Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
106-153)
Lord Armstrong of Ilminster GCB CVO, Lord Wilson
of Dinton GCB, and Lord Turnbull KCB CVO
1 February 2011
Q106 Chair: Thank
you for joining our Committee this morning. For the record, would
you each kindly just identify who you are?
Lord Armstrong:
I am Lord Armstrong of Ilminster. I was Secretary of the Cabinet
from 1979 to 1987, and Head of the Home Civil Service from November
1981 to December 1987.
Lord Wilson: I
am Lord Wilson of Dinton. I was Secretary of the Cabinet from
January 1998 to September 2002. I was both Secretary of the Cabinet
and Head of the Home Civil Service in that time.
Lord Turnbull:
I am Lord Turnbull. I succeeded Richard Wilson in both roles in
September 2002 and I retired in July 2005.
Chair: Thank you. Our
principal concern is our inquiry into good governance and Civil
Service reform. We are attempting initially to establish some
principles of good governance, but our questions will go wider
than that. We will start with the Cabinet Manual that has just
been produced.
Q107 Robert Halfon:
Do you think that the production of the Cabinet Manual is a good
thing?
Lord Armstrong:
Yes, I do think it is a good thing. It is a comprehensive collection
of material about how things are done, both in some constitutional
matters but also in administrative matters right across the Government.
It is a very useful collection of information. I do not think
that one should exaggerate its importance. I do not see it as
a written constitution or anything of that kind. It is descriptive
rather than prescriptive, descriptive of the way things are now.
I think it is very useful. I can see that it will be able to
be updated as the system and practices change. That too is going
to be very useful.
Q108 Robert Halfon: Is
it based on precedent and convention? How has the Manual been
drawn up?
Lord Armstrong:
You would have to ask somebody closer to the business of it than
I am, but I presume there has been a team of people collecting
the material. Some of it obviously is not directly from the Cabinet
Office—the material about the Attorney-General, the Law
Officers and so on. There would have been an editorial team collecting
it under the leadership of Sir Gus O'Donnell.
Q109 Robert Halfon:
What is the legal backdrop to the document?
Lord Armstrong:
The legal backdrop?
Robert Halfon: Yes.
Lord Armstrong:
I do not know that there is a legal backdrop as such. I think
it is an administrative document.
Q110 Robert Halfon:
In essence, is it just guidelines rather than an enforced set
of rules?
Lord Armstrong:
It is not rules, it is guidelines. It is a description of what
happens now, the way it is done now, and it is capable of modification
as the way things are done changes.
Lord Wilson: It
says on the cover "a guide to laws, conventions and rules
on the operation of government". It is a mixture of all
those things. Some of it is in the law; some of it most definitely
is not in the law and, as Lord Armstrong rightly said, is about
describing how things are done.
Lord Turnbull:
It brings together two kinds of material, and they have slightly
different statuses. There is the bit that relates to how the
Civil Service and Cabinet work, which is authoritative, because
the Government is in the best position to say what is the best
description of those workings. There is also material where they
are describing their relations with other people—the Judiciary,
both Houses of Parliament and so on. Some people have said, "What
right have you got to describe that?" I think the answer
they will give is, "We are telling you how we think we interact
with those other parts of Government." It is useful for them
to know what we think is the way in which we interact, for example,
with the conduct of civil servants appearing before Select Committees.
Those two parts are of slightly different status, drawn together
in one document.
Q111 Robert Halfon:
Lord Armstrong, would you have found the Cabinet Manual more useful
when you were conducting negotiations in 1974 regarding the potential
coalition with the Liberals?
Lord Armstrong:
I should have found it useful if there had been such a document,
certainly yes. I suppose, in a sense, the experience of that
time, as it was funded at the time, became part of the basis of
the Manual. As it was, I had to do research from other sources
to fill myself in to think about what would happen if we came
to that situation.
Lord Turnbull:
Another use of this was not simply to get the principal players
in, for example, the Cabinet Office and the Palace on to the same
page, but to explain to the outside world how this works. There
were a lot of misconceptions. People had got used to a Prime
Minister losing an election and departing the scene by Friday
afternoon. To explain the process whereby negotiations take place,
I think, helps calm people. They did not expect there to be a
result immediately. The comment written about this process was
thereby more informed. Given the tensions around the markets at
the time, I think that was a very useful function.
