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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 660-v House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION COMMITTEE
POLITICS AND ADMINISTRATION: MINISTERS AND CIVIL SERVANTS
Thursday 15 June 2006
MR JONATHAN BAUME Evidence heard in Public Questions 291 - 326
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Public Administration Committee on Thursday 15 June 2006 Members present Dr Tony Wright, in the Chair Mr David Burrowes Paul Flynn David Heyes Kelvin Hopkins Mr Ian Liddell-Grainger Julie Morgan Mr Gordon Prentice Paul Rowen
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Examination of Witness
Witness: Mr Jonathan Baume, General Secretary, First Division Association, gave evidence. Q291 Chairman: It is a great pleasure again to welcome Jonathan Baume, General Secretary of the First Division Association, to help us with our thinking about ministers and civil servants. We thought some time ago that we were having a serene little inquiry on this matter when it all seemed to blow up in our faces and yours too. We wanted to hear from you anyway, but we particularly want to hear from you now because all these issues have suddenly become very live. As you have heard, the First Civil Service Commissioner tells us that she does not know what ministerial responsibility means any more. We look to you for guidance on this matter. Do you want to say anything by way of introduction? Mr Baume: Thank you, no, Chairman. I am happy to take questions as they come. Q292 Chairman: Before somebody else does, let me quote back to you what you have been saying. You have been saying that ministers have been scapegoating civil servants and seeking to blame them for things which are their fault. You have been telling us that there are lots of ministers around who are lazy and inefficient. This is quite an indictment. What is going on? Mr Baume: I think that is a paraphrase of what I said. Two separate statements were brought together there. One was that I felt some politicians and commentators sought to blame civil servants, and separately I also tried to bring into the debate the realities of how government worked. As to the first comment, on 2 June the FDA put out a press statement in my name. I hasten to add that I wrote it. In that I drew attention to what appeared to me to be almost an avalanche of comment over the previous couple of weeks, triggered I believe by the Home Secretary's comments about the Home Office. To be fair, when one goes to his exact wording to the Home Affairs Select Committee he talked about "systems". But other media commentators, some basing themselves on politicians and some having a political perspective, sought to attack the Civil Service, not necessarily naming individuals. We are not talking about allegations about so and so in a particular office, but it was an attack on the capability of the Civil Service and what they argued was the non-accountability of the Civil Service. I felt that something needed to be said. This is not a new comment on my part. I was looking back in preparing for this to the evidence that I offered on the scrutiny on the effectiveness of the Civil Service. We submitted evidence in December 2004 in which I made exactly that point in written evidence to the effect there was a danger that some ministers might use the Civil Service as the scapegoat. This is not a new argument, but I recognise that we are in slightly different times. I do feel that there has been an attempt to use the Civil Service as a scapegoat for what a more measured assessment would reveal as a more complex picture as to why particular initiatives have not succeeded. As to the second issue, I did not say there were many lazy or incompetent ministers, but that when we were examining these issues they could not be separated from the reality of day-to-day government. I was trying to make the point that in any government one did not have an homogeneous group of individuals who were ministers but a collective of individuals whose talents and abilities varied considerably. I was not singling out this government or, frankly, any other; I was making the point that all governments had within them extremely capable and experienced ministers, extremely capable and not very experienced people - they can be up and coming individuals - but also a range of ministers who, frankly, are not as capable, are not always particularly effective or committed to the outcomes; they are sometimes lazy. With the best will in the world, sometimes they are not very good at taking difficult decisions. That is human nature. If you looked at almost any group of individuals in employment you would find that breadth of skills and abilities. I was trying to make the point that civil servants work in the real world of which the political world is a part. I am also keen to make the point that I have enormous respect for the work of ministers, particularly at junior minister level where they have a very thankless task and a grinding job. People work immensely long hours and in very difficult circumstances, with media scrutiny not being the least of them. I always accord to a minister, regardless of any personal opinion of an individual minister enormous respect for the post that is held. I think you will find that is exactly the same among civil servants in the round. Civil servants have their personal views about ministers in all governments and those are rarely political judgments; they are about the abilities of the ministers, but they also accord enormous respect to the offices held by ministers. I believe that to be an important differentiation. Q293 Chairman: You sound a little like a politician, saying that your words are wrenched out of context and we must understand the wider picture. I have been reading this stuff which is very good. You say that, frankly, one has the not very good and not very competent ministers; one has ministers who are lazy and who cannot make decisions and prevaricate. If we ask you who these are you will not tell us, but I put two questions. First, in any government at any one time approximately what percentage of such people are we talking about? Mr Baume: I am sure that you would have your own views on these matters. I am not going to give a figure because I do not think it is easy to do so, but I make the point that in any government, and sometimes within a department, there is a range. Ideally, the prime minister of the day identifies after a while which ministers are making a success of the job and which ministers are, frankly, not coping very well. Q294 Chairman: If it is the odd minister one understands, but if it is a quarter of the government it is a different issue. I am asking approximately what we are talking about here? Mr Baume: I cannot give an answer to that. People will have their own judgments about the skills of individual ministers. I made a commitment in my own mind to say nothing here that would be of any interest to the media today. I shall not be drawn into trying to make a checklist of the state of government at any one time. What I am doing is