Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-99)
MR HUGH
LANNING, MR
MARTIN FURLONG
AND MS
SUE FERNS
30 NOVEMBER 2006
Q80 Chairman: Thank you for that. So
it is sort of assent in principle, but, from your different perspectives,
worries about aspects of what all this means. Can I just ask whether
we have ever had someone who comes from the specialist professional
side of the Civil Service, a Prospect member or someone who has
been a PCS member working at the coalface of the Civil Service,
who has risen to the very top?
Ms Ferns: I think we have had
a couple of Prospect members, scientists, who have become agency
chief executives and that is the most senior level they have got
to.
Q81 Chairman: But we have not had
a permanent secretary, have we?
Ms Ferns: No.
Mr Lanning: Not that I am aware
of, no.
Q82 Chairman: Is that a cause for
surprise because you would think in an organisation like yours
that someone, as it were, who starts off stacking shelves in Tesco's
might one day run it?
Mr Lanning: It is not a surprise.
If you look at the traditional structure of how you recruit, it
is not trying to take the shelf-stacker and get them to the top,
it is graduate entry, it is fast stream, it is executive officer
recruitment level and actually trying to replicate the people
already in senior management posts and bringing more of their
ilk through. There is not a mechanism actually to reach right
down into the large numbers of the Civil Service and give them
a route to follow, and that is partly what we were saying about
a skills framework. One of the issues when we raised Skills for
Life, we got scepticism from the permanent secretaries and the
then head of the Civil Service that there was a need for skills-for-life
training. When we showed some of our evidence that actually on
basic skills level 2 up to SEO level within the Civil Service,
senior executives, which can be a major regional manager, there
were problems, they only reluctantly believed us. I think that
was because there was an assumption that, because we recruited
lots of good graduates, we had the skills and you did not need
to provide a route map for people through. I think there are a
lot of people with untapped skills inside the Civil Service where
we do not know what they are, so it is not a shock that nobody
has risen up because it would be very hard to find your way through
that route through the traditional methods and it would take a
long time. You have to go step by step, there is no way that you
can be identified easily and say, "Hello, I'm a bright person
and I can do something bigger, better or greater", and you
have to plod your way up the treadmill.
Q83 Chairman: I am interested in
this because we are talking about leadership spotting and leadership
development within the Senior Civil Service, but we are not talking
about it across the Civil Service as a whole in a way which would
enable someone to move through the ranks. Is it something to do
with the way in which we recruit and structure the Civil Service
that prevents it being that sort of straight-through career organisation?
Mr Furlong: Quite possibly. One
of the interesting facts that came across from reading the evidence
is that 35% of SES[2]
posts are filled externally and that kind of influx of people
at a level where you could progress up to being a permanent secretary
and beyond does actually send the message out that the skills
from outside are much more highly valued than the ones which have
been organically grown inside. That is quite a high statistic
and, if that was maybe higher, then it would be almost impossible
for people starting below those levels to progress that way. It
sends subliminal messages as to how your career is going to progress.
Mr Lanning: On diversity, as a
union, we run a course called "Achieve" which is for
black members on management and we run one called "Women
into Management" which is for people who have not been picked
up by the official structures. In the context of the Professional
Skills for Government, there is not a view that we can provide
positive training for people who have not been picked up by the
traditional structures to enable them to get up, be identified
or to come forward themselves. There is no easy mechanism for
individuals, if you like, to aspire and try and find a way forward.
If you look at the training that is done in most departments,
it is short-term, functional training on the whole, "What
do we need tomorrow? What skills do we need tomorrow?", and
it is not long-term, strategic planning about their needs and
their requirements. IT is a very good example of that where, if
you like, in the period when large-scale privatisation was taking
place, not only was there the issue which you may expect of our
view on privatisation to be, but all the skills were given away,
so they are still our members, they are working for Siemens, they
are working for EDS, they are working for Cap-Gemini, Fujitsu,
but they are no longer civil servants and there is a huge shortage.
That strategic view of whatever we do in terms of how we organise
our work and to try and retain the skills we need inside the organisation
to make it function is not a judgment that is placed at the procurement
stage when they are making major decisions about what they keep,
what they do, what they do not do, and I think that is a big problem.
