the full advice and then it was made available to
him. If it was only what had been made
available to us anyway, what was it that he had to ask for access to and
eventually got?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: The Attorney had been
working on this problem, earlier work, and that was what Robin Butler was
given. What the Cabinet was given was
the conclusion that he finally came to.
Q234 Chairman: Is there, or is there not a full text of the
whole legal advice in existence?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: The Parliamentary Answer is
his conclusion of all the thinking that he had done and addressing the
particular position that he was in.
Q235 Chairman: So when people say "Can we see the full legal
advice?", you are telling us that there is no full legal advice.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: There is a statement of the
view that he reached which sets out the logic of the argument. What he is saying is that other advice is
covered by legal privilege. What he put
forward is the conclusion that he reached as a result of all the thinking that
he had been doing.
Q236 Chairman: Yes, but normally the conclusion document is
one which is distilled from a larger document.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: Not necessarily, because he
had, at this point, to address the situation which was that we then knew there
was no second resolution.
Q237 Chairman: Well we know the political demands. We know that the chief of staff was saying "I
am not going to commit troops, unless I am told that it is legal". So we know the political imperatives that
were bearing on the need for it, but we also now know that there were huge
disagreements about the legal situation and so obviously the Attorney's advice
became the central document in all this.
If you are saying to us, that in fact there was not a fully-fledged
version of this ---
Sir Andrew Turnbull: He thought that this was a
self-standing statement of his view.
Q238 Chairman: Is there now a fully-fledged version of his
view?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: No, there is no other
version. This is the definitive
statement of his view.
Q239 Chairman: Well what did Robin Butler then have to ask
for access to, if the summary statement was already publicly available?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: He wanted to see some of the
work that had gone on earlier.
Q240 Mr Prentice: May I just say that Clare Short was at the Cabinet
meeting when the Attorney gave his legal advice and we have copies of a letter
that Clare sent to the Attorney. She
said "I am afraid that it is now clear to me that by failing to reveal your
full legal advice and the considerations that underpinned your final advice,
you misled the Cabinet and therefore helped obtain support for military action
improperly. This is a very serious
matter".
Clare Short was a participant as a Cabinet
minister and she believes that there is in existence ---
Sir Andrew Turnbull: The Attorney General will
write today, tomorrow, very soon, repudiating that view.
Q241 Mr Liddell-Grainger: She also says "There were then many voices
calling for me to be quiet ... and no discussion was allowed". Is that true?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: Not to my memory, no.
Q242 Mr Liddell-Grainger: It is part of Clare's letter; it is page two.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: I am not answering for her
view.
Q243 Mr Liddell-Grainger: I am just asking for your recollection. Was there discussion at the time?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: I have no recollection of
anyone saying this could not be discussed.
The whole purpose was for the Attorney General to come there and answer
questions.
Mr Liddell-Grainger: I do not understand this.
Q244 Chairman: People have been asking for the full legal
advice endlessly now. Requests have
gone in to the ombudsman, requests have gone into the information commissioner
under the new freedom of information regime and then you are saying, well there
is not any full advice anyway to ask for.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: I am not denying that there
are other papers and he is claiming legal privilege in relation to those other
papers, but he has set out his conclusion in the text of the PQ.
Q245 Chairman: All that we know; we know about the
professional privilege and we know the grounds and we know the exemptions and
we know the summary, whether it is a summary or not. It is the question of whether there did exist on that day when the
Cabinet discussed it and therefore could, in principle, have had access to it
as the Ministerial Code said that they should, whether it existed then, or whether
indeed it exists now. That is what we
are trying to get to the bottom of.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: He believes that he set out
a conclusive view which was sufficient to allow them to discharge their
responsibility and also sufficient to allow him to discharge his responsibility
to give a clear view, the conclusion that he had reached on this issue, and
that is what he said he did.
Q246 Chairman: Well you can see why Lord Butler and others
might think that it becomes very difficult for Cabinet government to operate
and to interrogate advice which is highly contentious, if the full grounds for
it are not available to them.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: Did he say that, having
looked at it, he suddenly thought that the whole world was completely
different? He did not conclude that. You
need to see the reply which the Attorney gives to this letter he has received
from Clare Short, which will come out later today or tomorrow.