to state the obvious, and sometimes doing so becomes quite newsworthy, as I have found from experience. But the fact is that in the Civil Service one deals with ministers with different capabilities and abilities. Sometimes ministers are not particularly suited to the role that they are playing at that moment but might well be suited to a different role in government; and occasionally ministers themselves say that they do not believe they are coping but enjoy the role they play and there are other roles that they could play in government. There is the famous example of Estelle Morris - I do not want to labour it - who decided that she did not feel she was the right person to be a secretary of state but nonetheless was happy to continue to work one tier below. That was a personal decision. I have not been led to believe that that was the decision of anybody other than that particular minister. Like yourself, Chairman, there are those who have spent periods as ministers and have chosen to step back from those jobs because presumably those have not been the ones they most enjoy and you have taken on this role. There are other examples. The chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee resigned as a minister on a matter of principle and has continued to play a very effective role in politics as the chair of a Select Committee. People find what makes them satisfied. Sometimes that happens to people; sometimes individuals make a choice. Q295 Chairman: You are trying to be very nice to us and not to be newsworthy, but we are old hands; we recognise all this company. Broadly, what scale are we talking about here? Is it a serious problem or a problem at the margin of government? Mr Baume: I would say that it is more towards the margin in any government but within any team one will still have differentiation. I should like to make a point that touches on the previous evidence. There is an area that is always very sensitive but perhaps to which we ought to give more attention: the training and development of ministers. We seem to have a culture in which almost the only job in the economy where it is not felt necessary to have any training and development in the positive sense is that of a minister. There are initiatives in local government for the training and development of councillors, for example. Perhaps one of the matters to which we ought to give thought given the enormous pressures on individual ministers is how we train and develop them as they continue in their roles. A little bit of that kind of things goes on quietly behind the scenes, but it is not something that is ever talked about. We should not be ashamed of saying that any minister who takes up senior office in this way ought to have support that allows him or her to develop the skills and abilities. That might be something ministers would find helpful. Q296 Chairman: All of these comments were provoked by the recent kerfuffle in the Home Office. The question is whether these references to lazy, incompetent and prevaricating ministers is in any way connected with recent events in the Home Office? Mr Baume: No; they were not connected. They were part of an attempt to try to understand how a department in general functions. One accepts that the Home Office was a catalyst for some of the remarks. First, the Civil Service works in a way that makes it very hard to delineate precise roles. I know that a few moments ago you raised the different roles and responsibilities of ministers vis-á-vis civil servants. There are also pressures and difficulties faced by civil servants themselves in the jobs that they undertake. They are working with human beings who hold ministerial posts and it is not a straightforward relationship. I was trying to explain, if you will, the obvious about the working environment within which ministers and civil servants find themselves. If one is trying to understand how government works one will have a range of abilities among civil servants. We have always acknowledged that. At the same time, I was trying to point out that there is a range of abilities among ministers as well and the human dimension has to be taken into account in understanding how government works in practice. Q297 Chairman: Although these remarks were in the context of the discussion about the events in the Home Office they were not relevant to them in any way? Mr Baume: I was not referring particularly to the Home Office. Q298 Chairman: Let us talk more widely about the key relationships between ministers and civil servants. I quote an interesting article by Sue Cameron in the Financial Times the other day. As you know, she is a veteran Whitehall watcher of good contacts. She writes: "At their regular Wednesday morning meetings, the permanent secretaries who head each department have been preoccupied with accountability. They want more discussion about the role of ministers and greater clarity about who should take responsibility for what. If a minister opts to disregard civil service advice, the permanent secretaries want it to be clear that he or she should carry the can." Do you recognise the discussion that is going on? Mr Baume: I would not necessarily put it in exactly those terms, but I believe that there is a debate to be had, which we have explored in the past, about responsibility and accountability. My best understanding of the status quo is the work of the Public Service Committee. I refer to the report from the 1995-6 Session, and I believe that a final report was issued just before the general election in 1997. I believe that the Government's response to that, which in a sense brings different perspectives together, sets out probably as clearly as anywhere the current understanding of responsibility and accountability. To be fair, I do not believe that fundamentally anyone challenges that understanding at this point. It is quite obvious that whatever may be the current understanding there is a public debate - one cannot pretend that such a debate is not taking place - about where particular responsibilities and direct accountabilities lie. In one sense one can simply argue that in reality there is not a problem because the accountabilities are clear, but the fact there is public and political concern about the issue means that permanent secretaries and those in the centre of government recognise the need to reopen the debate and explore it further. I believe that in his speech last Tuesday at the public services seminar, which the Prime Minister attended earlier in the day, Sir Gus O'Donnell himself said that there was probably a need for a debate, if there was doubt in people's minds, to clarify where real responsibility and accountability should lie in the work of central government. Q299 Chairman: I was on that Committee and involved in the report to which you referred, but I do not believe that 10 years on one would expecting this kind of discussion to be surfacing in such an acute form, with people saying that they no longer understand what the relationship is and it has to be redefined. It is not simply a question of clarifying what it is but redefining it. Sir David