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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 660-iii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE Public AdministratioN SELECT COMMITTEE
Politics and Administration: Ministers and Civil Servants
Thursday 2 March 2006 RT HON LORD BUTLER OF BROCKWELL KG GCB CVO, SIR NICholas MONCK KCB, and SIR CHRISTOPHER FOSTER Evidence heard in Public Questions 148 - 223
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Public Administration Select committee on Thursday 2 March 2006 Members present Dr Tony Wright, in the Chair Paul Flynn Julia Goldsworthy David Heyes Kelvin Hopkins Mr Gordon Prentice Jenny Willott ________________
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Rt Hon Lord Butler of Brockwell KG GCB CVO, a Member of the House of Lords, Sir Nicholas Monck KCB, and Sir Christopher Foster, gave evidence. Q148 Chairman: Good morning, everyone. I particularly welcome our witnesses, Lord Butler, former Cabinet Secretary, Sir Nicholas Monck, former Permanent Secretary, Sir Christopher Foster, adviser to government for 40 years or so. We have a huge amount of experience we are drawing on this morning and we are wanting to use you for a number of the inquiries that we are doing at the moment, in particular some of the issues concerning Ministers and civil servants, but we may go into other areas too. I think I would probably prefer just to kick off, unless any of you want to say something by way of introduction, in which case by all means, do any of you? Sir Christopher Foster: I will try and be rapid, if I may, about it. Q149 Chairman: You have given us a very helpful memorandum which we are grateful for. Sir Christopher Foster: I have been reading various evidence given to you thus far, and suggest I say one or two words more, if I may. You have had my book and my pamphlet ---Chairman: We have read all of your collective works! Sir Christopher Foster: In it I give many examples of bad policy making and law making and I argue that they lead to problems for Parliament, parliamentary discussion and scrutiny and afterwards very often to difficulty of implementation. This has happened not only under this administration but also under Thatcher and Major. I am not arguing that policy was ever perfect - far from it - but in general Bills were complete on entering Parliament, and they did get preceded by one or more explanatory White Papers. These were normally reasonably lucid and reasonably intelligible, and intelligible enough for meaningful intelligent parliamentary debate on the policy proposal, and thereafter helpful for scrutiny in subsequent Bills. They are far from ideal, in my judgment. For 30 or 40 years I was foremost well, not foremost certainly among the critics, not of their clarity and logic but because in general I believe they relied too much on consultation processes, usually pretty thoroughly done and reflected in the subsequent development of the policy but not enough on the relevant social sciences and other sciences. Neither am I arguing now that, in recent policy times, policy outcomes are always poor, though I do believe there is a frequent correlation between successful policies and policies which are comparatively easy to implement, like, if I may give an outstanding example, handing income rate determination to the Bank of England. I set out in my pamphlet the necessary stages I think Ministers need to go through to develop a good White Paper, a good explanation to Parliament. Contrast the current Education and Health White Papers, both of which I confess to having read. The first is now famously unclear in its description of the problems it addresses, the solutions it advocates and poor in its use of evidence and in the outcome of consultation. The Education Paper is so confused and confusing as to be capable of countless misinterpretations, as it has been, and the Health White Paper is different; it is not bad but as bad. One could give many other examples. I spoke to a number of MPs when researching my book, and I do not think that one said other than that they found White Papers, and even ministerial statements, virtually valueless in helping them understand the real detail of policy change, and I have spoken to eminent journalists who have told me that they never bother to read White Papers; only press releases. In other instances there are no explanatory White Papers at all. To go back in time and in my own experience, neither the poll tax nor rail privatisation had explanatory White Papers at all. These omissions, as I argue in my book, had serious consequences. The answer to a situation which I think constantly brings Parliament and Ministers into disrepute and helps lower public trust in politicians is, I suggest, better process - not only within government or between Parliament but continuously from one to the other. What is needed is a drill, or a number of drills depending on circumstances within government, which ensures that good intelligible policy papers and policy statements and then Bills where relevant reach Parliament. The prerequisites are, I think, better and more systematic use of Cabinet and the Cabinet system; a return to Cabinet papers in which policies are first initiated in departments and then matured by discussion through the Cabinet system, until emerging as considered well argued White Papers presented to you in Parliament; a return to meaningful collaboration between Ministers and civil servants in which Ministers, of course, take the decisions but in which civil servants are more effectively able to challenge on such matters as use of evidence, factual accuracy, benefits and cost, practicality and quality of expression, and those civil servants working with Ministers and political advisers being seen as junior partners and not in a position to be intimidated. The main argument, I suggest, against undue political influence or indeed any substantial political influence on Civil Service appointments, promotion, pay and bonuses in my judgment is that it is a private sector activity, that it is impossible to get honest, independent but particularly challenging views from people when, rightly or wrongly, they believe those to whom they have given such views might use such power to influence their future and future careers. The argument is exactly the same in my opinion as that for keeping such matters concerning judges away from politicians, so helping preserve their independence and judgment and integrity. May I end by insisting I am in favour of external appointments in many circumstances. I also believe that Ministers should have special advisers, I have myself been a special adviser to six Labour Cabinet Ministers but I believe Ministers are best served if they also constantly engage at the highest level with politically impartial civil servants in their policy making and law making, and in a form which respects due process. Q150 Chairman: Thank you for that. It is very helpful having that thesis set out at the beginning, though I am not sure whether I want to ask both of you to say whether you agree with that - well, why do I not ask you whether you agree with that? Is that the thesis that is our working proposition? Lord Butler of Brockwell: I should say, first of all, we have not concerted anything, so we are not here as a team, we are here as individuals, but I do think there is great force in what Christopher Foster says. Q151 Chairman: We are badly governed? Lord Butler of Brockwell: Yes. There are elements of our government that need improvement and it has got worse, I would say. Q152 Chairman: This is pretty serious stuff if we have a recently retired Cabinet Secretary saying we are badly governed. Lord Butler of Brockwell: I think what I said was that there are things that need improvement and I said it has got worse, and when I say it has got worse I do want to emphasise that it has got worse continually; I am not just talking about the present government. Things have got worse over a long period, including during my period, so there is a mea culpa. Q153 Chairman: You are well covered there, because you are quoted on the front of Christopher's book saying: "Politicians and civil servants will find it a penetrating perceptive account of what has been happening in government in recent years". You were part of this falling off, were you? Lord Butler of Brockwell: I was. Q154 Chairman: We shall return to that. Sir Nicholas Monck: Many of the things that Sir Christopher says underlie my proposal for a resolution about better preparation of government proposals. Q155 Chairman: We shall come to your proposal. Before we get into all this, because this is deep and fascinating, Lord Butler, because of current events, could I just come back to our old friend the Ministerial Code, because that is part of the ethical regulation framework we are looking at as part of our general work. You had trouble with all of this, famously. What do you think? Here we are again, poor old Cabinet Secretary, expected to pronounce on this kind of stuff. You discovered with Jonathan Aitken, this is a bed of nails, is it not? Lord Butler of Brockwell: I am not going to comment on the current travails of my successor; I think he has quite enough on his hands without being burdened by public comments from me. Q156 Chairman: But is it the kind of thing that a Cabinet Secretary should be expected to do? Lord Butler of Brockwell: I have always said in the past that it depends on the circumstances. I was asked to look, as you will recall, into the Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith cases and the aftermath of Cash for Questions and there the evidence was, as it were, inside the government, it was in the department's files. Really I think one had to look internally and the Head of the Civil Service was a suitable person to supervise that inquiry but you can only carry it so far if you are in that position and, as I have also said, you have to have I think horses for courses on these things. There are some things which, and many examples of it, where you need a judicial inquiry, a judge sort of person, particularly when people's reputations are at stake and you need to have a very fair process. There may be things where it is the police who ought to look at them. My view is I have always argued against having a set panel of people who do this. I think the parliamentary committee on conflicts of interest, I do not mean the Committee on Standards in Public Life but the parliamentary select committee, also had trouble with this. I do not think that you can have a one-size-fits-all piece of machinery for dealing with these matters. Beyond that, I really do adamantly refuse to comment on the current situation. Q157 Chairman: You still do not think, even with