Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120
- 138)
TUESDAY 3 JULY 2007
PROFESSOR TOM
BURKE CBE
Q120 Dr Turner: Perhaps your comments
on the previous Prime Minister's effectiveness on the international
scene as opposed to governance in this country are a reflection
of the fact that it is probably easier to move George Bush than
it is to move the English Civil Service and its institutions.
You have been reviewing environmental governance in Northern Ireland.
Clearly, that is much smaller and more compact, but if you were
to take the rather much more cohesive process that exists in Northern
Ireland and impose it upon Westminster, what changes do you think
you would make?
Professor Burke: May I start with
the premise that I think it is impossible to move George Bush,
not least because Dick Cheney stands behind him and Dick Cheney
is definitely immovable. Also, I think the British Civil Service,
and I have experienced it in a number of different ways, is phenomenally
responsive to the wishes of ministers, sometimes if anything a
bit too responsive, and particularly in recent times it is has
been rather less willing than it was in the past to bring ministers
unwelcome advice, even in private. So I would not say that. In
Northern Ireland, there is a danger in having too closed a community.
What I found in Northern Ireland was to some extent rather the
limitations of too small a scale of Civil Service whereby there
were not, for instance, sufficient career opportunities for people
to develop as it were functional specialisms while maintaining
a progressive career through the Civil Service. That is quite
important. You have heard previous evidence on the importance
of training and skill development for people; I think that is
true. I also think you need to have a broad enough base of opportunity
for officials so that they can seek promotion but nevertheless
not become totally generalist civil servants that only know broad
theories and do not actually acquire specific expertise. That
is a difficult balance to draw and you need to draw it in practice.
I do not think there is a theoretical basis for it. On the whole,
I found the Civil Service in Northern Ireland to be more introverted
than I would like and I do not find that to be the case here.
Some of that is structural, and I am not talking about the attitudes
of civil servants. You have 1.7 million people in Northern Ireland.
The opportunity that we have in Great Britain as a whole with
a much larger pool to draw on is that you can draw on people from
outside into the Civil Service. I think Nick Mabey made some suggestions
to you about the importance of that. There is much more opportunity
to do that here than there was in Northern Ireland.
Q121 Dr Turner: We have heard a lot
of evidence that suggests that you should not keep energy separate
from the environment as the two are so closely related in function.
It is slightly surprising that your review did not recommend that
energy should become a responsibility of the Environment Department
or that you should merge them together.
Professor Burke: You really do
have to separate the political level from the policy level. Quite
often we blame political failure as policy failure and often it
is unresolved political disputes. There is plenty of opportunity
for political differences not to be resolved, and that does lead
then to policy failures and policy excuses. I do not think it
matters very much where individual functions sit. It matters that
the political will to resolve disputes between parties exists.
That is why I recommended a strong Cabinet Office secretariat;
in other words, I think the underlying point in that suggestion
that you have heard evidence on, that there needs to be terribly
close co-ordination of climate change policy and energy policy,
is absolutely correct but the right way to accomplish that is
to have the kind of powerful Cabinet Office secretariat that can,
at a policy level, resolve disputes or at least then create the
options for political resolution and make sure that is a clear
and transparent process inside government. I do not think we have
that at the moment. You need to have the kind of Cabinet Office
secretariat in the way that we have an EU Secretariat, because
it is a cross-cutting issue, or we have a Defence and Overseas
Secretariat because it is a cross-cutting issue, not one of the
standard, issue-following Cabinet Office committees.
Q122 Dr Turner: Does that not run
the risk of creating yet another department and yet another opportunity
for turf wars?
Professor Burke: I do not think
so. My experience from watching this in the formation of our original
carbon dioxide climate change policy back when I was a special
adviser under a Conservative government was that the Cabinet Office
process was very good. I saw on three or four occasions how a
large Cabinet Office process was a way of ensuring that the departments
came together and made a coherent case. I have not seen very much
of that of late. For instance, it would be quite sensible, if
you did that, to take the current Office of Climate Change and
have that as an analytical capacity for that secretariat. I am
talking about a secretariat and not a department. Departments
have multiple functions and they have an outward-facing function
as well as, as it were, an inward-facing function across government.