Normington, permanent secretary at the Home Office, said to the Home Affairs Select Committee: "I am completely clear that we have to have accountability of officials and we have to pin that on them. We have discussed this and we are absolutely clear that people have to have accountability and have to be held accountable for how they have performed. That is what I would put in place." Something is going on here, is it not? Mr Baume: In my comments of a couple of weeks ago I tried to set the political context as to why I thought this particular debate had surfaced now, and I do not resile from that. In a sense, it is about the concept of the Civil Service working in a highly political environment. The point about political impartiality is one that we have talked about before, but it is not that civil servants are not very politically aware and politically conscious; it is just that their actions are not gauged by their own personal political views. The fact is that the Civil Service does work in a highly political environment, and we are at a change in the political cycle where there is a revitalised opposition, which is obvious to us all. At the same time, we have a government that faces difficulties in the way that perhaps it did not before with polling figures, for example. What will also be a testing time for both ministers and civil servants is the movement into a period where not only does the Government have a smaller majority and lower support in the polls but there is also a cycle of decreasing expenditure in departmental budgets. This is a very testing time - perhaps the most testing time for many ministers and government supporters since 1997. In that period some of the issues that become part of any government cycle - one gets into a difficult period when things come back to haunt government and not everything seems to work in quite the way it was envisaged five or 10 years earlier - are about where the responsibility lies for problems that are apparent to all of us, whether it is the issue of the release of foreign prisoners or other issues in this Session which were referred to earlier. In some people's minds that has reopened the debate about the accountability of civil servants. I take a slightly different view from Sir David. I read his evidence. I believe that those mechanisms are in place. It is not necessarily apparent, however, that those mechanisms are always accepted or understood. I believe that there is very clear accountability for civil servants within the departmental processes that already operate. However, what is being raised - I take it from what the IPPR is trailing, though I have not seen the detail of its report - is that others will be proposing that there should be more public accountability of individual civil servants. I am happy to explore that although I believe that if we seek to go down that route we need to be very clear about why we seek to do it and what the implications might be. If we are approaching this debate about accountability we should stand back and ask a more fundamental question about accountability of the executive in the round. I have argued before this Committee in the past that the first question that we should be considering is how we hold accountable the executive in the round, whether it is ministers or civil servants, and the problems of the relatively weak scrutiny by Parliament of the work of the executive. I have argued for a much stronger role for Select Committees, for example, with more powers, etc. Chairman, you and I have discussed on occasions why Parliament has stepped back from giving much stronger powers of scrutiny to Parliament and Select Committees. Therefore, the issue is: what is the right way to hold the executive to account? If one goes to the second level one asks: within the executive how does accountability work in the different relationships between ministers and civil servants? Q300 Chairman: We hear important voices on both the political and official sides saying that despite all that has been said in the past there is now a need for a much clearer statement of respective accountabilities between ministers and civil servants. What I am asking you is: do you think we do need that? Mr Baume: I do not believe that there ought to be doubt but I recognise where we are now; that debate has opened and, whether or not it is necessary, if everybody is to feel comfortable with how we move forward with central government, we need that debate. I believe that the responsibilities are clear; they were set out 10 years ago, and I have not seen anything that fundamentally changes the way that the constitutional relationships which have operated over decades should need to operate in future. But I recognise that the reality in 2006 is that we will probably need that debate, so let us have it. Q301 Kelvin Hopkins: The problem starts at the top; it is not to do with junior ministers and civil servants. Is it not the case now that the prime job of ministers is not to be intelligent or competent but to be loyal and if they do not carry out the wishes of the centre they no longer have their jobs? Mr Baume: I would like to answer a slightly different question. There is no doubt that there have been changes in the way this Government has worked which makes it somewhat different from previous governments, and in turn that puts pressure on the Civil Service. There has been a deliberate attempt to create a much stronger centre around the Prime Minister's office. I do not pass judgment on it; I am trying to reflect on what I see. That has been complicated by, if you will, what some people have called a kind of dual leadership and the pressures and independence of the Chancellor's office and the Treasury. I have remarked in the past that this is of some concern. Nonetheless, the fact is that we have operated in a period when Number 10 and Number 11, as it were, have both had very strong and at times competing agendas. That has made the work of central government more difficult in the round, though I hasten to add that on a lot of issues given the breadth of scale of day-to-day government and the work going on in departments we may well be talking about a relatively small number of issues in the scheme of things. These are, however, the issues that we often see in the headlines. Nonetheless, that has meant central government has had to change the way it works. There have also been weaknesses in the way the Government has worked which have been highlighted in the public domain, for example in Lord Butler's report and what some have referred to as "a sofa government". All of that has been in the public domain and it has been identified as a weakness in the way the policymaking process operates. I think that it has been more difficult for the Government to achieve its agenda because of the way central government has operated. One can argue whether or not that is right or wrong. That is not my role. But what one can do is at least assess what the implications of that have been and what lessons perhaps this or future governments might want to learn from it. Q302 Kelvin Hopkins: One of our two