events as they have gone since your time in to current ones, that we need some new mechanism? Lord Butler of Brockwell: It is always possible one can find a new mechanism but I do not think it should be a mechanism that you would expect to deal with every situation because each situation is different. In the end it must be, in terms of Ministerial Code, for the Prime Minister in the first instance and Parliament ultimately to judge whether the Code has been broken and whether Ministers have lived up to their standards. I am quite sure that all my successors, including the present one, would agree that their role can be no more than advisory. Q158 Chairman: But there is a distinction between finding out the facts, the investigatory role, and the political judgment side of it, is there not? At the moment this is all mixed up and the poor old Cabinet Secretary is the one who is called upon to do this investigation. If you look at the text of the Ministerial Code, and you famously over the years have said you must not regard this as a rule book but in fact it has now effectively become one, it says here: "The Code is not a rule book and it is not the role of the secretary of the Cabinet or other officials to enforce it or to investigate Ministers, although they may provide Ministers with private advice on matters which it covers". Now that is demonstrably not what goes on now, is it? The secretary of the Cabinet is now expected to do an inquiry when allegations are made and to produce a report of some kind which is a public document, so even in terms of the code itself we do not have what it describes. Lord Butler of Brockwell: As I say, I do not want to comment on current cases but I think actually the media have got very excited about the current issue and it may be easy to be misled by the rather dramatised reports in the media about what the current function of the Cabinet Secretary is. That is all I would say. There have been words about "investigation": I think that is, as it were, a word that has been used outside rather than by the government itself. Q159 Chairman: I do not want you to get at all into current cases; it is only the example of the general case which is the investigation point. When these allegations are made, and they are made, as you know well, periodically, who is charged with the job of doing the investigation to find out if there is anything in it upon which a political judgment can then be made? If a politician, a Prime Minister, does not want to put any kind of inquiry in place there will not be one. People then, as in this case the Opposition, write to the Cabinet Secretary thinking "That is the only way we can get in to get any kind of inquiry", so this is a mess, is it not? Lord Butler of Brockwell: Again, I do not want to comment on the current situation. I would not endorse your word "mess" but I would say that these situations are always highly uncomfortable! Q160 Chairman: Let me just ask one question to get us back into the territory we were in before we got into that one. I am really intrigued by the fact you are all coming here, including a former Cabinet Secretary and a former Permanent Secretary and a longstanding adviser to government saying that we are badly governed. I think this is an astounding proposition. One question I would ask is this: when I look back 30 years everybody was talking about the way in which we were a basket case in terms of government. In fact, it was fashionable to say we were ungovernable. Compared with that, government looks rather serene these days, so this thesis is not immediately plausible. Lord Butler of Brockwell: Shall I try and answer that? I think, if I may say so, you are slightly putting words into our mouths when you say we say we are badly governed. I think what we are talking about is defects in government. We are not saying that everything about government is bad - of course we are not; there are very many good aspects to the way that we are governed and there have been improvements over the years, but there have also been deteriorations and they are worrying. I think you as parliamentarians must feel, do you not, that you have too much legislation to cope with: that that legislation is too frequently revised, has to be revised because it is defective; that you have difficulty in holding the Executive to account and that you do not hold them to account as effectively as you do. Certainly I am a parliamentarian, and there are many aspects of that which need to be improved. You must feel that too much political debate is now carried on in the media and too little of it in Parliament, and that I would also say is a defect in our system of government and something that we all ought to be trying to do something about. So I think those are the nature of the criticisms. Of course we are not saying that the whole thing is completely disastrous: we are saying that there are some important things that need to be improved, and I am saying that there are some respects in which the system has got worse; no doubt there are also some in which it has got better. Q161 Chairman: Let's try and be more practical. When Christopher gives the example of the quality of White Papers and talks about the quality of the recent Education White Paper that is causing all the trouble right now, never mind what it says in quality terms, just the sheer quality of it, do you assent to the proposition that the quality of material produced for Parliament by government has declined over the years? Lord Butler of Brockwell: I do. Q162 Julia Goldsworthy: Why do you think there has been this decline and what do you think the cause has been? Do you think it is politically motivated by the government or by successive governments, or do you see it as being a slow, steady gentle decline which has not been addressed? Sir Christopher Foster: It has not been the slow, steady decline, there have been a lot of elements in it, and indeed I tried to argue both that things were not always frightfully good in the past but also to argue that in the past, when they attempted most things, they attempted them rather well. In Place of Strife was a very bad White Paper, but openly so. It just happened at that time it seemed to be a political necessity. People knew where they were. Whereas with the present Education White Paper nobody knows where the government is on it and that is a huge difference. The decline I think is due in part - well, very importantly - to the sheer growth of government business and this is absolutely astronomical in a way. It is due I think to the effect that that has had on the Cabinet. One of the most telling statistics is that under Attlee there were 340 Cabinet papers a year, under Heath 140, under Major 20 and briefly under Blair I think one, and now one is told about eight or nine or ten. Now, if something is not serious enough to merit a Cabinet paper then it is not really a serious development of government policy. There are important issues where you need it and others where you do not need it but as a generalisation that is true. Under Attlee they were virtually always produced two or three days before Cabinet so there was plenty of time for consideration and briefing. You cannot have that with a slide show at the Cabinet table. In every sort of way there was a seriousness and deliberation which meant that even if you did make mistakes, which of course you sometimes did, so to speak the mistakes were there for everyone to see when later on historians came to look at the Cabinet papers. Other reasons for decline I think are the internationalisation of so many political decisions, the fact that Ministers spend very much more time abroad than they once did. The role of the media. A fact that I think Ministers very often have not really perceived but have come to know is that press releases are a more important output for them on what the media says than on what Parliament has to digest but, alas, press releases do not make good policy or good implementation, and that is in the end what matters for people - what the actual policy is on the ground when it eventually hits the ground after the legislation has been passed. It is at that end where time and time again you get unsuccessful implementation, frustrated hopes, defeated policies. Q163 Julia Goldsworthy: With some of the things you listed is it possible to reverse some of them, like the international nature of policy making or even the legislative burden we have at the moment? Is it possible to then start cutting down on the amount of legislation we have and then if you are talking about improving governance, which would in effect perhaps slow things down, are we not going to end up with this massive backlog? Sir Christopher Foster: If not, then what? You go on having bad policies and bad laws but if you are clever and you want it quite a lot of these things can be put right. Yes, of course, there are going to be more international meetings with Ministers present but with technology and various other ways you may overcome the physical absence of Ministers on many occasions. There are things you can do if you have a process which demands their attention. Many laws people tell me are not really necessary; they are there because people feel they want the prestige of a law or they promised a law or whatever it may be. I refuse to believe that as many regulations, as many laws, as we have got are absolutely necessary. It is a matter worth looking into. I think devolution, real devolution of processes, so that in England for the most part here you do let people take decisions rather than always looking over shoulders, in many cases might help. There is a whole range of things - I am not competent to give you a blue print - which could help relieve the situation. Q164 Julia Goldsworthy: So what is the aim of good governance? Is it to ensure that Cabinet Ministers fully understand, or that the legislative process works better, or that the public understands better? Sir Christopher Foster: This may be theoretical but my own view is that too much of the Ministerial Code is "Do not do this"; the Ten Commandments writ large and wide, and that what it ought to be saying in many parts is something very much more like the Constitution of Article 65 of the Federal Government of Germany where, in fact, it specifies processes. It says before something goes to Parliament as a draft Bill or as the equivalent of a White Paper it has to have gone through certain processes, it has to secure various approvals; it has to have been presented as a Cabinet paper. A Cabinet paper is mandatory, except in extreme emergency. If you give your attention to that kind of thing I think the Ministerial Code or its equivalent could be an extremely valuable way of in a sense listing, setting out the