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David Howarth: I beg to move amendment 10, in clause 1, page 2, line 21, at end add-
(5) (a) Within two months of this section coming into force, the Minister for the Civil Service shall issue a list of all bodies and organisations that are to be treated for the purposes of this Act as part of the Civil Service.
(b) The Minister for the Civil Service shall from time to time review the list referred to in (a) and shall issue an amended list if he believes it appropriate to do so.'.
The Chairman: With this it will be convenient to discuss the following: New clause 33- Civil Service annual report-
'(1) The Minister for the Civil Service must publish and lay before Parliament an annual report on the functioning of the civil service of the state.
(2) The Minister for the Civil Service may publish separate reports covering civil servants who serve the Scottish Executive or the Welsh Assembly. Before publishing these separate reports the Minister must consult the First Minister for Scotland or the First Minister for Wales (as the case may be).
(3) Such a report must include but is not limited to-
(a) details on the numbers of civil servants by each government department and agency;
(b) the costs of civil servants by each government department and agency;
(c) a comprehensive definition of the civil service of the state for that year.
(4) The First Minister for Scotland must lay before the Scottish Parliament any report under subsection (2) that covers civil servants that serve the Scottish Executive.
(5) The First Minister for Wales must lay before the National Assembly for Wales any report under subsection (2) that covers civil servants that serve the Welsh Assembly Government.'.
The Committee will know that the list of amendments selected is provisional. Having had time to reflect on the matter, I thought that it might be for the convenience of the Committee if I included clause 1 stand part in this grouping, as the remarks that I sense hon. Members may wish to make would not then be restricted.
David Howarth: A central issue in this Bill is the question: to whom does it apply? Who counts as a civil servant? There has been debate for many years on the merits of a civil service Bill, and about the importance of giving statutory protection to civil servants, so that they do not rely simply on the good will of the Government of the day in important aspects of their working lives. Obviously, once one accepts the principle of statutory protection for civil servants, the question of who counts as a civil servant becomes very important.
In this Bill, the Government have simply not attempted any definition, or even any description, of what counts as the civil service. The Minister may be able to point me to a part of the Bill where I can find such a definition, but I have not been able to find it. Clause 1(1) simply states that:
"this Chapter applies to the civil service of the State."
It makes no further attempt to say what that means.
In contrast, in the Government's consultation on the 2004 Bill, they said:
"Because there is no satisfactory, authoritative and comprehensive definition of the term 'Civil Service', in order to achieve the necessary clarity and certainty about coverage, the draft Bill proposes that there should be a comprehensive listing of every part of the Civil Service to which the Bill is to apply."
Then, the Government accepted the fact that it is difficult to define the civil service in abstract terms, so the solution was to list in the Bill the organisations and bodies that would count as part of the civil service for the purposes of the Bill. The 2004 Bill included that list in a schedule. That is an important list, because it includes organisations that, if the only definition in the Bill was
"the civil service of the State",
could be defined as being in or out of the civil service.
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For example, is ACAS in the civil service or not? Are the people who work for ACAS civil servants or not? The 2004 Bill included ACAS. I do not want to go through the entire list, but there is ambiguity about other similar bodies. For example, does the civil service include regulatory organisations such as Ofwat, the Office of Rail Regulation and Ofsted, or the various inspectorates such as Her Majesty's fire service inspectorate, or the Health and Safety Executive? Are the people who work for those bodies civil servants or not? In every case, the answer according to the 2004 Bill is yes. All those organisations were covered. Are they covered by the present Bill? The problem is that we do not know.
This amendment asks the Government why, if in 2004 they thought that it was not satisfactory to leave the question alone and that we needed not only a vague general definition but a list of the organisations to which the Bill would apply, they have now suddenly changed their mind, and say that the lack of an authoritative and comprehensive definition is satisfactory. This is not an abstract point. It is important, because on this question turns who counts as a civil service employer-and that is important because it is the only way we have of telling whether the various rights in the Bill apply. In particular, clause 9 includes the right to an investigation by the Civil Service Commission. How can it possibly be a matter of dispute whether someone is entitled to invoke that right?
I hope that at some stage in our discussions we will consider the duties of civil service employers and Ministers to act impartially towards their employees. We do not know whether that will apply to some sets of employees unless we know who counts as a civil servant. The important issue of appointment on merit was raised in the previous debate. Does the requirement of appointment on merit apply to a particular job? If we cannot tell whether that is the case, the Bill collapses into unacceptable uncertainty and vagueness.
Mr. Heald: Many of the bodies that the hon. Gentleman mentions, over which questions as to whether they are part of the civil service may arise, perform functions that can be controversial-such as regulators or the Health and Safety Executive. It is all the more important that it should be clear whether civil servants working in those organisations will have the protection of the Act, and can make complaints if an attempt is made to interfere with a controversial decision.