leaders a couple of years ago said that one of his objectives was to sack lots of civil servants. Yet, was it not the case that if we were to solve the problems on immigration, tax credits and whatever we needed more, not fewer, civil servants? Was that not media posturing for political purposes and was it not at odds with what was really needed? Mr Baume: I think that what the Chancellor said at the time - I remember it because I received a phone call to say that he had just made this statement as I was returning by train from the Midlands - was that he would cut the number of posts. To be fair, he never talked about sacking individuals, although we as a union have been working with our other colleagues and the Cabinet Office and departments to try to manage the run-down in jobs. That process continues. I think that at the time there was great concern about the emphasis on numbers which many people saw as a largely political exercise designed to shoot the Tory fox, which I believe was the jargon at the time. That arose just after the publication of the James report. It caused concern in departments because for 20 years departments had been used to managing resources in the round; in other words, after the period between 1979 to 1982 when there had been an emphasis on numbers the then Conservative government changed the emphasis to managing budgets. Frankly, what was done with the budget was a matter for the permanent secretary. The number of jobs was not that important; what mattered was that one worked within one's budget. Whether one employed x or y number of civil servants was a judgment made by senior managers. The important thing was that one delivered what was expected. The reason why the Chancellor's comments two years ago caused such concern was that it was seen as a reversion to managing numbers as well as budgets and it was seen as a political gesture, not something which was to do with good governance and the effective running of the Civil Service. That has created problems in departments, but one would anyway have had a very difficult environment given the cuts in real spending which were being made because one was reducing budgets. As to the 2008 announcements made so far in the key departments such as Revenue and Customs, with their running cost budgets being cut by five per cent each year, there are no job numbers attached to them, but the reality is that in most big departments staffing accounts for a significant proportion of the running costs. This is different from programme expenditure. Therefore, one will need to cut jobs. There is concern about the ability of the Civil Service to take forward programmes if staffing resources are continued to be cut. If one looks at those areas where there have nonetheless been some increases in staffing, or not many reductions, they tend to be in the very demand-led areas, such as the number of prison officers employed because prison numbers have increased. The FDA's view is that it is for government to decide what these budgets are and, frankly, what should be the size of the Civil Service. I have worked in a civil service of 730,000 and in a civil service of 450,000, but what ministers must do is reconcile the resources that they make available to the demands they place on the Civil Service in terms of the delivery of services they want provided. Q303 Kelvin Hopkins: I have one more question about the Home Office in particular, because that is the current focus of the problems. Sir John Gieve has recently retired as permanent secretary to the Home Office. He was interviewed by the Home Affairs Select Committee the other day. I am sure he could see that if the Government wanted the immigration problem solved we would need the borders to be better policed and many more people working for the Immigration Service. Sir John Gieve's job was to say to home secretaries, "We need the resources. Give them to us and we will do the job." Was there any evidence that he did that? If he did that and the minister said, "Sorry, you can't have any more resources; that's tough", then it is the fault of the Home Secretary. If he did not ask then he could to an extent be culpable. Is that fair? Mr Baume: I certainly could not comment on what John Gieve may or may not have said to the Home Secretaries with whom he worked. What I can say in general is that part of the dialogue between ministers and the senior management of departments is how to reconcile the demands being placed on them with the resources made available. I believe that it is the job of any permanent secretary to say to the minister, "If you want me to perform a particular role I will need the resources to do it." If they are not available a different type of dialogue takes place. It is then the job of both the permanent secretary and the secretary of state to be arguing with the Treasury to make the resources available to the department in the round. It is not simply the secretary of state and an individual permanent secretary; the key to all resourcing is the Treasury, so a three-way dialogue takes place in any department. As to the question of where responsibilities lie, if one takes the simple example of a secretary of state saying, probably under instructions from the Treasury which is the main driver, that x number of jobs have to be cut, the permanent secretary with a department with a large network says, "I can achieve this. I have a coherent plan for doing this and it will involve the closure of a number of offices around the country. You leave me to get on with it. I can deliver the job cuts." If the secretary of state comes back a few months later and says he has been heavily lobbied in his constituency, or there is a by-election where this is becoming a big local issue, and he decides that that particular office must stay open, I think that the permanent secretary would be perfectly within his rights to say, "Well, you must now take responsibility for the fact that changes have been made to the way in which we were intending to reduce the numbers." That is a very crude and simplistic example. In the end the permanent secretary must take responsibility for many of the areas of work of the department and I do not think that any permanent secretary would step away from that, but ministers must also recognise that if plans and programmes are changed there is a consequence for which ministers must be prepared to take responsibility. Q304 Kelvin Hopkins: Is it your impression - it is certainly mine - that over the past 25 years we have moved away from the Sir Humphrey model of the Civil Service, if you like, to one where civil servants now knuckle under much more to the control of Downing Street and try to carry out the wishes of our leaders, even when they are contradictory, and that what we really need is for the Civil Service to be strong and independent again, so it can give bold and objective advice to ministers when they need it? Mr Baume: Whether or not we accept there was ever a Sir Humphrey, there is no doubt that the Civil Service has changed, in many ways for the better I believe. I have been working in the Civil Service under