Examination of Witnesses (Quesitons 20-39)
MS JANET PARASKEVA
24 APRIL 2008
Q20 Mr Walker: Your role, I am sure, does not cover the police?
Ms Paraskeva: No.
Q21 Mr Walker: When the police tell everyone they need to support anti-terrorism legislation, that would not come into your ambit because they are not civil servants but public servants and you do not cover public servants.
Ms Paraskeva: We do not cover public servants.
Q22 Mr Walker: Should public servants be covered by some form of regulation? Are they covered by some form of regulation?
Ms Paraskeva: The only public servants who I believe are covered by any form of regulation are the appointments that my colleague, Janet Gaymer, regulates, which are ministerial appointments to the boards of some of the public bodies established by government departments. However, I do not think there is any regulation or regulatory apparatus for the staff of those bodies.
Q23 Mr Walker: You mentioned that Permanent Secretaries managed their department closely to make sure this does not go on, as far as possible. If a Permanent Secretary—I am sure you have relationships with Permanent Secretaries—sees this going on, is he going to have a quiet word with the minister over a whisky late at night and say "Come on old girl, I think you are putting a little too much pressure on your team in this area. You just want to be careful." Would that be how it is done, just a sort of friendly chat?
Ms Paraskeva: I am sure it would happen in all sorts of different ways depending on the relationship between the Permanent Secretary and the Secretary of State. Certainly I know that Permanent Secretaries would have a word with ministers and with Secretaries of State if junior ministers were asking their civil servants to misbehave. That is the way that most of us would deal with things: something is going wrong, somebody has a quiet word and puts it right and stops the activity where it is. That is what you would expect in a properly managed department.
Q24 Mr Walker: Grown up. We had Ed Miliband, who is a marvellous young Cabinet minister, come and see us. He is very nice to us and we have a good relationship with him. He was going on about ministerial training, something that I am personally fairly hostile to because it is brain washing but I think there is a role in ministerial training, if we are to have this, to make sure that fairly inexperienced people going into a new job, a totally new role as ministers of the Crown, understand exactly what the relationship is between themselves and a civil servant and it is incumbent on them not to cross that line and make that civil servant feel uncomfortable. You would support that training?
Ms Paraskeva: Absolutely. We have offered to take part in any of the ministerial training that is organised and to run, albeit a very short session, on this whole issue. As I said, I do believe the Bill needs to pick up this gap and we should be involved in that ministerial training so that we can share some of the experiences we have. You asked for an example. A more trivial one in some senses but raised indeed by a member of the House was civil servants being asked to change a minister's Wikipedia entry. If it is a factual error, what is the problem but where does that stop and start?
Q25 Mr Walker: Doing their own PR on Wikipedia. You have an inspirational minister and the civil servants, his private office, get on with him or her extremely well. There is a danger that both sides can cross the line as they are pursuing this great common purpose, for example. How would that be managed, again in the sort of ways we have discussed?
Ms Paraskeva: Most of this is managed in what you described as a grown-up fashion. It is only when people actually begin to feel uncomfortable about what they have been asked to do that they then would raise an issue with us if they could not have that handled within their own department. Of course at the most senior level there is nowhere else to go but to the Commission.
Q26 Mr Walker: But a Permanent Secretary could say to the Private Secretaries, to ministers "Listen, I know he is great guy/she is a great woman, to work for but you need to be careful."
Ms Paraskeva: Absolutely, and they do.
Q27 Mr Prentice: I would like to run through some of the concerns you had which you outlined at the very beginning. We have already talked about promotion but you went on to express concerns about GCHQ. That was in the earlier draft of the Bill but it has now disappeared. MI5 is not covered and the security service is not covered. What practical difference does it make if you have disgruntled civil servants in these organisations and they have no-one to take their concerns to? What is the issue there? Why was GCHQ in the earlier draft and why was it dropped in the draft that we have before us now?
Ms Paraskeva: To answer the last bit first, it was simply to bring it in line with the other security services because they are not covered by the Bill. MI5 and SIS are not in the Bill. There is a sense that it was thought these three organisations should be on a par with each other. I will answer the first part with a question: why should those civil servants not have the same right of access as other civil servants to an outside body if, in fact, they are concerned about what they have been asked to do.