sorts of stages which you, Parliament, expect various measures to have gone through before they reach you. Lord Butler of Brockwell: Could I endorse that? I think there is a great challenge in adapting the internal process of government to modern life. They have to move fast enough to cope with modern life and, indeed, with Ministers' absences, Ministers being very much dispersed. But there are a whole number of issues, and I should think almost always the issues of White Papers, which do not have to be dealt with at a breakneck pace where really you can and should take time to develop the policy and put it through the necessary processes, and bring all the expertise that is available around the Cabinet table to bear. Where the Cabinet system is so good is that because the coverage of departments is pretty comprehensive and if an issue comes before the Cabinet and Ministers have an opportunity to be briefed on it, it is very unlikely that there is some aspect of it which is going to cover even a remote part of government or national life which will not be identified, so it is a very good grid to go through, but the other reason it is good is that it exposes issues to the wide political experience of senior Cabinet Ministers, and I have often said that some of the decisions I saw that were worse, made in government, were those that were not exposed to that. The Ministers dealing with them got so close to them that they lost a perspective which their experienced colleagues could have brought to bear, so those are just particular aspects in which the use of the Cabinet system as it used to be could improve the process of government. Q165 Julia Goldsworthy: But how do you think they can be policed and how do you make a judgment on what level they need to be enforced at, at what level should there be smaller meetings which need to follow similar standards, and if it is a code which is for guidance purposes then what happens if those guidelines are not followed? Lord Butler of Brockwell: This is where Nick should come in, I think. Q166 Chairman: Nick has a proposition for us, have you not? Sir Nicholas Monck: Yes. Shall I describe it, even though you have read it? Chairman: Yes. Sir Nicholas Monck: The initial spur to my thinking along these lines was the Butler Report indeed, and his description of the Iraq decisions, and I compared that with my own rather limited experience of commercial, private sector decisions, and it seemed to me that in the latter case there were stronger pressures, in effect, on the people concerned to take decisions seriously, which I think is what we are interested in, it seems to me, take serious decisions seriously, and this was I think partly to do with the existence of the Code of Corporate Governance backed up a bit by common law and a little bit of legislation, and it struck me as anomalous that there was nothing like that which effectively binds government. Just to remind you what I mean by taking serious decisions seriously, it is taking them with care, on the basis of high quality analysis based on evidence of options with their costs, benefits and risks - familiar stuff, and this led me to suggest that with the help of this committee there should be a specific proposal for standards which would apply to Ministers and secure quality decisions. That would, of course, both need to allow for the differences between politics and business but also allow for the largely common requirements of taking serious decisions seriously. The note I have put forward suggests an approach to this which focuses on ensuring that except in emergency there should be very careful preparation of proposals for legislation and policies or decisions which are put to Parliament, and it lists six components of thorough preparation, and I could list those but perhaps they are in the paper and I will not bore you. Then on how to secure that my paper draws on a precedent from 1997 when after the Scott Report the Commons Public Service Committee, which I think is a predecessor of yours, recommended that Parliament should pass resolutions laying down how it expected Ministers to carry out their duty to Parliament, and that was done largely on a cross-party basis in March 1997. So I suggested there should be a new resolution on the duty of Ministers to carry out thorough preparation including the substance of my six points. I think that former resolution by Parliament would be better than legislation. At the same time I suggest that the select committees would normally consider new proposals before they reach a decisive stage on the floor of the House, and as part of this would regularly ask government witnesses what had been done to meet the six points that constitute, in my view, good preparation, and the effect of this would be that Ministers would know during their preparations that these questions would be asked and, in effect, that their reputations would be on the line if they could not give convincing answers. I think there are other complementary proposals but I think a necessary component of reform of this aspect of government is that there should be some new obligation imposed by Parliament on Ministers. Q167 Chairman: I am grateful for that. I confess I was on the Public Service Committee which produced the resolution on accountability following Scott. It was an important symbolic moment and what you are arguing for is a good governance code to be approved by Parliament very much on the model of that previous resolution to be incorporated into the ministerial code, providing at least a statement about the requirements for good process within government. Is that a proposition, Lord Butler, that you are attracted to? Lord Butler of Brockwell: I am. Q168 Mr Prentice: What have the mandarins been doing over the years as government is decaying in this way? What about the present office holders? The Permanent Secretaries? Are they speaking candidly to the Prime Minister saying: "This is not the way, Prime Minister, to decide and do things"? Lord Butler of Brockwell: I do not know; I cannot speak for what is going on now. I believe so because I believe that the tradition of speaking objectively to Ministers and giving them frank advice is a very deeply embedded one and I am sure that it continues. In my own time, I would say that I do not think we coped as adequately as I would like, in retrospect, to think we should have done with the changing circumstances of political life, with these aspects of the world speeding up. When New Labour came in they, I think, made very good points about the government information service not being properly equipped to deal with 24-hour media, and the things they did caused the government information service to get much better. I do not think we have exploited, did exploit and perhaps still have not exploited, new technology as well as we could have done. So there are aspects of that for which I would accept that the mandarinate have got some responsibility. Q169 Mr Prentice: Yes. You see, I put down a question to the Prime Minister after I read your very interesting piece about Cabinet government and how it could be improved if we imported the principles of the Companies Act and the Code of Corporate Governance into the decision-making mechanisms and I was sent away with a flea in my ear, really. The Prime Minister was not interested at all in what you are saying, Sir Nick, and that must disappoint you. Sir Nicholas Monck: I have read his mockery of such things in the House but I am not proposing, although my first article might have suggested this, bringing in legislation on the lines of either the company code or - Mr Prentice: No, the principles behind it. I understand that. Sir Nicholas Monck: I am concentrating now on the product of government and how you go about improving the quality of it, and I think the suggestion I have made is proportionate to that and worth more. Q170 Mr Prentice: You all talk about the inadequacies of policy making. Can I take a specific example and ask you to comment? Last year the Department of Health told the world that 250,000 NHS employees, midwives, chiropodists, physiotherapists - people like that - were going to be transferred from NHS employment into the private sector, the not-for-profit sector or the voluntary sector, and a letter went out to that effect signed by Sir Nigel Crisp. In November, I think, the Health Secretary told a conference of NHS managers that it was all a big mistake and that was not really the policy. In the Financial Times yesterday we read that the NHS chief, Sir Nigel Crisp, his future is in doubt as Ministers appear to lose confidence in him. How is it that the policy could have been so screwed up? This was a huge policy decision, that it got through the system, through Cabinet or what-have-you - how did it happen, and who is responsible? Is it Sir Nigel Crisp, or is it the politicians? You are all retired so you can be completely honest about this. Lord Butler of Brockwell: But do we know? Do you know about this case, Chris? Sir Christopher Foster: No, not in any detail, but perhaps I am in a better position to speculate than some. I think what we are observing here, as in so many other departments, is a product of unceasing change where one initiative quickly overtakes another, where not enough time is spent on working out exactly what is implied by a decision so that something is done, and then somebody at a higher level, like a minister, realises it was not quite what they intended. I think it is just a product of instant government and the length of time it takes to effect change. It is an absolute antithesis of what I believe is desirable. Q171 Mr Prentice: But government is not or should not be organised in silos. It is not just a matter for the Department of Health. What were the mandarins doing in the other departments? Sir Christopher Foster: I doubt if mandarins should get any more blame than anybody else. These things happen. It is not a question of silos as such. The more people have to be brought into a decision-making tree the more complicated and difficult it becomes, the longer it inevitably takes, and the more patience is needed to try and resolve these things. It is terribly tempting when you get into such a situation to try and cut straight across it and take an easy decision which, in my experience, almost always in the end turns round to be the wrong one and one which, at least in part, has to be reversed. So I think to try and find a single source of failure is much more exciting for the press. Q172 Mr Prentice: I am interested in the process here. If we are talking about a huge policy decision to transfer a quarter of a million people out of employment in the NHS, what are the processes at the top of the Civil Service to check this? Would it