different guises. I am now a full-time employee of the FDA but I have worked in the Civil Service since 1977. I think it has changed for the better. I believe that the Civil Service has been more effective over that period. Central government has changed. Each Prime Minister has a different way of working and a vision of government that will be different. Margaret Thatcher was different from John Major and Tony Blair and no doubt it will be different when the next Prime Minister takes over, but there is a much stronger centre. That has been complicated slightly by having perhaps two centres which often work together very harmoniously but at other times evidently there have been different approaches, and that changes the way the Civil Service works. What is important is that the Civil Service must be able to give frank advice to ministers. At the same time, ministers must be prepared to listen to that advice. It is the job of ministers to decide whether or not to accept advice, but if there is a culture where ministers are unwilling to listen to frank and difficult advice - at times one hears of arguments between ministers and secretaries of state, never mind between civil servants and ministers - or they make it clear that they are not particularly interested in having such advice, then in the round the ministers are weaker, but that is often about the personalities and traits of individual ministers; I do not believe that it is particularly about one government or another. One will find across different governments the same things. I believe that in most cases the relationship between ministers and civil servants works very well across government, and continues to do so as we speak today, but there will be areas of difficulty, sometimes based on the personalities of ministers themselves. It is part of the ministerial code that ministers must take account of this advice, and a minister with any sense will want to have frank advice in private and have his ideas, wishes and visions tested to destruction, if you will, to make sure they will work on the ground. If there is one criticism it is that at times policy initiatives emerge without sufficient thought being given to them and work done to ensure that they will stand up robustly to public scrutiny when action is taken to try to make them work on the ground. Q305 Paul Rowen: I should like to change tack a little. Obviously, you are employed to represent your members. Are not your comments really a smokescreen? You have attacked incompetent ministers. If one reads John Reid's comments he is not talking just about systems but about leadership and management within his department. Are not the problems with the leadership and management in some areas of the Civil Service? Mr Baume: I am here to represent FDA members, and I have no hesitation in saying that. I believe it would be naive to suggest that in any organisation there are not ways to improve leadership and management. I do not think that the Civil Service is exempt from that. Whether that is the same as leadership and management that is inadequate is a different matter. I have some difference with the comments of the secretary of state, but those were the comments he made. I do not want to get into a row about John Reid. Q306 Paul Rowen: But are they not backed up by facts? If you look at the IND and the sorts of issues that regularly crop up - we as elected Members deal with the consequences of those - it is quite clear to me that that organisation is not functioning? Mr Baume: I want to be very careful not to become involved in the detail of what has happened. Q307 Paul Rowen: That is an example. Mr Baume: It is an example. Speaking generally, I know that the Home Affairs Select Committee is examining this matter and it is clear that the Home Secretary and permanent secretary will want to examine what has happened in IND to make sure lessons are learnt. Q308 Chairman: It is not just John Reid. The message sent out by the permanent secretary to the department as reported by The Times is: "We now need radical improvement in our performance, our service standards, our systems and processes and, most of all, in the quality of our leadership and management." This is the top civil servant in the department speaking? Mr Baume: I do not believe anyone denies that some real problems have been highlighted in the work of the Immigration and Nationality Department. It is not fashionable at the moment to praise the Home Office. Large amounts of the work done by the Home Office are done extremely successfully and well. The fact is that it has not been done well enough because some very significant problems have arisen, but one could take almost any area of the Home Office and point to some very significant successes, including the Prison Service, IND and some other parts. This is a department that has been under enormous pressures, some external and for reasons not of the Home Office's making, whether it is a significant increase in the prison population and its nature or the response to terrorism, with the complete rebalancing of priorities and tasks that emerged after the attack on the twin towers and last July's bombings on the tube. That department has been under enormous pressure and in many ways has coped extremely well under it, but clearly in the circumstances has not coped well enough in all areas. Some would argue that parts of the work were being neglected as priorities were focused on others. Clearly, it should not have happened, and I do not think anyone argues to the contrary. Nonetheless, I do not want people to walk away thinking that somehow the Home Office is failing, because I do not think it is. Q309 Paul Rowen: I do not think we are saying that. But we are focusing on this Government where clearly there is a leadership and management problem. Do you think it right that civil servants in one branch of a department that is clearly not functioning properly should be getting bonuses? It is reported in the papers that several civil servants in the IND are in line for £15,000 bonuses. Is that right? Should they not be carrying the can for what is happening or not happening in that direction? Mr Baume: I will not answer the comment directly as to what happening to individuals in the IND because I have not seen the detail of that. Within the senior Civil Service the 3,500 individuals are all potentially entitled to a bonus under the senior salaries review body recommendations published about six or eight weeks ago. For some individuals that might be up to about £15,000 but it depends entirely on the grade within the senior Civil Service and salary. We are talking about the way that the pay system works in general. Whether or not a decision is taken to award a bonus is one that is based on the performance of that individual, and ultimately that decision is made by the permanent secretary. That is just a fact. Whether or not bonuses are awarded is another matter. I have not seen any announcements on that and I will certainly not comment on it. If one tries to unpick some of the ways in which government works one will find that particularly