We say in our evidence, I think, that in 2020 the majority of
the workforce is going to be the existing workforce, so a big
requirement, if you like, if we are going to meet the skills,
is what training they are providing to existing staff to untap
the skills that are there at the moment, and I do not think they
are taking that as a serious priority at the moment.
Ms Ferns: From the point of view
of specialists, I think there are three points I want to make.
One is that I think the Civil Service does not value specialist
skills. We have just done a survey of our members and that is
one of the messages that comes out loud and clear. However good
your specialist skills are, they are not seen as being of as high
value as general management skills. In terms of the external markets,
certainly if we are talking about people with scientific and technical
skills, clearly there is an external market which in some ways
looks more attractive to them than the Civil Service, not just
in terms of pay, I have to say, but in terms of core funding for
work and longer-term certainty about the environment you are able
to pursue your career in. The short-termism, the contracting out,
the amount of time that people have to spend actually winning
funds to do the work that they need to do is a huge cause of frustration
to specialists. Just as an example from another area of Prospect's
membership, which shows how important this is, one of the electricity
companies where we have a lot of members, quite interestingly,
like many companies in that sector, has been through some waves
of changes of ownership, changes of fortune and so on, but the
reports back we had were that after one particular change in a
period of time when engineers were brought in to the senior management
team in that company, that directly translated into greater commercial
success. I think the message there is that parts of the private
sector are recognising it and the Civil Service is not.
Q84 Chairman: Thank you very much
for that. The FDA, in your memorandum to us, and we are talking
about leadership and management and so on, you talk about the
"continued lack of sufficient emphasis within the Civil Service
on leadership and management skills over many years", although
you say that it has got better in recent years. Why was there
that traditional lack of emphasis on the issue of management skills
inside the Civil Service?
Mr Furlong: I suspect because
it is the way the Civil Service has been over the years, for want
of a cliché, the old boys' network which existed in the
past which made it easier to get promoted if you were of a certain
background which perhaps had more emphasis than leadership skills.
I like to think that has changed, but that is possibly the historical
reason for that. I think we also make the point in the evidence
about conflicting interests that senior civil servants have about
to whom their responsibilities are, whether it is to ministers,
whether it is to the general public or whether it is to their
staff and sometimes those lines are blurred and have been blurred
in the past. Whilst we hope that Professional Skills for Government
will help people provide leadership skills, it certainly has not
been there in the past. Just to give perhaps a more concrete example,
a large proportion of our membership are lawyers, and in fact
something like 42% of the people who responded to our surveys
were lawyers, and it is quite usual for groups of lawyers to be
managed by another lawyer. There is nothing wrong with that in
practice because they are probably very good lawyers which is
why they have become managers, but they have become managers because
they are very good lawyers, not because necessarily they have
leadership skills which means that some of the things like personal
development have not actually been high up the agenda. We would
like to see that changed. It also explains why some people, the
specialist members that we have, particularly lawyers, accountants
and economists, look at Professional Skills for Government and
actually see it as a barrier to them getting on because it says,
"Unless you have certain core skills, you cannot get beyond
certain levels". They say, "I'm a lawyer. Why do I need
accountancy skills?", for example, and it is actually seen
as a barrier to that. Unless that leadership is there, then it
is hard for them to actually see how they can progress their careers.
Q85 Chairman: I wanted to pick up
what you just said at the beginning of your remarks there when
you said that there is confusion about the role of ministers and
then you went on to talk about the different kinds of people to
whom civil servants could be accountable. You say, "Civil
servants must be clearly and properly accountable and any widespread
perception of poor leadership, except where it has been shown
to be the case, is deeply troubling". I did not quite understand
that. What were you trying to say there?
Mr Furlong: I think sometimes
we feel in FDA that, whenever things go wrong in public life,
it is a very quick and easy solution to blame the civil servants.
We have always sort of held the view that civil servants are accountable
for their actions, they are accountable for what they do, but
they are not the only people who actually get the blame when things
go wrong and sometimes it is far too easy to blame the hired help
rather than perhaps the people who developed the policies in the
first place. That is a general view.
Q86 Chairman: But you have just told
us that there has been a traditional lack of emphasis on leadership
and management skills inside the Civil Service.