They have particular responsibilities to discharge. You do not
eliminate those different responsibilities by lumping the departments
together. Often what you do is then conceal inside the veil, as
it were, of the policy making process and the political process
the divisions rather than reveal them transparently. I have a
big disposition for saying that these are real conflicts; they
are genuinely difficult issues and they are much better resolved
in a transparent when everybody can see what the conflict is and
that allows other voices to join the debate than when you lock
it up inside a single super-department and nobody actually sees
anything other than the final resolution, which I think undermines
a lot of confidence in the outcome.
Q123 Dr Turner: Do you think that
there is any sort of backwardness or friction induced in departmental
cultures and baggage?
Professor Burke: I watched the
creation of Defra and the whole way in which the interaction between
the MAFF culture and the former DoE culture led to something that
remains pretty confused. On the whole, it is important to build
up a departmental culture that has a clear mission focus. Part
of the difficulty of lumping things together is that you tend
to lose that mission focus. One of the best things you can do
if you want to develop the right kind of culture is to stop changing
the deckchairs all the time. Cultures take time to develop, as
views take time to develop. You do not achieve that kind of thing
quickly. The kinds of change processes that Nick Mabey was recommending
and the idea that you really do need a lot more personal development
and training for civil servants is right, but you need to do that
inside a relatively stable context, or else everybody is thinking
about the next set of changes that they have to cope with that
are short-term and tactical. I would much rather see departments
left where they are, the creation of a powerful secretariat that
required the bringing together of all the voices inside government,
but clear presentation of options to ministers. At the end of
the day, on an issue like climate change, what matters is what
the Prime Minister wants because it is a cross-cutting and cross-sectoral
issue. Unless the political will is there for the Prime Minister
to do the heavy lifting, on the difficult choices, they will not
be made.
Q124 David Howarth: Tom, we have
heard the message about the balance between trying to divide up
departments in different ways and central policy resolution. That
was very clear. What is your view on the comparison of different
ways of trying to centralise? We have had the PSAs. What is your
view of how that worked or did not work and if it did not work,
why did it not work?
Professor Burke: I have not had
a lot of direct experience with the actual PSA process. Like all
of those management tools, an enormous amount depends on how you
use them, not just on what they are. I cannot really comment on
the PSA process directly because I have not had much experience
of it. The real danger always is that you create tick-box exercises
much as you do when you ask for impact assessments or action plans
in a generalised way. I am rather sceptical about using management
tools to substitute for leadership choice, but that is not to
say that properly used they cannot play an extremely useful and
helpful role. They need to be few in number. It would be quite
interesting to have a reverse PSA; in other words, it would be
quite interesting for other departments to be in a position where
they could ask the Treasury to come up with a public service agreement.
For instance, why has the Treasury not set itself a target for
reducing the carbon intensity of public expenditure? Take out
transfer payments because in a sense they are neutral, but leave
in all the substantive investments we make: why is not the Treasury
going to set a target to reduce the carbon intensity of the money
it spends according to rules it generates?
Q125 David Howarth: You have asked
for a more dynamic process because we have a static process.
Professor Burke: There are two
things: one, more dynamic; and, two, do not imagine that institutional
change and management techniques can substitute for political
choice and political will.
Q126 David Howarth: What do you think
of this idea that a lot of us are interested in coming out of
Finland? There are some things about Finland neither of us like
much. The idea in Finland is that the government divides up into
priority areas and a senior cabinet minister with a senior civil
servant is given responsibility for a governmental political priority
with the power to bring resources and departments together to
drive that priority on? That is seen as a more senior political
job than the job of what might be called maintenance, of keeping
the departments ticking over. Do you think that might work, the
building of it into the structure?