at levels below the management board - the permanent secretaries and director-generals - people will have specific areas of responsibility. It is quite possible that even in an area where something has gone wrong those identified areas of responsibility have been carried out extremely effectively. That may still mean that between those teams across an area of a department something has not happened, for example in the IND, and yet all of the priorities and targets set for that particular department have been undertaken to the letter. That means one has to stand back and see why those cracks in the system have been allowed to appear. One needs to take a very sober look at it. One is talking of extremely serious issues, and no one denies that. But at the same time it does not necessarily mean that there is one person to blame in an organisation or that one can single out an individual. We have a problem in the public services in the round, including the political system. We have a media-driven culture where there is an easy tendency to go for scapegoats. Somehow it makes people feel better if an individual scapegoat can be identified: sometimes it is a politician or a public official, whether in the Civil Service, health service or whatever. The problem is that we are often working in very complex systems and processes in the broad sense and in reality it is not about one individual's failure. You might say that the person at the top of the organisation, whether it be a chief executive, permanent secretary or minister, in the end has to take personal responsibility, but quite often it is not about any particular individual; it is about trying to undertake the breadth of work that an organisation carries out, whether it is a NHS local trust or government department, and balancing out all sorts of priorities and trying to juggle the balls in the face of events as well as take forward the organisation's strategic direction. These are immensely difficult and complex jobs. In a country like the UK, where we have a big state, in the American sense - I do not pass judgment on that - public organisations are often extremely complex bodies to run, and in central government when mistakes happen they are up there in lights in a way that they might not be in other parts of the public services. On the one hand, that means people should be accountable directly for their own actions but, at the same time, we also need systems to allow us to analyse why these problems have arisen. Sometimes that is not about individuals; and certainly in central government one cannot separate that out from the political process as well as the administrative process. Q310 Paul Rowen: Therefore, on your logic nobody should carry the can? Mr Baume: I am not saying that. It may be the case one can find that there are personal and individual failings and then, depending on their severity, one will need to take some form of action. The Civil Service does take action about individuals. I am saying that it does not necessarily help us to understand, remedy and avoid problems arising in the future simply to single out somebody because it is very easy in the short term to put up a scapegoat. Q311 Paul Rowen: Do you think that to sack somebody because he did not make farm payments on time is not the right way to go about dealing with the problem? Mr Baume: I am saying that it may be; and I am also saying that it may not. I have to be very careful because I do not want to make a judgment about what happened. Clearly, there was a major problem on rural payments. If it is clear that an individual failed - it could be somebody at a very senior level or someone in the middle of an organisation - it may be there are grounds for dismissing that person. On the other hand, that might not be what has happened. There will be times when it is about individual failings and times when it is about systems that are not comprehensive or ones put in place long ago. Q312 Paul Rowen: Surely, the permanent secretary or senior civil servant is responsible for that to make sure that the systems are satisfactory? Mr Baume: Yes. I am saying that I do not think you will find permanent secretaries standing back from that responsibility. But one needs to be clear why that particular problem arose. All I am saying is that in complex organisations it is not necessarily about an individual, and quite often there will be a balance of responsibility between permanent officials and politicians because they work in a very political environment where the decisions of both ministers and civil servants together lead to particular outcomes. There will be times when it is very simple. There will be areas on one side or other of the spectrum in which it is clear where the responsibility lies, and there will be lots of areas in the middle where it is difficult to unpick exactly who took the right or wrong decisions and where the responsibility lies given the compromises that take place within the work of government. Q313 Paul Rowen: Surely, ministers make policy and civil servants tell them how to implement it. If they do not give the right advice should they not carry the can for saying, "That is impossible; you cannot do that"? But if a minister says he wants something done and you say, "Right, we'll go ahead and do it", and it is a shambles should you not carry the can for the failure to implement the policy? Mr Baume: If only it were so simple. I am sure that if I thought long and hard enough I could come up with cases where it is simply a matter of telling civil servants the policy and they are told to do it and if it does not work the officials take the blame, but most of the time it is not that simple. Policy is not a straightforward, easy process; even designing policy is not a simple and easy process. There are lots of issues and problems to which there is no simple policy solution. There may be a vision of a particular policy that is easy and straightforward but very often one is trying to understand complicated events in communities and coming up with what at times might not be particularly desirable policies in anybody's view but probably the least worst options to tackle a particular issue. One can think of hundreds of examples like that. Every government wants to cut crime. What is the policy that cuts crime? There are all kinds of initiatives that will help to lead to a reduction in crime, some of which are to do with personal behaviour. Most governments would like to cut child poverty, but it is very easy to have such visions; it is much more difficult in reality to find the policies. One breaks it down to particular initiatives, but how one makes policy is part of what the Civil Service and ministers together have to try to do together. I read the previous evidence of retired permanent secretaries and others. I think there is a consensus that there have been times when government in the round has not focused sufficiently on ensuring that the policy process is as sharp and effective as it should be, and making policy is about policy that can be delivered on the ground. That is a point which some of the previous