have been discussed by a committee of Permanent Secretaries? Would it be checked by them? Would their seal of approval have been required? Is it something that would have been left just to the Department of Health? That is my simple question. Lord Butler of Brockwell: We do not know the answer to that in this particular case but our whole argument, and I think we are agreeing with what you are saying, is that it should have been, and it would have been less likely that a mistake would have been made if it had been. Just so that we do not blame the mandarinate entirely, there are well-documented cases of announcements made by Ministers which have come as a surprise to their departments; indeed, announcements made from 10 Downing Street where the Secretary of State did not know, let alone the department, before the announcement was made. It is always difficult to speak with absolute authority about this because one is very often relying on press stories but I think there is a good deal of evidence that that has happened. People are not just given the chance to put these through the sort of rigorous process that you are implying should happen and we believe should happen. Q173 Mr Prentice: It is common sense I think, leaving aside the question of rigour, to check things out before rushing in. Can I just very briefly turn to Sir Christopher. You are not a happy person, are you? I read your booklet and you take a swipe at everyone. No part of our constitution is performing effectively, not Parliament - that is us; not Cabinet, not Ministers, not the Civil Service, not local authorities, not other parts of the public sector. Is the monarchy doing well? Sir Christopher Foster: What I wrote does not come from black bile, I assure you, I am quite a happy enough chap in most walks of life, but from conviction. If I think about Parliament, of which I know much less than all of you, I tend to believe what I am told that in terms of your institution and your select committees and what you can do, you are capable of being as effective a body as ever - probably more so. The problem is what you are given to feed on from government; that is your problem - that you are not given the right kind of material to scrutinise and to debate - and there are similar limitations in many parts of government. It is very hard running a public body these days. You do not know what is the framework which has been laid down for Ministers within which you are supposed to operate, what discretion you have to operate within that framework, when somebody is going to intervene in your daily arrangements - there are many, many things of this kind which means that the whole is not working well, even though the part or many parts are capable of working quite satisfactorily. Q174 Mr Prentice: Why is it that you do not mention in your booklet here manifestos? I may have missed it but I do not think you mention manifestos at all. Sir Christopher Foster: I do not. Q175 Mr Prentice: And manifestos are held up as a source of legitimacy and we are all expected to vote for ID cards and for all sorts of things because it is in the manifesto. Sir Christopher Foster: I have always been sceptical of manifestos. My first job as an adviser in 1966 was to try and reverse the manifesto commitment on behalf of Barbara Castle, who was my minister, because it had not worked out very well. There is tremendous danger. Of course you have to have manifestos, you have to seem pretty solemn and you have to have commitments, but frequently when you come to look at what needs to be done either it is impossible or brings in other difficulties. One of the things which began to go in the Thatcher years, and you can see more about this in my book and I am delighted that you have read that, was the expectation that the civil servants within a department challenge the commitment in the manifesto. Q176 Mr Prentice: That is what I am trying to get at; when the Civil Service does a forensic job on the manifesto. Sir Christopher Foster: That went in the 80s. It was certainly around when I was first --- Mr Prentice: Because if you suggest that Parliament is supine maybe it is because of this doctrine of the manifesto - that the manifesto cannot be challenged because this is a source of legitimacy. I will let my colleagues come in. Q177 Paul Flynn: Meeting as we are today on the first day of Lent do you think it would be a good idea if politicians gave up the practice of legislating at certain periods? I am thinking particularly of pre election. There is a pre election tension which builds up amongst all parties which inspires the government to appeal to the politically erogenous zones of the electorate to persuade them to vote for them and bandages the mouths of all opposition parties in case they are heard in possession of an intelligent idea. This is very much the build-up, and I take you to in the last election when a particularly moronic piece of legislation went through. Do you think one of the general problems with politicians is that we see that the answer to every problem in earth or Heaven is in legislation? Dogs bark, children cry, politicians legislate. Do you think periods like this could be beneficial, non legislation periods, where all politicians do is consider draft Bills? Would that be beneficial to good governance of the country? Sir Christopher Foster: A Lent for legislation? Q178 Paul Flynn: Indeed. A pre-election Lent. Sir Christopher Foster: A splendid idea and, if I may say so, I think there are some extremely important issues that you raise by saying that. First, Parliament according to theory is not a legislature, unlike Congress which is. Its job is supposed to be, or used to be, receiving first rate or good White Papers and good Bills and then saying what it thought about them and ratifying. It did not actually make the laws. It stopped doing that in the 1880s because experience showed that creating laws through committees was diabolical and really led to laws that were not very good. So in some rather academic sense you should not be a legislature because much more that comes to you should be in pretty good shape, not just knocking around the edges but firming up before it ever reaches you - or rejecting it because you do not like it when you see it. You have all sorts of rights of that kind. But the idea that you should actually make laws here is one which there is a lot to be said against. But that is perhaps not the most important point. I think the most important point here, and I am sure you are right, is in saying that a great many Ministers think that they have to pass laws; it is how they get a tribute for posterity. Certainly when I started off new Bills were much less frequent. To say there needed to be a new Bill on a subject quite a case had to be made. Ministers spent an enormous amount of time on two other things, taking decisions within the law, which could be very important, Royal Prerogative, decisions on war and all sorts of decisions, or they can be changing policies without necessarily changing the law, reflecting on how policies were doing. The idea that somehow you have to be changing laws all the time I think, though one understands why it has happened, is one of the reasons, just one, why you are in the state you are now. Whether Lent would cure that, a legislative Lent, is perhaps another matter. Q179 Paul Flynn: Lord Butler, do you think some of your powers might have been more productive if spent in reflection rather than in activity in legislation? Lord Butler of Brockwell: I certainly think that there is too much legislation but in the end I am afraid I think it is because Parliament has allowed itself to be too dominated by the Executive and too supine in resisting excessive legislation. When I saw the way in which the legislative programme used to be put together, departments felt that each of them had a right to have a Bill, maybe two, and, as it were, if there were not fair shares then they had reason to feel aggrieved. The Leader of the House, the parliamentary Ministers, did their best to restrain this, but because the Executive as a whole knew they could get the stuff through Parliament their efforts to restrain it were on the whole to a considerable extent brushed aside. So I think it is that Parliament has allowed itself to be so dominated by the Executive that it lets legislation go through without something that could even be close to being described as proper scrutiny and the Executive then jumps on that wagon. Q180 Paul Flynn: To take one example that you will both be very familiar with, rail privatisation, I think you made the point that there was no rational basis for that; the only argument was that all privatisations had worked so this must as well. But that was challenged in Parliament by a very unusual set of circumstances in that there was a select committee with a Chairman who was appointed in defiance of the Whips. The Whips chose somebody else and the committee chose a Chairman who had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the railways and great authority, Robert Adley. They produced a unanimous report on rail privatisation from all parties condemning it, which was very prophetic. What is your feeling about this? Do you recall this report? Was this not an example of Parliament doing the job that those who ---- Sir Christopher Foster: I do have a chapter on this, or half a chapter, in my book. Because government did not produce a good White Paper, or any in the circumstances, it did not set down all the things it needed to make this measure a success. Behind the scenes it went through all sorts of hoops to try and think of most of the things that needed doing - perhaps all, I do not know about all - but if it had had to write them down with sufficient rigour to convince you some of the problems would have been more exposed and challenged by Robert Adley and many others who were knowledgeable on this matter. In my judgment, as I say, most of the things were, like many other privatisations, not bad but needed a certain amount of improvement. One or two things were wrong. They would have been exposed in a good White Paper, and one likes to think they are correct. Adley and his colleagues started from a very definite political position where they tried in a sense, and all credit to them, to do the job of the government for it in writing a White Paper. Inevitably, because they neither had the same political commitment as the government or the same access to sources, they did not do as good a job as a government should have been able to do. Q181 Paul Flynn: Reports of this kind of that quality, and there have been three I can remember in the last 18 years where a committee has put out a substantial piece of work, are fairly rare, but do you see hope of