Q247 Chairman: It is the sheer unnecessary difficulty of all
this which is difficult to understand.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: He is protecting a position
of legal privilege, which legal advisers, not just in government but in the
commercial world, have relied on for years and years.
Q248 Chairman: No, we understand completely about the case
for not disclosing. That is the case
which clearly will be tested shortly and we know all about that. What has arisen now is about the very status
and existence of a full advice document and you have suggested that it may not
even exist. That is a quite separate
issue.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: He regards this as his
conclusion.
Chairman: We have been round this a
few times. Let us move on.
Q249 Brian White: What do you think is the relationship between
the civil service and the private sector doing civil service type work?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: It can be a
partnership. Let us divide things into
two. There are certain functions which
the government, over time, has decided do not need to be discharged by central
government. That was basically the
privatisation debate which ran for nearly 20 years and that defined what you
might call the external boundary of the public sector. There is very little still in the public
sector that anyone is seriously considering privatising; maybe a small thing,
but nothing major. There is then a series
of services where the government is saying, we have a responsibility to deliver
this service, education, health, criminal justice, but we have choices about
which resources we use to deliver that on our behalf. In some cases, take prisons as an example,
they say we will provide custodial capacity using our own resources, which is
HM prisons, but we will discharge some of that responsibility to keep people
under lock and key, by contracting with the private sector. Now this is a debate which goes on; it is a similar debate in education, it is a
similar debate in health. You can
retain the responsibility to provide the service, you are funding it 100%, you
are determining the standards, you are determining people's eligibility and
then you can have a separate decision as to whether you do it all yourself. It is a make or buy decision and that is
being approached actually quite pragmatically.
The Prime Minister has this phrase, "What matters is what works". He does not have a view which says the health
service must always be provided by organisations owned by the health service or
staff employed by the health service; it can be a mixed provision, but it is still the health service
funded by, and people's rights to it are determined by, the government.
Q250 Brian White: So if you had a function that was being done
by a private sector company quite adequately, you would not expect the civil
service department to then try to take over that work and put those private
companies out of business.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: No.
Q251 Brian White: So, why are you doing it in the Office for
National Statistics with regard to direct mailing for people who are dead? Why are you doing it at the Department for
Transport in regard to websites that are actually showing people where to go
and spending a lot of money in doing that?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: If you believe you can
provide a better service, better value for money by enlisting the help of the
private sector, then you should do it.
Q252 Brian White: That is not what you are doing.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: You may actually want contestability,
you may actually indicate ---
Q253 Brian White: I am sorry, but you are not answering the
question. The question is that you
actually have private sector companies doing this work now and the civil
service, in two departments I have listed, Office for National Statistics,
Department for Transport, is actually seeking to put those companies out of
business and take on the work itself. Why are you doing that?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: You are talking about the
reverse.
Q254 Brian White: Absolutely.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: That is contestability
working. You do not start with a kind
of pre-judgement which says you are going to take this work over. You start with a judgment which asks whether
this work is better done in-house or bought in and you then make an assessment
and some things which have gone out you may actually decide you want to take
back in-house. There have been prisons
which went out into the private sector.
They were then market tested and the public sector won that second round
and things were kind of repatriated.
Q255 Brian White: What criteria do you use for judging that?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: Quality of service and value
for money.
Q256 Brian White: If we take something like the e-university,
where you chose not to use the Open University and you have just been
criticised by the National Audit Office for that, what lessons have you learned
from that?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: I was not involved in that
particular decision. I would hazard a
guess that one of the reasons that you may not have chosen to use an existing
supplier is that you wanted to develop the market, so that there was more than
one player in this field. You are always
better off if you have more than one provider.
In this case it did not work.
Q257 Brian White: Let us move on to a slightly different
area. These are all to do with your
role in improving delivery.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: Yes.
Q258 Brian White: You have a number of pilots happening in
local government at the moment on a whole range of subjects, e-government and a
whole range where local government is taking delivery forward far faster than
central government. Yet there are
departments which are looking for a uniform view of the delivery of that
service, irrespective of what the local circumstances are. Why is that?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: I do not know; this is too
hypothetical. Can you give me an
example?
Q259 Brian White: I can give you plenty of examples, if you go
to the work on e-government pilots, where the ODPM is now saying that instead
of providing choice, it would be one set of deliveries.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: Sorry, which pilots?