Q28 Mr Prentice: You would like to see the Bill amended to put the GCHQ people on the same footing as main stream civil servants.
Ms Paraskeva: The Bill is taking them out of that. The question is slightly broader: it is also where is the regulatory apparatus for our security services.
Q29 Mr Prentice: The next concern which you expressed at the very beginning was that the appointments to the senior diplomatic service were excluded. Think about political appointments such as Paul Boateng going to become ambassador to South Africa, Helen Liddell shooting off to Australia, Goodlad, the Conservative MP, going off to Australia beforehand, are you concerned that these senior diplomatic posts are being used as some kind of patronage?
Ms Paraskeva: We are concerned they could well be.
Q30 Mr Prentice: Are they? We have a record of MPs going off to be ambassadors in very important countries. Do you think that these appointments were a kind of reward for services rendered?
Ms Paraskeva: I think it would be inappropriate for me to comment on the past. What I would want to do is to say that all appointments should be made on merit. It is not impossible to argue that a senior politician is exactly the best person for the job, which is what merit is all about, and for those posts to be given, therefore, to a senior politician. It should certainly not be as a prize but because they are the best person for the job.
Q31 Mr Prentice: Are there any occasions when it is appropriate not to appoint on merit?
Ms Paraskeva: One would always want the best person for the job. It is less the merit principle and more the method you use to identify that.
Q32 Mr Prentice: You may want to appoint someone who grew up in Australia. That could be a factor but that does not come into merit at all?
Ms Paraskeva: It does not come into merit but it might be one of the factors on your personal specification that you needed somebody who knew and understood, because they had born and bred in, the culture of that country.
Q33 Mr Prentice: You talked about absence in the Bill of any reference to the Ministerial Code. We all remember the Blunkett-nanny case and the Permanent Secretary at the time said at the time that no civil servant had done anything wrong and we believed that, but it got a huge amount of coverage. Do you think there should be a legal requirement in the Ministerial Code for a minister not to ask a civil servant to act in a breach of the Civil Service Code?
Ms Paraskeva: Yes, that is exactly the point I am making. There should be something there that actually holds the minister to account for the impartiality of the Civil Service.
Q34 Mr Prentice: Do you think this happens—I know it would not necessarily be reported but just your gut instinct—that ministers are asking civil servants to do things that are in some way rather improper?
Ms Paraskeva: No, I do not think it happens very often and we need to make sure it does not and we need protections in place. We do not have any evidence that there is widespread bad behaviour at all but one hears enough fear to make it clear that it would be sensible to have some kind of protection.
Q35 Mr Prentice: You say there is fear out there.
Ms Paraskeva: I think the newspaper coverage of the Wikipedia example has caused people to ask what should they do if they are asked.
Q36 Mr Prentice: What happened to the civil servant, the mystery blogger? What happened to that women?
Ms Paraskeva: I have no idea what happened to that individual. Certainly at the Civil Service Live conference a few weeks ago where we had 6,000 civil servants we ran a question time session on the values and one of the questions we asked the panel, that included Sir Gus O'Donnell, was whether civil servants are able to write blogs. He said yes, of course, but they needed to be careful what they put in them.
Q37 Mr Prentice: You talked about the Commission's independence and maybe you would feel constrained if the budgets were being determined by somebody else but the very fact that you and your colleagues are now being put on a single non-renewable five-year term you are really a free agent, you can say what you like and nobody can get rid of you. In a sense, where are the pressure points in this independence?
Ms Paraskeva: The pressure points may well come on our budget, for example, and currently our staff are given to us by the Cabinet Office and our staff are Cabinet Office staff. Under the legislation the staff will belong to the Commission. I do not manage the staff in the office, they are managed by the Cabinet Office, and the Bill will sort that out because it will give us an NDPB status where my successor, the First Civil Service Commissioner, and whatever board is established to run that organisation, will then manage the Chief Executive of the office who will manage the staff team.
Q38 Mr Prentice: Has it been an issue in the past or is this you trying to safeguard the future?
Ms Paraskeva: We have an issue that is current that could be problematic.
Q39 Mr Prentice: You are not going to tell us what this issue is that is problematic at the moment?
Ms Paraskeva: Not today.
| 