David Howarth: That is an important aspect of the question. Are civil servants protected from improper pressure, for example? Do they have the protection of the code? If they do not, what is their protection? The hon. Gentleman is right. Many of the bodies concerned are charged with making judgments with which the Government of the day might not agree, which makes it even more important for us to know whether they are covered.
On amendment 10, I hope that the Government can provide a better explanation of their position than they did on the previous amendment. I shall not comment now on new clause 33, which has been grouped with my amendment, except to say that we agree, of course, with the part of it that demands that the Government tell us who counts as a civil servant.
Mr. Maude: I apologise, Sir Alan, for being a little previous in attempting to intervene during the last grouping. I have worked out that I last led for my party during the Committee stage of a Bill in 1992-so perhaps I am a little rusty. However, I hope that I shall get the hang of it before long.
The Conservative party supports the proposal in amendment 10, but new clause 33, which stands in my name and in those of my hon. Friends, goes further. The Bill has been in gestation for 150 years: it has taken a long time to get here. It does some very good things, and we support its purpose of putting the civil service on to a statutory basis-but it is deeply eccentric that after 150 years, we have a Bill to put the civil service on to a statutory basis that does not say what the civil service is. This is a moveable feast-and one that is broadly at the discretion of the Government. It seems to be almost at the whim of the Government, too.
I am always astonished that if a Member of Parliament puts down a parliamentary question to the Cabinet Office about civil service numbers, answer comes there none. The question is referred to the Office for National Statistics, as if the number of civil servants were an external phenomenon that the Government tried to track out of interest, but they had no concept of its being a crucial management tool. In truth, at this stage, it is a management tool of considerable bearing on reducing Britain's ballooning budget deficit.
The fact is that the numbers of civil servants have varied enormously. The Government claim that they have reduced the size of the civil service. They claim to have "achieved 86,700 work force reductions" as part of the Gershon programme. Civil service employment was 522,000 in 2008. I accept that that was down from the 2004 peak of 570,000, but it was still higher than the 516,000 level of 1997.
The recent fall is deceptive. There has been a significant expansion in the size of the quango state, which is not shown up in civil service head-count figures, and there
has been a growth in the number of quangos classified as public corporations, rather than as part of the civil service. In 1996, 89 such bodies were classified as public corporations, but by 2008 that number had doubled to 178. Staff in public corporations are generally not classified as civil service employees for civil service head-count purposes. No fewer than 568,000 staff are now employed by public corporations, compared with 525,000 civil service employees. Mysteriously, only 31,000 of those public corporation staff are included in the civil service head count.
There has also been a shift of bodies from the civil service into public corporations. For example, the Forensic Science Service became a Government-owned company in 2005 and was transferred out of the Home Office, so was no longer counted in civil service head counts.
Mr. Heald: My right hon. Friend will have seen that part 1 of the Bill sets up, as a body corporate, the Civil Service Commission. Will the people who work there be civil servants?
Mr. Maude: I look forward with interest to the Minister's response to that question- [Interruption.] She is looking anxiously to the civil servants Box for advice on that important matter-so at least it should come from the horse's mouth.
Executive non-departmental public bodies, with the exception of three Crown NDPBs, are not counted within civil service head counts, and regional development agencies are not deemed to be part of the civil service either. In the last year for which there are numbers, there were more than 200,000 NDPB employees. Furthermore, a series of what are effectively public bodies are not deemed to be part of the public sector at all-the Carbon Trust, Envirowise, the Energy Saving Trust, Network Rail and UK Financial Investments Ltd are not counted as civil service, central Government or even the public sector, yet all are funded by the Government.
Of crucial importance, at a time when it is enormously important for the health of the country that the Government can, in the years to come, get more for less, given the pressing demands of the budget deficit, is the fact that the growth in the number of employees has been accompanied, sadly, by a productivity decline. The ONS's own figures show that between 1999 to 2006 there was an average fall of 0.7 per cent. per year in education productivity and a decrease of 2.1 per cent. per year in social care productivity, and that between 2001 and 2005 there was a decrease of 2 per cent. in health care productivity.
We would like a more transparent and efficient civil service that is a better place in which to work. Many extremely capable people, imbued with a public service ethos-we value that enormously-work in the civil service, but morale is very low. That is partly the result of a lack of transparency, efficiency and productivity. Public accountability is crucial, which is why we think that there should be a civil service annual report clearly laying out the definition of the civil service. That is what new clause 33 would achieve. We support amendment 10, which was moved by the hon. Member for Cambridge (David Howarth), but if that does not proceed to a vote, we will want a Division on new clause 33 at a later stage.