Q260 Brian White: The e-government pilots as an example. The ODPM is saying, for cost reasons, you
will choose just one form of the ---
Sir Andrew Turnbull: All this illustrates is that
very little of this is driven by a kind of ideological view or a kind of
unified business view. Each of these
things is tested in its own circumstance, and you are constantly looking for
the best solution. In some cases you
find at any one point in time that you seem to get a better solution by an
outsourcing approach and in others you think you are better off developing a
critical mass and unifying it all together; but sometimes decisions go one way
and sometimes another way.
Q261 Brian White: This has got me extremely worried, because
the key task that you were given upon appointment, and you came to this
Committee and said so, was delivery.
That is what the Prime Minister said to you, that the key objective of
your tenure was delivery. Now those two
examples - and I have only used them as examples, I could have chosen any range
of examples - are about delivery and yet there is a frustration out there that
we are not delivering as fast as we can because the system is not supporting
delivery. Your key objective was to
support delivery, yet there are examples there where we are not actually
achieving that.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: What these examples show is that
there is a kind of restless search for the best solution. Some things are going out, some things are
coming back ---
Q262 Brian White: In every one of those examples there is a
frustration that it is not being delivered.
That is the point.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: Well, it depends what you
think. Take the main PSA objectives,
which of these are not being delivered: objectives about healthcare, waiting times in hospitals, waiting
times at GPs', waiting times in A&E, Key Stage 2, Key Stage 3? Take the really important PSA targets, not
all, but most of them are satisfying three tests. One is whether they are currently improving. Two is whether they are ahead of where the
government started in 1997. Three is
whether they are meeting the target. There
are large numbers of these things which meet all three; there are some which
meet the first two and then there is another test which is whether people
believe. What is their perception? There are people who believe there are fewer
doctors and nurses; large numbers of
people, more than view the opposite, believe there are fewer doctors and nurses
now than there used to be. So there you
have this force, this perception test, but judged over the whole gamut, you can
look at a table which the Prime Minister produced at a press conference back in
the summer answering these questions.
Are things improving and are they better than they used to be? The
majority of these key services satisfied both those tests.
Q263 Brian White: So what are the actual mechanisms you use to
measure those criteria?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: Each PSA target has a
technical annex attached to it which says whether we are measuring waiting
times, how we are measuring them, whether we are measuring deaths from heart
disease, how we are measuring them, which time series we are using. Each of these is ---
Q264 Brian White: How do you monitor the PSAs?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: How do I monitor PSAs? The delivery unit, which is part of the Cabinet
Office but actually lives in the Treasury, keeps track of progress against all
130 PSAs, and there is a website that you can look at, so you can see what is
happening to school examination results or whatever.
Q265 Brian White: As one of the people who do look at that PSA
web page, what I am interested in is that you have the key role of making sure
we deliver as a government, that the civil service delivers. I am interested in how you are actually
operating the civil service and what changes you have made to operate that
system more effectively.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: Before 2001, there was no
delivery unit at all. There were PSA
targets, but no systematic process for following those up. The delivery unit has taken on the top, say,
30 of these targets, mainly in the areas of health, education, transport and
criminal justice, and it tracks these and it organises a series of stock-takes
which the Prime Minister personally chairs; so it has a health stock-take, a CJS stock-take and so on. For each of these variables, there is a
target. There is also a trajectory and
charts are produced which show, let us say, whether we are reducing the number
of ineffective trials, whether we are increasing the proportion of fines which
are collected. There is a target which
measures where we are now, what path we should be following if we are going to
get there and then we track it. If the
data shows that it is all progressing nicely then you get on with it, if it
shows that you are getting off track, for example that asylum applications
instead of going down are going up, reaching 8,000 a month, you then intervene
intensively to take some actions to turn it round. The delivery unit does two things: it organises the tracking of these top tier objectives; secondly,
it promotes the methodology which is used by the Treasury departments to track
the rest. This is something which did
not exist in this country before, to my knowledge hardly existed in any other
country actually; this is really pioneering stuff. We know much better where we are in relation to any of the major
PSA targets than we used to.