Mr Furlong: That is our view,
looking back over the history of the Civil Service, and something
we would like to see changed obviously. Hopefully that is something
that is changing and we would like to see it change even more.
Q87 Chairman: So would you like to
see civil servants being more visibly accountable for their performance?
Mr Furlong: Providing everybody
else is as well. For example, senior civil servants in particular
are always given tasks to do by, for example, ministers, by chief
executives and by other bodies and actually developing policies
that have come from other people. It is not necessarily the civil
servants' fault if those policies are inherently wrong, but certainly
civil servants, like any other employees, are accountable for
what they do, they have to be accountable, so we have no problem
with that, but we do also make reference to the blame culture
and I think that is partly what we were talking about there as
well, that it is far too easy to blame civil servants if things
go wrong. You only have to look at what happened in the Child
Support Agency where everything that went wrong was blamed on
the people running the system. Now, I would not necessarily think
that was true and I think some of the people who made the policy
decisions maybe were just as accountable as the people working
on the ground. Certainly civil servants are accountable and should
be accountable, just like everybody else, but they are not the
only people who should be accountable.
Q88 Grant Shapps: On that subject,
we are looking at Skills for Government and a very obvious area
of skills is skills for the ministers themselves, bringing on
your point, Martin. I know you are very keen that ministers are
given greater training, formal training in fact. Is that because
of this potential for civil servants to get the blame otherwise?
Mr Furlong: Possibly, but also
I think there is a public interest element to it as well. The
sort of cyclical nature of politics in one way or another probably
means that ministers could well come into a department, stay there
for varying lengths of time depending on other circumstances and
then move on and are replaced. It certainly seems to us that a
formal type of training for ministers or MPs in general would
actually be helpful in helping them to be able actually to go
into departments.
Q89 Grant Shapps: If that minister
in question happened to be John Reid, he would just be permanently
on training courses, would he not? He has been in so many departments,
he would be doing nothing else.
Mr Furlong: I think the point
has been made there earlier. Learning skills and Skills for Life
are very good for everybody and I think everybody should be learning
skills all through their life.
Mr Lanning: I think that is a
mistake. You are not talking about politicians and MPs being taught
to be micro-managers of their department, you are talking about
how they could acquire the skills, whatever their policies or
politics, to ensure that their department can get through the
policies that they want and that is a different skill from the
one which is saying, "I know how to run a Jobcentre Plus
office". I think that is the mistake of quite a lot of the
thoughts about training and actually quite a lot of the mistakes
I have seen of ministers, some of whom are friends, where they
do get immersed in the day-to-day work and they are not actually
holding the department accountable for, "These are the big
policy objectives we want you to implement. What are you doing
on them?", and I think we need to be careful.
Q90 Grant Shapps: No, that point
is definitely understood. I think this quote is from you, Martin,
it is certainly from the FDA, where you cite, for example, basic
IT training or perhaps the ability to offer others tactful assistance
in interpersonal skills might be beneficial. Are we really at
that sort of level? What has happened to the quality of ministers
that they come in without the ability? Is this because ministers
these days do not come in from outside business where they have
had real-world experience, but they have been politicos all their
lives and they have just missed out on these basic skills?
Mr Furlong: My view is that ministers
and politicians generally come from all walks of life and that
is one of the beauties of the system that we have in the UK, that
anybody can become an MP, from any background.
Q91 Grant Shapps: We are all proof
of that.
Mr Furlong: Exactly. Therefore,
everybody coming into a new job, whether an MP, whether a minister,
whether a civil servant, whether a permanent secretary or even
a trade union official, you do need actually to have some sort
of training, everybody needs training, and I think it is for their
own protection as much as anything else.
Q92 Grant Shapps: So if there is
this obvious and pressing need to train our ministers and ministers
have always been under-skilled, in your view, why has it taken
until this September, do you think, to have the first ever training
college for them?
Mr Furlong: I could not possibly
comment on that. I am not sure I know the answer, to be honest.
Q93 Grant Shapps: Either, I assume,
the answer is that it was not required or it was not required
with the standard of ministers in the past or it was always required
and this was an obvious shortcoming, in which case you wonder
why in hundreds of years this has never been done earlier or perhaps
it is not really adding much to the value of ministers' work.