Professor Burke: I do not know
much about the Finnish process. I have read a couple of articles
on it. I do not really know how it works in practice and I do
not know the Finnish political policy culture, so I am not sure
how translatable it is. The idea is exactly what I have in mind.
We did not arrive at the idea of having these powerful central
Cabinet Office secretariats because we were particularly clever.
We did it because we had lots of brutal experience that required
us to develop that mechanism as a result of policy failure, much
as we eventually got to a General Staff because it turned out
we were not very good at running wars. There is a tried and tested
model which fits our culture very well, which achieves much of
those objectives in which you would have a director general in
the Cabinet Office with prime responsibility who is the Prime
Minister's principal adviser. You do have that leading politician
at least on climate change. I am not sure how many issues you
would want to apply this model to but certainly for climate change,
because of the scale and urgency of the problem, you would have
that official as the Prime Minister's principal adviser. There
is a clear mechanism for banging heads together at a policy level
in the Cabinet Office process and at the political level in whatever
cabinet committee or cabinet structure is used. All of that is
visible and transparent and rather easy to understand. I have
been doing this for a long time but I am getting lost in the fog
of consultations and institutional mechanisms. I am getting a
bit lost as to where accountability lies and where the clarity
of focus lies. It is really important to retain mission focus,
which is partly why I am reluctant on this idea, whether it is
in the departmental way or whether it is Dieter Helm's idea, of
bringing all the various extra-governmental bodies together into
a single agency; you will lose mission focus. There are reasons
why you have different bits because there are different missions.
As long as you have a mechanism for transparently reconciling
those conflicts rather than burying them, I do not think that
is a bad thing. I think you want a more informed public debate
not a less informed public debate.
Q127 Chairman: You make an intriguing
suggesting about the Treasury having a specific target for cutting
the carbon footprint of its own expenditure programmes. Given
what you also said, and on which I entirely agree with you, about
the crucial role of the Prime Minister in driving the priorities
right across government, it could be argued that we have a uniquely
favourable opportunity now to achieve a change in Treasury thinking,
given that the longest ever serving Chancellor in modern times
is now Prime Minister.
Professor Burke: I think there
is a very big opportunity. From the evidence we have seen so far,
we have a Prime Minister now who has some interest in the mechanisms
of governance and therefore in the ability to turn political intent
into real outcomes. There are more problems in the Treasury than
just machinery; there are also methodological issues. The Treasury
is tremendously hide-bound on a particular theoretical conception
of the problem which does not suit climate change. It may suit
all kinds of other problems. It is very difficult, for instance,
to think of climate change as just another welfare problem: here
is a public good which we have to trade off against other public
goods. If we have policy failure on climate change, we will not
be able to have the other public goods. That is the reality. I
think there needs to be quite a lot of methodological innovation
in the Treasury because the methodology that simply says, "Let
us do a cost-benefit analysis and reduce all these complex issues
to numerical assessments of welfare and then see which gives us
most of it" is probably a bit too primitive to address the
real world complexities of this problem.
Q128 Joan Walley: You have just said
that there is a huge fog and it is very difficult even for you
to know who is responsible for what, where there is transparency
and how policy is actually made. Where do we go from here? What
should the role of the Civil Service be in all of this? If we
are on the brink of a new way constitutionally of decision-making
that could put environmental concerns and climate change at the
heart of how government takes existing policies further forward,
what should the role of the Civil Service be in all of that and
how constrained are they? Given the blur in which we are operating,
how do we take it forward?
Professor Burke: Let me separate
climate change from the rest of the environmental agenda because
they have different requirements. Climate change is a threat to
the prosperity, security and wellbeing of 60 million Britons.
It is not an immediate threat in the sense that the effects are
immediate. It will not be that the Britons in this room will feel
the consequences of a policy failure, but the nature of the dynamic
of climate change is such that decisions that are taken by people
in this room and people currently serving will determine the prosperity,
security and wellbeing of those 60 odd million Britons in the
sense that the effects of climate change express themselves about
40 years after the emission. That gives you a very difficult dynamic.