Q266 Brian White: And how do you measure the interaction
between them?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: You then have to evaluate
the policy as a whole. It may be that
you are hitting a target, but neglecting something else and you have to address
that. There is always a tension, for
example, between driving up school results and exclusions. You have to be prepared to address that and
that is the process of policy evaluation, to see whether you are hitting the
literal target, but failing to capture what is the wider objective. For example, in 2000 we added a second dimension
for a number of targets. We said we
wanted to increase school results at GCSE on average but we did not want this
to come about by making the third, fourth and fifth deciles better, leaving the
tail as long as it was. There is a kind
of attached floor target which says, if you are improving on average by X, you
have to improve by more than that for the services in the weakest areas and we
track the progress of the floor targets as well as the main average target.
Q267 Brian White: The Modernising Government White Paper is now
about five years old. When did you last
review it and what conclusions have you got about how effective that White
Paper was?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: We have moved on from it
really. We have absorbed most of the
ideas, but I think we felt that it had a number of aspirations; it did not have
a coherent narrative to it and I suppose it was replaced by the Prime Minister's
four principles of public service reform, which is in turn in the process of
being replaced by a narrative about greater choice, personalisation and
building the service around the customer. We have taken a lot of the ideas for modernising government,
particularly around e-enablement, forward in a different context.
Q268 Mr Heyes: You said earlier that you do not run the
civil service; you were very specific about that. I think maybe this is a source of some of the ... I thought you
did. I suspect the Committee thought
you did.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: No, I am the leader of the
civil service, I do not run it. I think
that is the distinction.
Q269 Mr Heyes: I understand that distinction, but that makes
me more anxious because the kind of issues that I come across as a constituency
MP very often look to me like leadership problems within the civil service. For example, when I visited the local
Jobcentre Plus team just recently, what the managers of that told me was that
they described their staff as demoralised, overwhelmed with the frequency and
pace of change and they themselves shared that feeling. They impressed me with their obvious
competence and were concerned about what was going on, but it was equally easy
to see they were worried about the future. For example, just a few weeks away from a major reorganisation
they do not know what budget they have, they do not know how many staff they
have, they do not know where they are going to be located, they do not even
know whether they have a job in the new structure. I get that sense from many contacts with various parts of the
civil service in the course of doing my job as a constituency MP. That feels to me like a leadership problem.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: It is a problem of change
that is being driven very hard and very fast.
It inevitably creates a ---
Q270 Mr Heyes: You described it earlier as a restless search
for a best solution.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: Yes.
Q271 Mr Heyes: Frankly it looks more like thrashing about with
little idea of what you are doing.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: No, I think I prefer the
earlier description. There is a purpose
to it. It is never easy to persuade
people to change. You have to do a
number of things. You have to explain
why you are doing it, what it is you are trying to achieve. You have to demonstrate that you have a plan
for doing it and the other thing is not to kind of hang about dwelling over it but
get on with it decisively and do not leave people in uncertainty. If there is major change about how jobs are
configured, where they are located and so on, the best thing is to sort out
what you want to do, then announce what is going to happen, then get into
discussion with your staff about the consequences of that, including the
consequences for people who are staying and the consequences, in some cases,
for the people who are not staying. That
requires a degree of visibility that managers have to be upfront.
Q272 Mr Heyes: Do you do that? Do you ever get out onto the shop floor, into the front office?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: I do. I have a programme, which is called the
outreach programme, where, usually on Fridays, I go to visit government establishments. I hope this Committee, before it finishes
its study, will do the same.
Q273 Chairman: We have.
We get out and about.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: I have been to Newcastle,
Derby, Nottingham, Companies House, Land Registry. I have been to an event in docklands where the revenue and customs
people were coming together in a new configuration. Yes, I certainly try to go out and see people on the ground.
Q274 Mr Heyes: You do not detect anything. I saw colleagues nodding in a sense at what
I was describing which was one recent example. Do you never detect any of that in the civil service that you
lead?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: I do, because I also talk to
the council of civil service unions and I certainly get it from them.