Is there enough evidence—there probably is not after just
one college—to say one thing or the other?
Mr Furlong: I think you are probably
right, that there probably is not the evidence to say one way
or the other, but it would seem to me that the need has probably
been there for some time and perhaps it has only just been recognised.
Q94 Grant Shapps: Do you detect a
lot of resistance from ministers to going off and being trained
in this way? I think you have referred to the potential stigma
attached to it and I am not sure why there should be stigma attached
to it, but is there?
Mr Furlong: I think the point
in the evidence was more about people not necessarily wanting
to admit that there is a training need. Particularly people in
public office may not want to say, "I've got a training need"
because it may be seen as a weakness. I think actually the people
we look after in the Civil Service, if they say they have a training
need, it is generally seen to be a good thing. A few years ago,
perhaps it was not. We have mentioned before about people always
learning through life and I think that is a fact and the same
applies to ministers, MPs, shadow ministers as well, that people
always need to learn new tricks.
Q95 Grant Shapps: Is there ever a
sense that the permanent secretaries might rather wish the ministers
were not too helpful about this stuff if they are over-trained.
There is a fundamental complication, is there not, because you
will have a minister and a permanent secretary and there has been
a lot of discussion about who takes orders from whom?
Mr Furlong: I would not have thought
so. The permanent secretaries I have met through doing this job
either in formal meetings or informally tend to suggest that they
would prefer the ministers they are dealing with to actually be
more knowledgeable about what is going on because it makes it
a bit easier actually to operate, so I would not have thought
that was the case.
Q96 Mr Prentice: Can I just continue
the theme and I want to talk briefly about the capability reviews.
The FDA's submission said that the first four capability reviews
highlighted differences between departments rather than any failings
in the quality of leadership demonstrated at senior levels. Are
you being serious there?
Mr Furlong: Probably the point
being made at the time this was written was more that the capability
reviews were at the very early stages and the main thing we had
seen from it was people saying, "That works there, but that
does not work in other departments". Perhaps it might well
be that, as there are more capability reviews, there will be more
evidence to look at what the outcomes are.
Q97 Mr Prentice: On the capability
review on the Home Office which the Home Secretary has famously
slagged off, it says that 15 immediate changes were needed at
director level in order to strengthen leadership in the most important
areas. Fifteen immediate changes. Surely that points to a weakness
in the leadership of the Home Office?
Mr Furlong: I think one of the
other points we made in the submission about the Home Office was
when we talked about the change around of people at certain levels,
we talked about, I think the phrase used was, "a lack of
corporate knowledge", corporate memory, when people actually
move around. That is one of the points we brought out in our evidence
and particularly about the Home Office, and I think that is quite
an important point as well.
Q98 Mr Prentice: I am just trying
to winkle out from you really whether you think that is unfair,
15 immediate changes, immediate changes, as the Home Secretary
said, to strengthen leadership in the most important areas. Was
that justified or not?
Mr Furlong: To be honest, I have
not actually read the Home Office paper in complete detail, so
I would hate to commit myself to anything.
Q99 Mr Prentice: Okay. Can I just
switch then to the PCS on the same theme because in your submission
you said, astonishingly for me, that neither the findings for
the individual departments nor the common themes identified contained
any surprises or any new insights. The fact that the Home Office
was, and I hate to use this phrase but in the Home Secretary's
words, "not fit for purpose", that the Department for
Constitutional Affairs was on a journey to reach its vision or
whatever and all that kind of stuff, which came as a complete
surprise to me because I am just an innocent in these matters,
but for you, when you read the capability review, there were no
surprises there and no insights?
Mr Lanning: And would you expect
there to be? You have just commented on the Home Office and one
of the things we got back from our representatives in the departments
was the speed with which the capability reviews were done, it
was very quick, so essentially what is going to happen in a speedy,
quick process is that what will come up as the answers are the
answers that already work in progress. If they were instant solutions
that came out of thin air in the Home Office or anywhere else
in that period of time, you would think, "Well, where's that
come from? How does somebody, who has come from outside, in 30
days work out a new solution?", so most of the things that
come forward in the capability reviews are pulling out the things
that are there.
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