I think that can only be dealt with at the very top of government.
In a sense, I think the responsibility for climate change is a
prime ministerial responsibility and nobody else's at the end
of the day. That is not true of the other environmental issues
which is why I wanted to make that distinction. Only the Prime
Minister can deal with a threat on this scale and of this nature.
Frankly, the civil servants will do within the limitations of
their skills and training what ministers want them to do if ministers
give a clear lead. Let us be really clear: ministers do not often
give a clear lead. Ministers are quite often more interested in
the headlines than they are in the outcomes. I do not have a fundamental
feeling, at least from my experience, that the civil servants
are the core part of the problem. We do become confused by current
management speak that is badly imported into the public service
that civil servants do delivery. They do not. Let me be more clear
about that. The public servants who work in the health service
or in the big spending agencies do delivery, but the policy making
civil servants do not do delivery. What they deliver is policy.
What they really do is build the governing coalitions amongst
the various sectors—business or police or whatever—that
have to do the delivery. So the civil servants are the mechanism
by which governments translate their policy intent into the governing
coalitions inside the various professions that actually do the
delivery. On the whole, civil servants, if given clear guidance
and in the case of complex issues like climate change rather more
training than they are currently getting, do a reasonably good
job of doing that, provided they are getting a good steer from
politicians. I do not share the fear that somehow the civil servants
are a big barrier. Always you can run into individual civil servants
who get a lock on a particular set of knowledge and can become
an obstacle to making progress but, as a whole, the culture is
enormously responsive to the priorities set by ministers.
Q129 Joan Walley: There has been
a failure by civil servants in the past to operate in a holistic
way, has there not? They have not understood the agenda, have
they?
Professor Burke: Departments reflect
the aspirations and ambitions of their ministers. Yes, if a minister
wants to fight a turf war, his officials will go out at policy
level and fight that turf war for him. That is why I say for climate
change you really do need a Cabinet Office process that forces
at a policy level the banging together of heads on an evidential
basis. Even that cannot substitute for the fact that, at the end
of the day, ministers have to make choices and, frankly, ministers
are not always willing to make choices, particularly strategic
choices where the benefits fall somewhat in the future and the
costs quite often fall right away. It is understandable that they
do that but there is not much point blaming the Civil Service
for that failure.
Q130 Joan Walley: Is there not a
step before the stage at which ministers come to take decisions?
Does that not depend upon the quality of the strategic planning
that civil servants are giving to ministers to enable them to
put their policies into effect?
Professor Burke: The Civil Service
does the planning and the analysis and the preparation on the
basis of where ministers say they want the plane of policy to
land. In a sense, the democratic process puts the ministers in
charge. It is their job to lead. To use an analogy, it is the
job of the minister to say where he wants the plane of policy
to land and why and to persuade, first of all, his colleagues,
which is often quite difficult, and, secondly, the public that
that is the right place to land. It is the job of a permanent
secretary, if you like, to fly the plane and make sure that it
arrives at that landing place with all of its wings and engines,
passengers and cargo on board, or to tell the minister clearly
an unequivocally that if he wants to land there, he cannot do
it with the current plane. That is the theory as to how it should
work.
Q131 Joan Walley: But has not part
of the problem in the past been that civil servants have been
reluctant really to understand the serious time threat of climate
change?
Professor Burke: Again, I am much
more inclined to blame the politicians than the civil servants.
Could you find examples of civil servants in that mode? Yes, of
course you could. Civil servants are human beings like all of
us and they have different views on things. On the whole with
very few exceptions, are they responsive to a clear lead from
ministers? Yes, in all my experience, both inside and outside
government, that is the case. It is very difficult for civil servants,
for instance working in the Department of Energy in the last two
years, to come and tell ministers that they do not think there
is a good case for nuclear power if the Prime Minister has said
he wants nuclear power. It is really hard for them to do that.