improving - it is our problem I realise - the scope of select committees or strengthening select committees to do this job or should we go back to the original way of getting the government to write its White Papers? Sir Christopher Foster: I think I believe that it really is the job of government, or a departmental Minister in the first instance, to give you the case in considerable detail for what it is they want to do. They can feed upon select committee reports, feed on all sorts of reports and information - and so they should; the more relevant external information they feed on the better in general, but in the end, if they want the legislation, it is up to them to defend it, not I think for a select committee. They can probably make an input but the logical follow-on from a select committee producing a very valuable report - and I know this committee has done what I am just about to say but perhaps only occasionally - is for the committee to produce the legislation, and that is not I think what we are talking about in general. Q182 Paul Flynn: Has pre legislative scrutiny been successful in your view? Sir Christopher Foster: Again, of course, it helps but I think it is a poor substitute for what government should be doing. Q183 Paul Flynn: Touching briefly on one of the concerns we have had as a committee, it is about the movement of civil servants into business and business people into the Civil Service, which continues throughout the careers of various people who move from the business world and then back again, and we are concerned about the possible effect on the Civil Service ethos of people having half an eye on business values rather than Civil Service values and civil servants having an eye on their future job prospects, because many retire early and go into lucrative areas of work, particularly in the defence industry. Do you think there is a danger here that it is not so much a question of the Civil Service ethos having a chance of making much impression or change on business ethics, but is there not a danger of business ethics substantially damaging Civil Service ethics? Lord Butler of Brockwell: I think you have to balance the advantages of drawing on a wider pool of talents, which we would all be in favour of, with risks of this sort. My view is that it is right to draw the talent from wherever you need it and these posts ought to be put up for open competition and, indeed, some interchange between the private and the government sector is good, but it needs to be accompanied by safeguards against the sort of risks that you describe. Q184 Paul Flynn: You said to one question "mea culpa". When you are putting on your slippers at night and reflecting on your career, what was your maximum culpa? Lord Butler of Brockwell: That would take longer than the evidence to this committee to go through! Paul Flynn: We have time! Q185 Chairman: I think I have just discovered a split between you two, by the way, because, Christopher, you are not terribly keen on Parliament ---- Sir Christopher Foster: Oh, I am. Q186 Chairman: No, despite what you say. Because in your book and you have sort of said it here, you say Parliament cannot really do very much and just does stuff at the edges, and you are interested in getting the process of government right, and you are very keen on party discipline, and you tell us how wonderful the Whips are because they stop people being bought and so on whereas Robin, now he has become a legislator, has decided that Parliament is supine and wants it to be more robust. These are very different views, are they not? Sir Christopher Foster: You are undermining the value of all I have said this morning by accusing me of not believing in Parliament. I certainly do believe in Parliament even though, as a Special Adviser, I spent a lot of time over here in those days in the bar, or in the several bars, with someone called Stephen Swindler, who was the Parliamentary Secretary for a long time, just talking to MPs about what we were doing, and getting from railmen and bus drivers and all sorts of things the most splendid spirited comments and, indeed, taking them back to Barbara, or most of them, and that was good. Parliamentary debate, in my experience, was an awesome vigorous matter. Because you could understand the White Papers you got very forthright opinions. There was a beginning and an end to a debate. There really was a summing-up of what was said. Ministers stayed in the chamber, for goodness' sake! Q187 Chairman: But the argument surely is this: that if Parliament is supine, and that is the proposition we have heard, because of whipping and routine majorities, Ministers know that they will get a majority for this proposition, however absurd it is, because that is how our system works, if we have a system like that that tells against quality because you do not see Parliament as a quality test that you have to pass: it is simply the automatic hurdle that you jump over. Do the two not come together? Sir Christopher Foster: No longer. One is observing you being very much less easy to jump over. There you are, rebelling on every front it would seem at the present moment. The problem is how do you turn that rebellion, which is far from supine, into government taking effective action to make the whole business much more constructive? That is what I have been on about. Q188 Paul Flynn: You mention the Birt papers, and the Birt papers had to be prized out of government under Freedom of Information. One of them was about drugs and one clear conclusion that Birt made was that you could not tackle the problems of drugs by attacking the supply side; you failed in Colombia and everywhere else. We have just decided to send troops into the Helmand province in Afghanistan to do precisely that, possibly sending them to their deaths. There is no attempt to deal with the rational argument of Birt and many others on this. Does this not depress you? You do draw comparisons between the Birt papers and White Papers in the past, but the fact that the government cannot only try to suppress what is in the Birt papers but actually ignore their conclusions when they are established? Sir Christopher Foster: In principle, yes. I have to say I have not read that particular Birt paper and I have no knowledge really of the issues. Q189 Jenny Willott: Just quickly, on the Legislative Reform Bill that is currently going through the various different parliamentary processes, one of my colleagues referred to it as the "Abolition of Parliament Bill" which I thought was reasonably accurate in some ways. One of the proposals that has been mentioned by the Minister is that they would contemplate giving select committees the right of veto over ministerial decisions. Do you think, given what you were just saying about lack of scrutiny and so on, that would be a good idea? Lord Butler of Brockwell: I have not, I regret to say, studied the Bill in detail. I would like to take part in debates on it in the House of Lords, and if I can I will, but I think there is a dilemma here because the purpose of the Bill, as I understand it, is to deal with the problem of over-regulation and to get rid of unnecessary regulation more easily than in the past, and that I sympathise with. It seems to go much wider than that, and I think that the defect that probably lies at the root of it is that there is not an effective process for dealing with statutory instruments. Parliament does not get into statutory instruments as much as it should. Now if there was a more effective process in dealing with statutory instruments then I think one could use them with greater confidence. I have not heard of the suggestion you mention that select committees should be able to veto them but that might well be such an instrument. I would be in favour of Parliament being given more powers of that sort if that, as it were, goes a long with making it easier to get rid of unnecessary regulation, unnecessary passed law. I have always been in favour of sunset clauses myself. Sir Nicholas Monck: I would hope, without having necessarily a veto, if a select committee reported on a proposal that had been really badly prepared, there should either be a convention or expectation that government would look again at the proposal before putting it to a decisive stage on the floor of the House. That is one thing which reconciles some of the things which have been said in the sense that we are saying that the Parliament select committees should make proposals to try and make the processes within government work better, and I think that could happen. It would obviously be for Parliament to decide what the force of a critical select committee report on a state of preparation would be. Q190 Jenny Willott: Turning to another issue and going through the different papers and different documents we have had for this meeting, in one of your notes, Sir Christopher, you refer to the undermining of the status and the responsibility of Secretaries of State, and the various other papers also talk about the fact that Permanent Secretaries have a lot less influence and responsibility in decision-making now than they used to. If both Secretaries of State and Permanent Secretaries have less responsibility and authority, where has it gone? Sir Christopher Foster: It is very hard to say; it varies enormously. That is part of the rather chaotic state of the processes at the centre of government. Some would say it has gone to some extent to No 10, to the Treasury; some Secretaries of State are more powerful than others; a recent ex Cabinet Minister who I will not name told me not very long ago that he thought one of the things that most needed examining were the relationships between the centre, however you describe it, and departments; communications, what might or might not be instructions, were travelling all over the place in a way which was very hard to grasp. The traffic in e-mails, one of the serious problems in all of this, was so great it was quite hard at times to know what was being said by whom and with what authority, and "with what authority" is perhaps the really important point there. It is perfectly possible to believe that we have a situation in which the Prime Minister has theoretically got more power and influence and control not only over Ministers but Parliament than any in the past but to believe it is so fluid, and in some senses so chaotic, that an awful lot of that power is not particularly effective, so it is not puzzling in a way that you hear people around the throne, so to speak, on the one hand saying "We have a throne" - a No 10 throne - "but at the same time we need more power still in order to try and get done what we want to get done". That is all part of the problem. The clear lines of authority, authorisation, development, are