witnesses have made. One has to get that right, but even translating what ought to be a very effective and efficient policy from central government to the local classroom or the police in the local community or hospital is itself quite an important area of transmission where so much can go right or wrong. I am not trying to step away from the fact that people must be held personally accountable for their own failings, but in a very complex process it is often hard to strip out where the individual responsibilities lie. Q314 Chairman: What was so shocking about recent events was that it seemed absolutely straightforward to most people; it was basic administration; namely, whether or not one releases somebody who should be deported. There was no basic check in place of an administrative kind. It was not because of great complications of policy and so on; it was the basic administration that went wrong. Somebody who is charged with administration did not do it? Mr Baume: I am not arguing against that. I am being very careful not to pre-empt any such conclusion. For example, the FDA could find itself representing individuals who might be caught up in that, and both the Home Secretary and permanent secretary have said they will look at this. Therefore, I will not pre-empt that. But it may well be, without prejudice to any inquiry that takes place, that in that kind of situation it was about simple administrative failings. One then has to decide where that particular failing lay. All I say is that if one tries to generalise too far it does not help. To take a very simple case, there was lot of press coverage about an immigration officer who was publicly charged in connection with sex for visas. I have to be careful; I do not know if criminal charges were made laid. It appears from the newspapers to be a very straightforward issue of corruption. That could happen in the best run systems but one still has corrupt individuals. There one has very easy personal accountability. It may well be that in IND we find that it was about individual failings and basic administrative systems. Perhaps as a consequence of that individuals have to be held personally to account. All I am trying to say is that often it is not as straightforward and simple as that in trying to understand why particular initiatives have not worked. One can take almost any area. Why do we still have literacy problems in the UK? Whose responsibility is that? Is that a failing of central government, policies or individual teachers? At times it is very difficult to unpick how all of that operates. Q315 Mr Prentice: On the question of the Civil Service being accountable, you told GMTV that the Home Office sacks between 400 and 500 people every year. Can you give us a breakdown of why those people were sacked in terms of incompetence, fiddling the books, stealing, inappropriate behaviour or what? Mr Baume: I cannot. The answer was taken from a Parliamentary Question on 15 November last year by the Conservative Member for Monmouth, David Davies. Those figures were put before Parliament. Q316 Mr Prentice: Did those figures shock or surprise you when you read that answer to the PQ? Mr Baume: They did not shock or surprise me because there are good, although there could be better, systems of performance management. They will cover a range of issues, one of which is conduct. An extreme example is someone who steals or whatever. There are systems to pick up poor performance, and we as a union deal with them. Q317 Mr Prentice: But there must be information systems within government departments to list the reasons why people are sacked. The information must be there; it is just that you do not have access to it? Mr Baume: I do not have access to it. Q318 Mr Prentice: Do you know how many of the 400 or 500 people quoted in that Parliamentary Answer were members of the FDA? Mr Baume: The members of our union in a department the size of the Home Office are very small in number. The senior Civil Service comprises 3,500 people out of 530,000, but in general week in and week out most of the FDA negotiating staff spend their time supporting individuals. There will be a range of reasons for that, but the fact is that we assist individuals. There are two ways in which individuals are held to account. First, they are held to account for their own personal performance, which has an impact on pay and at times it has an impact on their very job security. Secondly, we assist people in moving to other posts where their particular skills will be more appropriate, and at times we assist them to leave the Civil Service, not because they are incompetent or ineffective but that their particular skills and background are no longer appropriate to future needs. Q319 Mr Prentice: I understand what you are saying. Given that you represent a very small group of people at the very apex of the pyramid, can you give us any sense of the numbers of FDA members who are dismissed because they are incompetent or for any other reason? Mr Baume: The numbers dismissed for incompetence are very few, because I do not believe that there is a major problem of incompetence. Q320 Mr Prentice: We have heard about all these cock-ups in the Home Office, IND and you cannot tell us how many members at the top of your organisation lose their jobs because they are just not up to it? You told GMTV when you spoke of the 400 or 500 people in the Home Office that, frankly, some of them go because they are just not up to the job. My question is: how many of your FDA members have lost their jobs because they are not up to it? Mr Baume: Very few. I make three comments. First, in any situation where one is looking at somebody's job, and any other form of disciplinary process, one must have proper and fair processes that are conducted in private. That was a point I made to GMTV. Second, I am sure that further analysis of what has happened in the Home Office will take place. I do not want to pre-empt any of that. Third, what we are seeing much more is not people being necessarily inefficient or incompetent but rather a civil service renewing itself with turnover of staff and so on as people move out of the Civil Service and other people are brought in with the appropriate skills. But the bigger point I make is that to try to pin it down to individuals is not necessarily a particularly helpful process or frankly the answer to why particular problems have emerged, because the answers are much more complex than saying that it was the failing of one particular individual. Q321 Mr Prentice: We cannot always be defeated by complexity and say that policymaking is so complex that no individual can ever be held to account because it involves lots of people within departments and departments working with each other before a policy emerges. The argument that things are just too complex is not good enough, is it? Mr Baume: My argument is not that things are too complex but that in complex systems to identify where responsibility for particular problems arise is not always straightforward. When one works in a political process where the priorities, tasks and work of a department