There is not much point giving advice to people who have already
told you that they have made their mind up on the outcome. There
are real tensions in that relationship. Sometimes, but more rarely,
I think the civil servants are to blame for that; more often than
not, ministers are unwilling to take difficult choices.
Q132 Mr Caton: This morning you have
already mentioned Dieter Helm's suggestion that we turn to independent
regulators to try to reduce political pressure and particularly
the one that you mentioned, a single environment agency to look
at energy security and climate change. Do you see no benefits
in that approach?
Professor Burke: As I understood
the proposal, and I have not examined it in great detail, that
Dieter was making, you would lump the Energy Savings Trust, the
Carbon Trust and Ofgem into one body, so that you would have spending
bodies and regulatory bodies. I could not see the logic in that.
Promotional bodies have a job to do, which is to promote. A regulatory
body has a very different job to do. I do think the terms on which
you write the regulations are very important, and Dieter was right
to point out that there is an enormous confusion. I often feel
that on climate change the economists are much more interested
in finding out how to make the market work perfectly than they
are actually in solving the problem and that when it comes to
a conflict between making a market work properly and solving a
problem, they would rather make the market work properly. If you
take, for instance, the issue of carbon sequestration and storage,
we cannot solve this problem without the rapid deployment of carbon
sequestration and storage. If your electricity market regulator
allows for the passing through of the additional costs, and there
will be initially in particular some considerable additional costs
in doing that, to the whole of the rate base, it becomes a manageable
cost to achieve. If you do not allow that to be passed through
the rate base, then you have a really difficult problem inducing
the utilities to make that necessary investment. The idea that
you can do that with a carbon price which you are trying to drive
up at the same time as you have an energy regulator trying to
drive the price of electricity down seems to me to be completely
incoherent as an option. The regulator's role is extremely important
in this but I do not think you solve that problem by giving whoever
is then running that entity promotional roles as well; you would
just lose mission focus.
Q133 Mr Caton: You are certainly
right to identify what Dieter Helm said, and he talked about a
myriad of different organisations functioning in the same policy
area or areas. One of the advantages that he perceived is rationalisation.
Do you think that there is not an issue there, that there are
not perhaps too many bodies trying to work in the same area?
Professor Burke: There may be
but it is not a universal panacea and you would want to do it
on a case-by-case basis rather than as a general theory. I think
there are some considerable arguments for creating more one-stop
shop approaches, but that is about how you make the different
bodies work together effectively. I have some experience with
that issue in English Nature. The same argument came up about
the difficulty of land owners dealing with the Environment Agency,
Defra itself and English Nature, and there was a perfectly good
managerial solution to that, which created teams, as it were,
that were united and had a common focus and had worked out rules
for how they would work together. That is a management issue;
it is not an institutional issue. I think we sometimes look for
headline-grabbing institutional solutions to what are rather boring,
painstaking, managerial problems. The problem of creating the
one-stop shop access for people to information or to funds is
a real one but it is not easily solved by just lumping all the
institutions together.
Q134 Dr Turner: The Government has
proposed a committee on climate change; it will report annually
to Parliament on the carbon budgets. Given the information you
have at the moment, do you feel that in the way the committee
is proposed to be constructed and the appointment of its members
that will mean it will be insulated from political and other pressures?
Do you think it will be truly independent?
Professor Burke: That answer is
that I do not know. It very much depends on what the practice
is of doing it. It will also need to be seen against the background
of the creation of the independent planning commission, which
is also proposed, in the sense that if you are creating these,
as it were, extra-governmental bodies with big headline responsibility,
one would be seen against the other and so it is important that
they command public confidence. They will only do that if they
are representative in their composition, if their functions are
very clear—and I do not think that is the case yet with
the climate change committee but, on the other hand, we are only
in the pre-scrutiny phase so there is time to get that right—and
if the chair commands broad respect from the all the constituencies.