Q275 Mr Heyes: Well that is all very different from the
picture you were painting to this Committee and published in 2002, when you set
out your own goals for what the service might look like in 2005.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: One of the things which have
changed is that we have gone through a phase in which public spending has
increased much more rapidly than the historical trend, 4.5 per cent a
year. We have had about five years of
this, we are probably now in the last year of it, but this cannot go on forever
and the last spending review was clearly signalling that the growth of public
spending will have to slow down, otherwise the tax burden goes up and up
indefinitely. The emphasis has to
change. We have had an emphasis
particularly on building up capacity in education, health, whatever, but we
cannot go on doing, in a sense, more of the same. The emphasis has to bring in a greater dimension of efficiency,
value for money, productivity. You can
see a whole series of discussions, the way the debate has changed, things like
the Atkinson review, how you measure ---
Q276 Mr Heyes: If you are going to achieve those things, and
you do have some very persuasive ideas, for example about developing the
corporate services experience of top civil servants, human resources, financial
management, IT and those sorts of things, those are very much the back-office
functions I think.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: I do not have many regrets, but
one of them is that the term "back office" was a mistake. The army do not talk about the Royal
Logistics Corps as the back office: they say "These guys keep us in the field".
Q277 Mr Heyes: Are you back office or front office?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: No, we are all part of the
organisation. The organisation has to
have strength all the way through it and the idea that there are some people
who are in some sense superfluous, back office, a drag on the system is ---
Q278 Mr Heyes: This is a somersault from the sort of view
that is promoted, for example, in Gershon, but in many other expert views on
this, that we need to be promoting front-office functions and staff and
diminishing the importance and the expense of back-office functions and staff and
that is where the 80,000, 100,000 cuts in the civil service are going to be
targeted.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: Not necessarily.
Q279 Mr Heyes: Is there not a link in your mind between having
that emphasis on reducing those so-called back-office functions and this
demoralised service that you preside over?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: Where are the biggest
reductions of staff in Gershon coming from?
They are coming from Inland Revenue, HMRC as it now is, and DWP. A lot of these are not simply back-office
people, they are people dealing with the public. What we are going to do, is we are going carry out that function a
lot more efficiently, particularly by the use of telecommunications and IT than
we used to. So efficiency improvements
run all the way through the organisations.
They are not the prerogative of so-called back-office functions; things
like finance and HR and so on are absolutely crucial, the ability to manage
projects and our skill at procurement. You might think procurement was a back-office function, but procurement
is the largest single source of savings in this whole exercise. The people
working in that function have to be given greater skills and also a greater
position in the organisation. We have
to improve our strength right the way through the organisation, not simply say
the front office is exempt from this and the cuts all fall on the back
office. We have to be efficient across
the whole piece.
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.
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; 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 and 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 to sort of 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 and 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 and in some ways, 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, the targets
are 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-circle.
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. If you 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 was now
just small corners of Europe and was disappearing and that you were really part
of this new ideology, that argument was over and we were now all agreed that
the 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 and 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, 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.
I am not sure it is that different. 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 the commitment: what we are getting better at is actually
just doing it.
Q294 Mr Hopkins: My final question is about this pluralistic
idea that now there seems very little opportunity to have effective challenge
to the all-pervasive neo-liberal ethos, if you like, that 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 and 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? There were coherent, highly intelligent
people supporting both sides. Nowadays
that has all gone because it has been combed out and unified into 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: Nineteen ninety seven 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.
Q300 Iain Wright: Very briefly, on a tangent,
you mentioned something about guardians of the constitution, which I did not
find in the memorandum, but I found very interesting. Why should the civil service be the guardians of the
constitution? Should that not be the
House of Commons?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: The House of Commons is the
ultimate guardian, but we administer a whole series of rules in conjunction
with the civil service commissioners about recruitment on merit, promotion on
merit. We police the distinction
between government activity and party activity. We make sure that people only spend money which they have been
authorised to spend. In that sense we
are the guardians but it is the job we have been assigned. We are not saying that we are like some kind
of supreme court. We have been assigned
this task and it is being carried out. Its
ultimate values, effectively the civil service code, are agreed between the
executive and Parliament and then the Cabinet Office has the particular role of
policing that.
Q301 Mr Liddell-Grainger: In 2002 you set out four goals. You are about to receive your clock and say
thank you very much. A civil service
respected for its capability to deliver the policy, skills and work with a
sense of urgency. Have you achieved
that?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: I certainly think that
people see the civil service as more delivery focused. Mr Hopkins is almost saying we are taking
this too far. Do we act with a bit more
pace? Yes, I think we do.