are constantly being changed and amended for political as well as administrative reasons responsibility is not always clear cut. I am not stepping away from this; I am saying that you can take any particular problem and analyse it in depth. Sometimes it is about individuals, whether politicians or civil servants, and other times it will be because systems, in which people have done an extremely effective job, are not operated. Q322 Mr Prentice: I am trying to squeeze a quart into a pint pot here. I was interested in the Chairman's opening comment that it had been alleged that some ministers were incompetent and lazy. I am sure that the Prime Minister would be aghast that ministers he had appointed were lounging about doing nothing in their departments. My point, which I put to the two Janets earlier, is whether there should be a kind of reporting of ministerial competence, perhaps informally, through permanent secretaries up to the head of the Home Civil Service and then to the Prime Minister so that the PM knows the kind of people and their level of competence that he is putting into the Government? Mr Baume: I could also ask whether you were aghast. I think that if you asked previous cabinet secretaries about this you might find that some kind of informal process does take place. Q323 Mr Prentice: Let me help you. Our colleague Karen Buck resigned as a minister of transport, not because she could not do the job but because she did not want to do it. I am sure that she would have been perfectly happy in some other role in another department; she just was not interested in transport. That is a classic example where someone would say that here is a woman who is very competent but who may be better off in another department, but, no, she has to resign. Do you understand what I am saying? Mr Baume: Yes. In the end that is the role for the Prime Minister. I tried to make the point myself. There will be ministers who are suited to different areas of interest and activity and sometimes people are put in the wrong posts. Q324 Mr Prentice: Do you believe that the Prime Minister is a bit light on personnel management skills? Sometimes people leave the Government and there is no exit interview; it is just, "I need your job", or something like that. Mr Baume: I suspect you will find that with almost any Prime Minister that process takes place. I will certainly not single out any one Prime Minister. I think that it is a very imperfect practice. People are appointed to different roles for all kinds of reasons. You even hear of people not being appointed sometimes because their names have been forgotten, but that is part of the political process and that is the context within which civil servants work, and they do their damnedest to try to make sure it does work. I suspect that every MP will have his or her own personal perceptions of the abilities of individual ministers. I think that at times we never really talk about it; it is just something that we can politely ignore, but the fact is that in that environment it has an impact on the way a department works. If anything comes out of all that has happened recently it is, first, the importance - we have talked about this in other contexts - of the secretary of state of a department making sure that the team of ministers works effectively, which does not always happen; and, second, that the permanent secretary does the same with his or her team and those two teams are brought together. I think that the departments that work well are those where there is a strong level of integration and common purpose between the senior Civil Service and ministers. They know the direction in which they are going; that is what happens in most departments, but clearly not always. Q325 Mr Prentice: This inquiry session is entitled "Ministers and Civil Servants". The affair between John Prescott and Tracey Temple was regarded by the Prime Minister as a private matter. You represent civil servants. Do you believe that it is a private matter or are there other implications? Mr Baume: I would again answer a different question. Q326 Mr Prentice: I would prefer you to answer the question I have just asked you, because it is very straightforward. Mr Baume: I have said on the record that there is nothing in itself wrong in a minister and a civil servant having a personal relationship. In any organisation regardless of the employment status there are standards of behaviour which one would expect to see observed. I have suggested that it might be appropriate to have clarity that where a minister and a civil servant enter into a personal relationship that matter should be reported by the minister - I think the responsibility is on the minister - to the permanent secretary. It is easy to laugh. That would be no different from many organisations out in the wider economy where if a senior manager and member of staff have a relationship at least account needs to be taken of it in the work place. In some organisations it is laid down in staff handbooks to avoid conflicts of interest, problems with colleagues and perhaps, in due course, one of the parties presenting a claim for sexual harassment if the relationship goes wrong, etc. But I believe that at this level it would help all concerned if that was the way it was taken forward. It would be a matter to be dealt with privately, but if issues arose in the future nobody could argue that the minister had done something surreptitious; it would have been logged privately, because people are entitled to a private life. It would also avoid future suggestions that individuals had been coerced into relationships, which is the kind of thing one sees happen in the normal employment arena. One has cases of individuals claiming that they have been coerced into personal relationships by colleagues. One needs only to read through Employment Tribunal cases. One can say, "Oh, this is ministers and we cannot go anywhere near this", and somehow ministers should be in a class beyond normal employment practices. I do not believe that ministers are beyond normal employment practices. I believe that, just as at times ministers can have a relationship with a civil servant where everybody lives happily ever after - there are such examples - there is also a danger of real embarrassment and difficulty arising from such a relationship if it is not handled appropriately. It is a small issue but potentially it can be a very difficult one. Sometimes one just has to employ normal employment practices to this very odd and unique circumstance of the minister and civil servant. Chairman: That is a rather good answer. As to the other issue about sacking ministers, there is a story about Clement Attlee. When a minister was being sacked by Attlee and the minister protested, "What on earth have I done wrong?" Atlee just looked up, grunted and said, "Not up to it!" That is perhaps the way to approach it. Consistent with your intention not to say anything remotely newsworthy, we have had an extremely interesting session. Yours is always a voice that we like to listen to, particularly so this morning. Thank you very much indeed. |