So the choice of chair is extremely important in doing this. If
you pick the wrong chairman for it, a chairman who does not command
across the board authority in the key external constituencies,
then I think you cripple the idea right from the start. It is
going to be a difficult task to find somebody who is sufficiently
independent in the minds of all those people, not necessarily
just in the mind of the selecting person. That is what is going
to matter. Can that be done? Yes, in my own direct experience
of looking, for instance, at the way in which John Harman has
been able to chair quite independently the Environment Agency,
that is a good example of how that can be done. There are examples
going the other way. There is no general rule here; it is a question
of whether you do it in the right way. As I said earlier, I think
it needs clearly to be an advisory body, not an executive body.
It is hard to imagine that you can pass on political responsibility
for an issue this complex and this immature.
Q135 Dr Turner: Do you think it will
have adequate skills and an adequate research base?
Professor Burke: I make the same
point as I made about this committee: if you give it the resources,
yes, it could do. That would be an important part of doing this,
but why would you do that at a time when you have not built up
the necessary concentration of capability in central government?
You would then be creating a deeply unbalanced structure.
Q136 Dr Turner: You say that you
would not want the committee to have any executive power, but,
on the other hand, would you expect the committee to make specific
policy recommendations?
Professor Burke: Yes, that is
advice. One thing you do learn as a special adviser, and it is
a famous quote from another rather more senior special adviser,
is that adviors advise and ministers decide. That is the clear
term of reference. At the end of the day, ministers must decide.
Ministers that have an advisory body that makes recommendations
to them that they consistently ignore ought to expect, and certainly
should find, that they no longer have an advisory body. Again,
that is up to the way in which the committee itself plays it cards.
That is why I say it is very hard to find a general rule. It is
a relationship; both sides of the relationship have to play their
part. One should not start with an assumption of mistrust and
bad faith.
Q137 Dr Turner: You would not want
it to get mixed up with regulation, except perhaps in giving advice?
Professor Burke: No. It is extremely
difficult. All executive action requires complex coalition-building
and compromise to achieve outcomes that bring everybody with you.
Advice needs to be clear and unambiguous and it is very difficult
to combine those two cultures in the same entity.
Q138 Chairman: Moving to energy for
a moment, you have called for changes in energy investment. Do
you think that the Energy White Paper is going to facilitate those
sorts of changes?
Professor Burke: No, and both
for process and substance reasons, I do not think many people,
other than government spokesmen, saw much difference in the energy
circumstances between the 2003 review and the 2005 review. Nothing
very much was changed in substance. Then the whole way in which
that was turned into a White Paper, which was not a White Paper
but became a review that then became a Green Paper/White Paper
and then had a consultation separate from it on a key issue undermined
investor confidence quite considerably and the Government's clarity
of intent here. In process terms, it led to a chilling of investment
and a chilling of people being unsure where government was going
to go. When it comes to making these very large, long-term investments,
the investors are probably more concerned about the political
will of a government over the long term than they are about the
price of carbon, for instance, as an influence on that decision.
Secondly, in substance terms, and I think I said so in my note
to you, the Energy White Paper is lethargic, and that is the best
description, on carbon sequestration and storage. I have given
you the numbers in my note. If we do not get others to adopt carbon-neutral
coal technologies, we cannot protect the wellbeing, security and
prosperity of 60 million Britons. If we are going to try to get
others to do something that we are not doing, we are on a fool's
errand. If we want people to do what we need them to do, we must
do it ourselves first, and we are not doing that. The idea that
in November there will be the announcement of a competition that
will at some date in the future maybe lead to somebody building
a demonstration process in Britain is, frankly, farcical. That
is no way to proceed with an issue that you think is the greatest
threat to mankind, as the previous Prime Minister said. Imagine
if we approached the threat of terrorism, which is certainly a
very big threat and will interfere with the lives of many Britons
but not all 60 million of us, with that same sort of desultory
approach. The government would rightly and roundly be condemned.
Chairman: That is very helpful. Thank
you for coming today.
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