not there to the extent they used to be. Lord Butler of Brockwell: My short answer to your question is that the power has shifted, not entirely but where Secretaries of State are bypassed, to No 10 and the Treasury. Q191 Jenny Willott: Do you think that has an impact on the levels of accountability and openness about decision-making? Lord Butler of Brockwell: Yes, it is bound to have. I think this is a thing which some Secretaries of State resent; some of that resentment has become public; and it is difficult for Secretaries of State to defend with conviction decisions to which they are not wholeheartedly committed and which they have not initiated. Sir Nicholas Monck: I agree with that, particularly that last remark. I remember a Conservative Minister saying there was always the problem of the unwilling agent. That if you try and force things on Secretaries of State who really do not want to do those things, it will not work. Q192 Jenny Willott: Can I ask finally about the relationship between Ministers and their Permanent Secretaries, and the civil servants? It has been suggested in various papers we have had that Permanent Secretaries and civil servants are having less influence on decision-making and instead influence is passing to special advisers and spin doctors and so on, and there is a bit more dislocation than there used to be. Do you think it would help if there was more political involvement in the appointment of senior civil servants? Do you think Ministers would be more likely to listen to Permanent Secretaries and deputy secretaries and so on if they had been more heavily involved in their recruitment, or of some of the political appointees. Lord Butler of Brockwell: They might be more disposed to listen to them because they would not be the right sort of Permanent Secretaries, would be my answer to that. I think the argument against too much political involvement with this is that it is valuable that civil servants should remain objective, professional and not dependent on, and people below them not seeing themselves dependent on, the favour of their Ministers for their advancement. If you do get people who are recruited on that basis they are less likely to give the sort of objective advice which I think is an important part of our system. Q193 Jenny Willott: In which case how can we reverse the swing away from Ministers taking advice from civil servants to political appointees? Is there anything that can be done about that? Lord Butler of Brockwell: I think that is what we are on about. What would reverse it is having an acceptance of good process which would give those people their place in the process. That is precisely what Sir Nick Monck is suggesting - that that should be the standard and the convention which is accepted and to which departments conform. Q194 Jenny Willott: Do you think it would work? Sir Nicholas Monck: I think it would certainly help otherwise I would not have proposed it, but I think another factor is that, as has been said, some things are much better and more successful now than in the past, notably the economy, and also I think the professionalism and access to experience elsewhere and the social science and so on of the permanent civil servants has greatly improved, so I think Ministers may realise, and I think if you look back over the current government, that they have actually lost, they have wasted, the experience and skills that were available and I think that would also be a slower acting but nonetheless perhaps eventually potent influence. Lord Butler of Brockwell: It is important to make clear that you cannot legislate for this. Ministers can always listen to the people they want to listen to, that is their right, that is why they are elected people, so they can go their own way to perdition if that is what they choose to do. You cannot stop that. But I think what Parliament could do is to put in place processes that make it less easy for that to happen, and give a greater assurance of good process. Q195 Jenny Willott: Finally, if we are bringing in increasing numbers of senior civil servants from outside the Civil Service, from business and so on, do you think in the long run that is likely to have an impact on the quality of people entering the Civil Service? If they feel they are unlikely ever to reach the top do you think it will have an impact on the type of people willing to join in the first place? Sir Nicholas Monck: I think it could do in the long run but I think the main way of tackling that at the same time as bringing in talent and experience from outside is to absolutely ensure that the permanent civil servants are actually given the proper opportunity to contribute to policy. Provided that is done I think the appeal of being a civil servant will still be strong but if not, if they are frozen out, and the existing code says that Ministers must listen to civil servants but it does not say anything about you must give them an opportunity to give their advice - in fact probably that would not make any difference - but I think that is the key thing for keeping morale and for recruitment of good quality people, to give them the opportunity to be able to give the advice. Q196 Kelvin Hopkins: I start from a position of being very sympathetic to what you have been saying. I agree entirely that governance is bad and getting worse in Britain. That being said, we have to do something about it. The alternative is we could change the system entirely and be like France and America or whatever, with another approach, but would you not agree that the essence of democratic good governance is where you have countervailing forces that have to be different centres of influence and power in the broad sense in the way society is governed, and that is the way good ideas are kicked about and come through. Lord Butler of Brockwell: I would agree very strongly with that. Sir Christopher Foster: You cannot control everything from on top; that is one of the points I make in my pamphlets. An attempt to control absolutely everything from Whitehall or one part of Whitehall is doomed to failure and, therefore, it is absolutely vital that one has alternate sources of power and influence, not only in Parliament, Executive, within the Executive - these are all tremendous safeguards of liberty and rights - but also in the end, if they are properly handled, well-handled, with a good dialogue and debate flowing backwards and forwards, of efficiency and effectiveness too. That is my belief. Q197 Kelvin Hopkins: Your criticisms I sympathise with but have you not rather pulled your punches? Let's take the example of Sir Nigel Crisp. He was appointed presumably I would guess because he is sympathetic to the Prime Minister's view. He was then, I suspect, or I surmise, given a policy to announce - not his own idea but coming from Downing Street - which then proved to be very unpopular and was then withdrawn, and now Sir Nigel is in difficulty, possibly about to be marginalised. In a different kind of regime he might have been moved to manager of a remote power station, for example. So the bureaucrat is being blamed for a policy which was not necessarily his own idea although he may have sympathised with it in the first place. Now, is that process not influencing civil servants in general, that they know that if they argue too strongly they might find themselves moved, and that increasingly the Civil Service is not being politicised by having politicians thrust into it but by a process of selection, survival of the fittest? It is gradually being politicised because it is falling in line with the ideology of our leaders? Lord Butler of Brockwell: I do not think any of us know enough the Sir Nigel Crisp case to be able to comment one way or the other on that, but I would say that is the reason why you have to have the countervailing force between the tradition in appointments, and first of all the insistence that appointment or promotion should be on merit - that is a principle of our Civil Service and one we ought to stick to very closely - but then you have to have safeguards to ensure that that happens. Nick and I certainly have experience of ministerial appointments, and in general I certainly felt during my time that the sort of thing you are describing did not happen. The Civil Service would initiate proposals for appointments, there would be a civilised discussion with Ministers, and sometimes Ministers would have a preference and that was a preference that you could go along with, but there was a good role of the Civil Service in it and I certainly did not find myself feeling during my time that appointments were being made on the basis of ministerial favouritism. If I did get any sense of that I tried strongly to oppose it. There were sometimes appointments made that I did not agree with but not generally simply because of ministerial favour. I had a reason when I was Head of the Civil Service because of long laid plans of wanting somebody to be in a particular appointment because it would fit them for something else later on. Understandably Secretaries of State were not often very sympathetic with that, they wanted the best person at the time, so I had to make compromises in those situations, but I would say that I felt that the system was pretty good proof against that and I hope it still is. Q198 Chairman: What kind of appointments were Ministers making, then? Lord Butler of Brockwell: They approved the appointment of Permanent Secretaries: they approved some other important appointments within a department and, of course, they approved appointments to NDPBs that were within their responsibility. So there is a whole series of appointments that go to Ministers for approval. Chairman: This is interesting ---- Q199 Kelvin Hopkins: Going back to examples --- Lord Butler of Brockwell: Surely that cannot be any surprise to you? Q200 Chairman: Well, it is surprising because we make a great fuss about Ministers not being involved in appointments, and then you talk in a rather routine way about Ministers making Civil Service appointments. Lord Butler of Brockwell: What I said was they approve Civil Service appointments. Surely it cannot be any surprise to you that Ministers approve the appointment of a Permanent Secretary in the department? Q201 Chairman: No, we know about that, but you were talking rather more widely. There is a mismatch, of course, between the ministerial role in public body appointments and senior Civil Service appointments and there has been an argument from Ministers, and I think from the previous Cabinet Secretary, that there is a case for moving towards the public body model in relation to ministerial involvement in Civil Service appointments. That is to say that they could get a choice of who to appoint