Q302 Mr Liddell-Grainger: You have not answered that quite. An enhanced capacity to think creatively and
operate strategically. You have not
really done that, have you?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: We have certainly made
progress in two ways. In the last 12
months virtually all the major departments have produced a strategy statement
as opposed to producing a series of white papers on this bit of policy, that
bit of policy. The second change is
that most departments now have an identifiable strategy unit with a director of
strategy. So there is much more
thinking, "What is the total policy purpose of this department?", rather than
simply relying on a collection of a series of individual policy statements. Are
we creative? Are we innovative? I think
we are. The e-university is a very good
example. Here was an experiment. You win some, you lose some, but some things
turn out to be more successful and some less.
We have tried lots. Take
anti-social behaviour for example. This
is something which has turned out to be vastly more popular than we thought at
the time.
Q303 Mr Liddell-Grainger: We will not dwell on the e-university. The civil service is for young people who
want to join and work with us. You are
getting rid of them all, not getting more.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: No, we are recruiting about
400-plus fast-streamers a year; we are
still recruiting.
Q304 Mr Liddell-Grainger: So you are talking about high-fliers as
opposed to what we are talking about.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: We are continuing to be
aggressive recruiters of the best talent.
We compete head-on with big companies, the banks, the accountants and so
on, for really talented young people.
We also want to attract people who are successful in other walks of
life. This has been an extremely
successful policy. We have brought in
lots of people in mid-career. Forty-five
per cent of the openings into the civil service have been subject to open
competition. We are running about 200
open competitions a year.
Q305 Brian White: Will your successor be appointed by open
competition?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: That still has to be
decided. It depends whether you think
by that process you would have a better chance of finding the kind of person you
want.
Q306 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Those are the first three but the fourth one
is integrity and trust. Do you think
the civil service is trusted? Is it
more trusted on your watch than before?
I am not sure it is.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: May I recommend that you go
into the MORI website?
Q307 Mr Liddell-Grainger: We try to steer clear of polls; we are expert
on them.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: They run a series which has
been running since 1983 about trust in various institutions and ask the same
set of questions. Down at the bottom
are tabloid editors, politicians, big businessmen, all around 20 per cent. The civil service gets a rating just below
50 per cent, which is actually higher than it was, but we are compared with
teachers, doctors, university professors, who gain ratings of 75 to 80 per
cent. We are in the middle. We also work very closely alongside the
politicians who get these very low ratings.
What delivers trust? There is
something about when you deal with a civil servant whether they are honest, if
you are applying for benefit whether you get the benefit you are entitled to,
whether you are treated fairly, treated like the next person. Does government procurement follow all those
standards? I think we score
highly. There are obviously problems
around ---
Q308 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Are you pleased after three years? Do you think you can look back on your
tenure and say you have made a difference?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: I have certainly made a
difference. This fourth area of trust
is in many ways the most difficult.
Q309 Mr Liddell-Grainger: You in the Cabinet Office pledged to cut
civil service jobs, etcetera, etcetera.
The numbers of people employed in the Cabinet Office have gone up in the
last year from 2003 to 2004, not a lot, I accept, but it has gone up. Are you going to look at cutting jobs and
trying to hit the savings?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: We are committed to reduce
about 150 posts, which I think we will.
Q310 Mr Liddell-Grainger: You hope to achieve that.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: Yes.
Q311 Mr Liddell-Grainger: I am intrigued that 721 people now work in
the Prime Minister's office and support him; its objective is to support the
Prime Minister in leading government and the figures for 2003-2004 are 721
including one minister and 29 specialist advisers. It seems an awful lot of people.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: But this guy is leading the
government of the United Kingdom.
Q312 Mr Liddell-Grainger: The total number is actually 2,400 and that
is under the four objectives. I hardly
dare ask this, but is there an organogram on the 721? I do not remember a figure of 721; it seems to have gone up some
705 last year to 721.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: The number of people working
directly in Number 10 is small, more like 175.
Then there are other people working for the Prime Minister in other ways
in the Cabinet Office. What we have
done is taken the four objectives and then tried to distribute that 2,400
around those separate headings.
Q313 Chairman: We do have a number of more detailed
questions about the Cabinet Office, but I am slightly constrained by the fact
that we are going to have a division in about ten minutes and we should like to
end before then. If we write to you on
those detailed Cabinet Office questions, perhaps you would kindly write to us.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: The person who has all this
stuff at his fingertips is Colin Palmer.