It is important for there to be a proper definition of the civil service, and for the numbers and costs associated with civil servants, in each Department and agency, to be laid out. The civil service has been waiting since, I think, 1854-not the current crowd of civil servants, clearly-for a civil service Bill, and it would be almost an insult were this eventual enshrinement in statute to be without any attempt to define it. It would then remain in the gift of the Government to decide arbitrarily and at whim who is to be covered. We therefore wish there to be the possibility of a Division on new clause 33, if amendment 10 does not proceed to a vote.
Dr. Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab): I want to address the narrow point about the precise definition of a civil servant in clause 1(1). As hon. Members have pointed out, that subsection states that
"this Chapter applies to the civil service of the State."
"In this Chapter references to the civil service...are to the civil service of the State".
It then excludes the parts mentioned in subsections (2) and (3) that we have discussed already.
If we then seek further guidance by going, as one normally would, to the definitions in the Bill, we find, in clause 18, the following definitions:
"In this Chapter...'civil servant' is read as stated in section 1(4)",
"civil service" is read as stated in section 1(4)".
We are therefore returned to the start, rather in the manner of one of those telephone calls when someone tries to get through to pay their electricity bill, but is returned to the number that they first dialled, without any satisfaction of their complaint. It is not just that the Bill apparently contains no extensive definition, but that such definitions as it does contain are completely circular.
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That concerns me; indeed, I raised the matter on Second Reading in an intervention on my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Justice. In answer to my question about whether the Bill's provisions cover the civil service as it is now, as opposed to its undifferentiated form after Northcote-Trevelyan, he said:
"I hope they do, but as my hon. Friend raises this point let me add that I am happy to ensure that they do. There is an issue to do with the growth of next steps agencies and non-departmental public bodies, which have arisen since the reforms introduced by the previous Administration in the early 1990s. It is certainly of concern to me that NDPBs can appoint their own staff and that they are not public servants; that creates difficulties and can lead to unacceptable and unjustifiable levels of pay and wage drift, as well as other anomalies and conditions."-[ Official Report, 20 October 2009; Vol. 497, c. 803.]
My right hon. Friend has clearly thought about the matter in depth and considers there to be some anomalies and problems, as well as some issues relating to the question of when a civil servant is not a civil servant.
If we are to place the civil service on to a statutory footing, as I hope we will, in respect of requirements for its practice and all that that entails, which I warmly welcome, the most elementary starting point would be to know who we are putting on to a statutory footing. I appreciate that that is a difficult problem. I also appreciate,
on the basis of the precise points that the Secretary of State made in reply to my intervention on Second Reading, that the issue has arisen to some extent as a result of the differentiation over time, and substantially so relatively recently, of what one might describe in common-sense terms as the civil service. Hon. Members have already given examples of boards and bodies that one might consider to be part of the civil service in common-sense terms, but which turn out not to be. There are also examples of bodies that one would think were not part of the civil service, but which turn out to be just that. It is therefore important to find, one way or another, a mechanism for the Bill to perform that service of defining who is and who is not a civil servant for the purposes of the rest of the legislation.
Incidentally, a little while ago I tabled a written question that sought to define that point in terms of NDPBs, agencies and various other things. I regret to say that my question has not yet been answered, but perhaps any answer that might be provided in the fullness of time could provide some illumination of what we are discussing in connection with the Bill.
Amendment 10 might not quite fit the bill in that respect. However, at the very least, I would like my hon. Friend the Minister to provide in her reply to this debate an assurance that the definitions in the Bill will be urgently considered, and that some thought will be given to introducing some mechanisms, whether in the Bill or associated with it, to clarify what we are talking about in the rest of the Bill as it proceeds through the House.
I am not sure that new clause 33 fits the bill. Although it says that the Minister for the civil service
"must publish and lay before Parliament an annual report on the functioning of the civil service of the state",
it does not really take us any further on the fundamental question of what the civil service of the state is. Although "the civil service of the state" might indirectly be defined in the laying of a report on its functioning before Parliament, that is not necessarily the case.
I hope that my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench will consider how a mechanism might be found to supply that definition more satisfactorily, accepting, as I think everybody in the House does, that this is by no means an easy task and that any definition would by no means be constant, but that such a definition is nevertheless important for the integrity of the Bill as it leaves this House.
The Temporary Chairman (Sir Nicholas Winterton): Order. Before I call the next speaker, may I remind the Committee of the decision taken by the Chairman of Ways and Means to include the clause stand part debate in the debate on the group headed by amendment 10?
Mr. Andrew Tyrie (Chichester) (Con): I am grateful for that ruling, because some of my remarks will range more widely than those that we have heard hitherto. I agree with everything that I have just heard, in a typically thoughtful and interesting speech from the hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Dr. Whitehead).
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