as opposed to having to take someone that the panel produces for them. Lord Butler of Brockwell: Within departments my experience was that the whole, you are saying "choice" gave a rather misleading impression of it. It was not that you gave three names and the Minister said, "I will have B"; it was a discussion, a dialogue between them, where you would hope to come to an agreement. The Minister would put his point of view and the civil servant would put their point of view and between you you would hope to come to the right decision, and the way I felt it for the most part did come to the right decision. Q202 Kelvin Hopkins: One of the last things Robin Cook said before he sadly died was to a Hansard presentation where he said that a major change had taken place because of the way party leaders are elected, particularly in my own party, the Labour Party. That back in the Wilson/Callaghan days the leader of the party was beholden to the parliamentary party and therefore had to please all sections of the parliamentary party, so he appointed a balanced cabinet and balanced government representing the broad range of views within the party from Benn and Castle across to, let's say, Healey and Jenkins typically. That is no longer the case and therefore the Prime Minister can either choose Ministers in his own image, supporting his own view entirely, but he can safely ignore sections of the party who do not happen to share his view. He thought that was a crucial change in the way we are governed. Do you have any view on that? Lord Butler of Brockwell: Not particularly, no. I remember the joke about it was better to have the guy sometimes inside the tent rather than outside the tent --- Q203 Chairman: Those were not quite the words! Lord Butler of Brockwell: Not quite the words but perhaps best expressed that way! If that has changed I am not aware of it. Q204 Kelvin Hopkins: Well, it is the case that the Cabinet now is not to put too fine a point on it a cypher. It meets very briefly; it does not have the papers; and one does not hear of Cabinet revolts. Occasionally there is a bit of a leak from one Minister or another, perhaps from some of those who do not see themselves as having a long future in government, maybe, I do not know, but we do not have Cabinet government any more, and that is a key part of our constitution, is it not? Sir Christopher Foster: It is a point I make in my book, this change in the power of the party leader, but I think it is only half the story. It may be the case that all parts of the party are not represented in Cabinet and insofar as they were they caused lots of problems. I can remember Ministers getting very angry and unhappy about difficulties they had with colleagues who thought they were just being mischievous or party political within the party, so it was not all plus. On the other hand, I agree it had considerable strengths. You had to get your ideas past some of your colleagues who were not always disposed to wish you well. But I think even now, though I make quite a lot of observations on the problems that Ministers have in holding onto positions and the Prime Minister deciding he wants them to go, there is I think sufficient division of opinion within the Cabinet, and from my own rather limited experience in talking to people quite a lot of talent too. I think the idea that MPs or Ministers are less talented than they once were is a mistake. I think they have far fewer opportunities to show their talents and to learn from experience, but my own view is that you do learn from the sort of people who if they worked within a collegiate Cabinet system would help achieve very much better governance. It is certainly not a reason for sticking to what we have. Q205 Mr Prentice: But how does that square with what you say in your pamphlet, that the status of Cabinet Ministers has declined to that of agents of the Prime Minister and Gordon Brown? Sir Christopher Foster: Precisely that, and this is what is so depressing, I think. Not all but I also I think mention that one or two personalities have slightly more freedom than that suggests, but be that as it may it is because they are regarded as agents - and we can all name people who have been Ministers who have had to carry out policies with which they did not agree at all, and that is not good for government. These people, these agents, deserve in my judgment a better status and more influence on the policies which they are formally responsible for, and in many cases, and this is perhaps just optimism but I think it is true, you would get a better outcome if they were more responsible. Q206 Kelvin Hopkins: Some people suggest that we have had a triumph of a particular political ideology and that we now all subscribe to that and therefore there is no point in having these conflicts and these serious debates and alternative governments with alternative philosophies, because the ideology of economic liberalism and so on has now triumphed and the end of politics has arrived. I do not agree with that but what are your views? Lord Butler of Brockwell: Even if it were true at the level of the general ideology the practical application of it needs a great deal of debate. I agree with what Sir Christopher has said, that in a good working system you get a range of views within the Cabinet, disagreement - fine, but in the end everybody feeling that they have had an opportunity to put their point of view and the proposals which the Cabinet emerges with are the best that they could cobble together with the interplay of those views. Then they will all feel united behind them and willing to support them and you will not get a situation, which we have seen a great deal of recently, where you have Cabinet Ministers in open dissent against policies put forward by the government. Q207 Chairman: I do not want to leave this until we have cleared up this appointments business, if I may, because I am not entirely clear what you have told us now. I thought we had a system where all senior Civil Service appointments were on the basis of open competition monitored by Civil Service Commission with the best person anointed but the Minister has to take, and if they are not happy with that they can re-run the whole competition until there is another best person. Now I am trying to reconcile this with what you are telling us, Robin, about the routine way in which Ministers are making Civil Service appointments. Lord Butler of Brockwell: I am not up-to-date with the way in which it works and I think there has been a greater formality introduced since my time. Certainly, when competitions are open for Permanent Secretaries I believe it works in the way in which you describe, but of course there is a wide range of other internal appointments or appointments which are not put to open competition which happen in a more informal way. Let's take the head of an information division, very important to the Minister. Let's take a Principal Private Secretary, very important. Let's take a civil servant in charge of an important area of policy. This would all happen by a more informal dialogue between the civil servant and the Secretary of State. Q208 Chairman: This is a very interesting issue because I think you are giving us an insight into how this works on the ground which is a million miles away from some of the formal stuff that is given to us, and it does cast the whole argument about politicisation into a new light. If there is routine political involvement in appointments across the Civil Service, and has been for a long time, why are we getting so exercised about this politicisation stuff that has appeared in the last few years? Lord Butler of Brockwell: My belief about that is that as appointments have been opened up to a wider range of people so that they are not just done within the Civil Service that obviously does increase the risk of a spoiled system or of political favouritism and because of that it has been necessary to put more safeguards in place to insure against it and that is a perfectly correct thing to do. We were saying before that if you have appointments from outside the balance of advantage is in favour of that but you need some safeguards, and these are the sort of safeguards to which you are referring and they are quite right. Q209 Chairman: If Ministers are appointing civil servants, surely that is liable to produce more compliant civil servants? Lord Butler of Brockwell: No - let me make it clear. What I said was they "approve" the appointments of civil servants and it is a dialogue, always was when I was involved in it, between the Permanent Secretary and the Minister, and if a Permanent Secretary felt a Minister was making an appointment for the wrong reason because it was his son-in-law or something then the Permanent Secretary would resist that very strongly and maybe take it to the Prime Minister. Q210 Chairman: To use shorthand now because we are running short of time, do you think there has been more politicisation in recent times and, if there has, is that necessarily a bad thing? Lord Butler of Brockwell: I am not sure I do think there has been more politicisation in appointments but I do think it is a bad thing if you lost the system where people had confidence that the Civil Service, as it were, had a separate professional status which was not dependent on politicians so that you can rely on their advice being impartial and objective, and I think my judgment is that the more government has been conducted through the media with political debate through the media, the more spin there is, the more general public opinion is in favour of having an impartial objective civil service. Q211 Chairman: But having more special advisers, for example, by itself does not cause a difficulty? Lord Butler of Brockwell: No. Q212 Chairman: There used to be a standard argument amongst reformers like Christopher 30 years ago that we should have ministerial cabinets, politically appointed people around Ministers. The argument about increasing special advisers in recent years makes it almost impossible to make a sensible case for something like that. Have not we got the whole thing out of perspective? Lord Butler of Brockwell: I have always been in favour of special advisers; they add a great deal. I have not been in favour of the cabinet system because I think there is a danger that if a Minister cocoons himself within a group of politically-appointed people, they by that cut themselves off from the other streams of advice they ought to be getting, both from civil servants and maybe from outside. I think a good Minister keeps all those streams open but there is a definite place for the special adviser, just as for the civil servant. Q213 Chairman: And you have come to believe that a Civil Service Act would help