Q314 Chairman: Yes; I think it would be more sensible if we
simply wrote to you about it. Is that
all right?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: Yes, that is fine.
Q315 Mr Prentice: When you were going around your empire in
docklands, did you actually do the jobs which the frontline people were doing
or did you just chat to them?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: Mainly just chat to them.
Q316 Mr Prentice: Have you ever done the job?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: I went to a Jobcentre Plus
office and I was assigned a role as a greeter.
I had a badge which said "Andrew" and I met people. I can tell you that within 30 seconds they
knew that I was a plant. It is quite
difficult to do the job.
Q317 Mr Prentice: What is the badge you are wearing at the
moment?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: This is Year of the Volunteer 2005.
In quite a lot of these things you go round from desk to desk or unit to
unit and what I find is that I get a different reaction from Mr Heyes. People are very keen to show you what they
are doing, what they are making progress on, very proud of the things they are
doing and I picked that up. Maybe it is
a biased sample.
Q318 Mr Heyes: They were not with me, but you are the boss.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: The act of observation
changes what is being observed. You
always have to be aware of the fact that your relationship with them is
different from my relationship. I see
lots of interesting and progressive things going on.
Q319 Mr Prentice: I just want to ask a couple of questions
about permanent secretaries. Four years
in post seems to be the norm. Why was
four years settled on?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: Four years is a norm but not
in the sense of a fixed-term contract and at the end of four years you go. It is saying you need something, a point at
which to trigger a discussion. This
four-year norm is not exclusively permanent secretaries; it is the whole senior
civil service. Part of the problem is
that in many parts of the senior civil service people are moving too fast, so
we are also trying to slow things down.
There is also the sense that in an organisation where you want to make
it a bit more dynamic, you have to bring people on and bring people in and if
people just stay in jobs, fifth year, sixth year, seventh year and you just leave
them there then you can get performance which kind of ---
Q320 Mr Prentice: Who is the longest-serving permanent
secretary? Do we know?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: In the same job?
Q321 Mr Prentice: In the same job.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: It could be Sir Kevin Tebbit
at about six years.
Q322 Mr Prentice: Have you had a word with him about how he is
doing?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: I have a performance
discussion with all permanent secretaries twice a year.
Q323 Mr Prentice: I want to ask you about that because when the
civil service commissioners wrote to us they said that permanent secretaries
must of course be held accountable for their record and they talk about
permanent secretaries running departments and so forth. How are they actually held accountable? Is it just your biannual chat or is there a
formal ---
Sir Andrew Turnbull: No, there is a formal
process. At the start of the year they
prepare a set of delivery objectives which are very closely related to, may
even be a sub-set of the department's objectives as a whole and a set of what
we call capacity building objectives, what they are trying to do to change the
organisation and themselves over time.
There is discussion in the spring; there is a discussion in
September/October and when we get to the spring there is a self-assessment. There is a form which says "Here are my
objectives and this is what I think I did".
Then there are some third party assessments. What did the minister think?
What did the non-executive director of the departmental board, what did
somebody else think? You know.
Q324 Mr Prentice: Do you have outside people like
PriceWaterhouseCoopers sitting on your shoulders saying Mr Tebbit really needs
...?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: No, but I have the delivery
unit and I have my own staff in the Cabinet Office, so I have access to a view
as to how all this department is doing in a variety of dimensions. That forms an assessment by me, which I
agree with the Home Secretary and the Treasury, which is then presented to the permanent
secretaries' remuneration committee and that is chaired by John Baker with two
other outsiders.
Q325 Mr Prentice: There was a piece in the FT which you would
have seen at the beginning of the month.
It says that Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's chief of staff should lose
his powers to direct civil servants according to a fiercely worded attack from
the civil service commissioners, the guardians of the service's
impartiality. It then goes on to quote
the commissioners directly. It is
wholly undesirable that any special adviser should have powers to act in effect
as junior ministers over areas of government activity whilst being unelected
and unaccountable. What do you think
about that?