to put some lines in the sand here? Lord Butler of Brockwell: Yes. I have been in favour of making a greater separation of the political special adviser from the Civil Service. I would not have them as temporary civil servants any more because I think it is an impossible situation for a Permanent Secretary, as it were, to be responsible for the disciplining of a special adviser. That has to be as a result of the relationship between the Minister and the civil servant. I would bring short money into government and have Ministers with a certain amount of short money that they can use to make temporary appointments of political supporters who help them in government, and who are kept separate from the civil servant. Q214 Chairman: But if they run riot in the system then you have lost any ability to keep them within the net, and Ministers who protect them surely we would be in deep trouble? Lord Butler of Brockwell: Well, the Minister has to be answerable for that but he is the only person who can be. I think it is very difficult for a Permanent Secretary to deal with a special adviser who runs riot. Q215 Chairman: But if a Minister is protecting a special adviser who is running riot who is his appointee, and you have dispensed with any other mechanism of dealing with it, do you not make matters worse rather than better? Lord Butler of Brockwell: I think that when a special adviser runs riot, and we can think of some examples in the early part of the present government, that becomes a matter for public criticism which the Minister has to answer for and in the end that is the way it is dealt with. Q216 Mr Prentice: Since I have the three of you here, there are huge structural changes happening across government - police, health and so on. My question is about the configuration of central government. The Conservatives have set up this policy commission, and we know it is the view of William Hague, the former leader, that before Whitehall departments are reconfigured there should be parliamentary approval. That is the case in our sister Parliament in Ottawa. Do you think it should be left to the Executive, or should Parliament have a role in deciding whether Whitehall departments are reconfigured? Sir Christopher Foster: I think the important point here with which I have a lot of sympathy is that there should be some parliamentary discussion of these matters; the extent to which agencies have been created, governments reconfigured by fiat. It is not the fiat I mind so much but very often more explanation was required, more discussion of the problems. Going right the way back so as to be non controversial, I think the creation of huge ministries in the 1970s made it far harder for Ministers to do their job, though there are lots of arguments on the other side. It is that kind of issue. If there is major reconfiguration of departments, again I would like to think there was more public discussion or creation of agencies. One of the things we have not talked about which I take very seriously is the whole issue of what powers and freedoms agencies have, and what discretion. To be short, I can see the case for government deciding how it wants to reconfigure itself, but I do think it should be prepared to defend it in more detail. Sir Nicholas Monck: May I just say that the continuation of civil servants who do feel free to, as it were, tell the truth as they see it and to be constructive critics of proposals is an essential part of my proposal working. If everybody inside the machine was compliant because they were frightened about being moved to power stations or the equivalent, then part of the major teeth of the machine would have gone and you would not have this working-out of internal testing of proposals before they came to Parliament. Lord Butler of Brockwell: Could I just draw your attention to Robin Mountfield's memorandum that he put to you which I thought put this case as well as certainly I felt I could have put it. Sir Nicholas Monck: I agree. Q217 Chairman: Absolutely. Just before we end, we started with this decline thesis, this deterioration in the quality of government. Just in a nutshell, if I said to you "Who is responsible? Is it Ministers? Civil servants, or external forces over which we have no control?" Without giving us a long thesis, which would you opt for? Sir Christopher Foster: My answer is it is a great many things. Lord Butler of Brockwell: My answer is all three. Sir Nicholas Monck: The same. Q218 David Heyes: The Chairman is determined I am going to ask you about memoires and I will, but I want to pick up on this better-the-governments issue first, if I may. Very briefly, is it the case that we should give up all hope of addressing the problems, as Sir Christopher describes, or start to produce some of the solutions that Sir Nick steers us towards under the present government? Is this a lost cause under New Labour and should we be looking for a change of government for the necessary changes to be brought about? I am guessing in Lord Butler's case that is the conclusion you have reached because you have thrown your lot in with the Tories on this, have you not? Lord Butler of Brockwell: I am glad you have given me the chance to speak about that! I have not thrown my lot in with the Tories at all. I am willing to help any party who wants to address these problems. If the Labour Party set up a group that was addressing it I would be just as willing to help with that, or the Lib Dems. I just regard this, and I think we all do as retired civil servants, as part of our duty to help any party preparing for power. Nick did some training for the Labour Party before they came in; when I was Cabinet Secretary I briefed the Shadow Cabinet on these things, so I really do want to disclaim any political motive for doing this. If, however, the Conservatives committed themselves to some of these reforms we have been discussing today and I could have some influence on that, I would be delighted. Q219 David Heyes: Should we abandon New Labour? Sir Nicholas Monck: I would say no because I think there is a current thinking where I think a lot of people are realising that mistakes have been made because preparation has been inadequate, and there may be eventually a competition between the parties and I would not be surprised if that happened. Sir Christopher Foster: We must not abandon it; the consequences would be too dreadful. You would continue to be discredited frequently; public trust would continue to decline: we need an effective government parliamentary process. I am sure there are many ways of achieving it, I am not talking about a return to the past. There are certain aspects of the past which are trying to be revived but I am absolutely sure that there is an awful lot of modernisation, technology even, needed to get this working properly again. Q220 David Heyes: It would be wrong for us not take the opportunity of having you here to ask for some brief views on our other line of inquiry which is about political memoires. We had amongst others Lord Lawson in front of us some months ago and he told us that he caused a certain amount of consternation in the publication of his memoires and that you, Lord Butler, at the time had a serious look at the Radcliffe rules behind the scenes, and his view is that you did not believe at that time that any changes were necessary and did not make any. Are you sorry about that now? Lord Butler of Brockwell: I saw that bit of evidence. I had not remembered and I still cannot that we had any particular look at it. It is true that his memoirs caused some consternation and they caused consternation because he was very frank about exchanges that had gone on not only with his political colleagues but with civil servants within the 15 years that Radcliffe said that Ministers should not do that after the event. This was within the 15 years. But Radcliffe also said that in this respect the Cabinet Secretary's advice can only be advisory to Ministers and they are free not to accept it if they wish, whereas official secrets or international relations they must accept, and Lord Lawson did not accept it. He made some modifications but he did not accept all of it. So what he did was strictly consistent with the Radcliffe rules. As I say, I cannot remember any exercise but it may well have been that we thought about tightening those up and decided that we could not. I think there has to be a self-denying ordinance about this. I have said over Chris Meyer's memoirs that I think the relationship between civil servants and Ministers and Ministers and civil servants should be a professional one, like that between a barrister and a client and a patient and doctor, and both sides should feel an obligation to be discreet about that so they can then have confidence in each other and people can have confidence in each other in the future. Q221 David Heyes: But that "good chap" idea has broken down completely, has it not? Lawson looks very tame now compared with events in more recent times. Just how damaging is it, this breakdown of trust, the rush from civil servants as well as ex-Ministers to publish memoirs that are designed to attract the biggest price really for publication? How damaging is that? Lord Butler of Brockwell: I think it is damaging to the sort of principles that we have been arguing for today, and I think the Chris Meyer book was damaging in that respect. He did not give away any great secrets but it was damaging to that confidence, so I am very sorry about it. You say it has broken down completely - well, none of us three have written our memoirs. Sir Nicholas Monck: Not yet! Sir Christopher Foster: I would agree absolutely with that but good may come of these things. The Lance Price book, for example, gave a horrifying picture of an operation at the heart of government which seemed to consider telling a truth of minimal importance and went on from one issue to another, the same sort of people, moving, leaping around. It may be misleading, it may be just a very bad book, but reading some of these books reinforces the case for change. Q222 Chairman: The problem with that argument is this is justification for producing such books because they tell us things that we need to know, so it is all very confusing, is it not? Sir Christopher Foster: I think we now know enough. Q223 Mr Prentice: Did you think Christopher Meyer should lose his Knighthood because he did a dishonourable thing? Lord Butler of Brockwell: No. There are rules about losing Knighthoods which depend upon being convicted for more than three months and I do not think what he did was bad enough to go to prison for three months. Chairman: We have had a splendid session. Thank you very much indeed. It has been both enjoyable and extremely important. Thank you very much. |