Sir Andrew Turnbull: This came about in
1997. Robin Butler thought it would be
better to give these powers transparently to Jonathan Powell. Although there was a possibility of using
three, there were only ever two, Jonathan Powell and Alistair Campbell. Rather than having what would be even worse,
which is someone coming in as a kind of chief of staff and they kind of behave
in this way but they are not acknowledged as behaving in this way, you could
operate either system. You can either
say that you will not have people with these powers, or you can give them these
powers. You cannot have people not in a
sense owning up to the fact that they have those powers and then behaving in
this way.
Q326 Mr Prentice: The thing I find intriguing is that the civil
commissioners know all this. We have
all had experience of Campbell, we have all had experience of Jonathan Powell
and they are still making this observation and they say that the Civil Service
Bill, with which we are all so familiar "provides no limit to the breadth of
powers such special advisers are able to exercise" and obviously the
commissioners are a bit concerned about that.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: We have one post in the
whole of the civil service under this regime.
Q327 Chairman: I think Gordon is just asking you whether you
agree with what the commissioners are saying, that is all.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: I am not saying whether I
personally agree with it. I can explain
the rationale of why you might want to have it, which is that it is better to
have someone behaving in this way and openly acknowledged as having these powers
than someone who comes in as a very, very close ally of the Prime Minister and
is issuing instructions and then pretending that they are really just an
ordinary special adviser. That is the
choice. If you do not have this power
you run the danger that you will get a non-transparent arrangement. If you are
not going to use it, and the Conservative Party have said they certainly will
not use it and that if there were a Bill going through on their watch they
would actually remove it ... Robin Butler put it in from the best of
motives. It was not that he wanted to
create this power: he wanted to make
sure that if Jonathan Powell exercised those responsibilities, it should be
acknowledged that he was doing it.
Q328 Chairman: You interestingly used the phrase "even
worse", which suggests that it is bad.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: We have set out a series of
duties and responsibilities to go in the next edition of the civil service code
which says they take no part, they do not take decisions on contracts, they do
not have responsibility for budgets, they are not involved in personnel
matters, etcetera. What is really bad
is if you are constraining the role of a special adviser in that way and some
people are covertly behaving that way.
It is better, if you are going to have a chief of staff or to call someone
a chief of staff, to own up to what you are actually doing.
Q329 Chairman: This will be revisited again in
discussions. Let me end by just trying
Sir Michael Bichard on you, who has been writing fairly vigorously about the
civil service and its effectiveness recently.
He said, as a former permanent secretary, as you well know, "In spite of
the impressive rhetoric and the language of modernisation we still have a civil
service which is risk averse, introspective, exclusive and
process-centred. Then he said "Why
government have failed to grasp the nettle of civil service reform is an
interesting question" and he goes on to suggest various possibilities. Then he said, "Perhaps senior ministers have
just been seduced by the mandarins' skill rhetoric and believe that
modernisation is taking place in spite of the efforts of a minority." and I am
not sure whether he includes you in this or not "It is not and will not without
a more radical strategy". He speaks
with some experience of these things.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: I do not really agree with
that characterisation. You said
something about introversion, was that the word? The senior civil service is far less introverted than it was four
or five years ago. One in four of all
director level posts, that is second tier, below permanent secretaries, is now
filled by people recruited from outside.
We have created a number of units in the Cabinet Office. Roughly half the people I work directly with
have been recruited from outside. This
is not a closed, hermetically sealed organisation.
Q330 Chairman: So you have not seduced the Prime Minister
into thinking that reform is going on when it really is not.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: I think he has quite a good
idea of what is going on and he is constantly pushing me to do more.
Q331 Chairman: You do not think there is a need for a big
bang at some point which really would ---
Sir Andrew Turnbull: The course we are on,
continued and possibly under my successor accelerated and reinforced, will
produce significant change in the civil service.
Q332 Chairman: Continuity and change.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: A bit more of the weighting
between the two. I would weight the
change bit.
Q333 Chairman: More change.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: Even at the expense of
causing a bit of disturbance and uncertainty in the organisation, I would weight
the change more highly; I would not just put it 50:50.
Q334 Chairman: Okay.
That is interesting. This is our
big bang, I am afraid and we have to go.
If this is farewell, we thank you very much for coming along, we thank
you for the diligence with which you have attended to our requests over your
years, thank you for your service and wish you very well in whatever comes
next.
Sir Andrew Turnbull: It has always been a
pleasure to work with you.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.