Q112 Robert Halfon:
Given what you have said about the Manual really being about guidelines,
is your view that this Manual does not represent the start of
a written constitution?
Lord Armstrong:
No, in my view it does not. I think it is descriptive, rather
in the way that academic and learned treatises have been in the
past. There is nothing in it that says there is a process for
amending this. It is a description of business as it is, work
in hand, if you like. That will change; it will modify, as it
has in the past. That will be reflected in updates of the Manual.
I do not see it as a written constitution, but I do see it as
a useful work of reference.
Lord Wilson: I
see it as a modest but useful document. It does not attempt to
write comprehensively. There is a great deal that lies behind
it--behind almost every sentence in some places--but it provides
the outlines, a starting point, for someone who wants to have
an overall view of what the conventions are in a particular situation.
Q113 Chair: Is it in
fact therefore misnamed? It is not a Cabinet Manual; it is questions
of procedure for civil servants.
Lord Turnbull:
It is not just for civil servants. It is to explain both to Government's
partners elsewhere in the constitution how they think they work,
and to the wider world. I think it is misnamed. It is a title
they have borrowed from New Zealand. People think this is about
the Cabinet, whereas it is about a lot more than the Cabinet.
The subtitle "guide to laws, conventions and rules"
is actually a more accurate description, because "Manual"
has slightly too prescriptive a tone, I think. Maybe they can
adjust the title, but I think the foreword is very clear on what
the purpose of this document is.
Lord Armstrong:
I agree with the comments on the title and I have been trying
to think what better title one might give it. I am unable to
think of anything crisp and short, except perhaps, "The Way
We Live Now".
Q114 Robert Halfon: Lord Turnbull,
you are quoted as saying, "Civil servants should support
the Government, but shouldn't try to keep the Coalition together."
Do you not think that, in the negotiations for the coalition,
the Civil Service overstepped the mark, given that Gus O'Donnell
is quoted on the record saying that he advised that a coalition
would be better for the markets? Is that not a step too far in
terms of the Civil Service?
Lord Turnbull:
The Civil Service said two things. One is that they would provide
logistical support: people needed rooms, communications or whatever,
and that offer was taken up. The other was that they said, "If
you want note takers or you get into something like proximity
talks and you want someone to carry messages from one place to
another, we will do that," which is what has happened in
Scotland; or "If you want help drafting this document."
In the end, the parties decided they wanted to do that themselves
but, if they had wanted to take advantage of that, I think that
is a proper function. Advice such as, "It would be a good
idea if you went about this briskly, given the uncertainty of
markets"—that was advice that was generic; it was not
specifically catered to a particular party.
Q115 Robert Halfon:
He said specifically that a coalition would be more helpful to
the markets. Surely that is a political statement in itself.
Who knows whether a minority government would have been beneficial
to the markets? We just do not know. Even if it is right, is
it really the job of a civil servant to try to push the Government
into having a coalition?
Lord Turnbull:
I think it is perfectly valid, particularly for someone who had
been a permanent secretary at the Treasury, to indicate that there
was a danger of market uncertainty. I personally think it is
true that a coalition has two things. It has support—in
effect it has a majority—and also it has some commitment
that this will last through time, which is going to give more
assurance than a minority government, where it is all about how
long it is going to be before one of them decides to break cover
and demand an election.
Q116 Robert Halfon:
Does it not give the impression that the Civil Service favour
the coalition, as opposed to another scenario?
Lord Turnbull:
I think it may be valid to say the Civil Service favoured a coalition;
it did not say which form of coalition and whether it was Lib/Lab
or Conservative/Liberal Democrat. That would have been overstepping
the mark.
Q117 Robert Halfon: Surely
the Civil Service should not favour a coalition or not a coalition?
It should be up to the elected politicians to decide.
Lord Turnbull:
No, what it should favour is a government that is stable, able
to carry through its programme and has some prospect of lasting
long enough to see it through. It is perfectly right to express
a view that that would be a desirable outcome.
Lord Armstrong:
I think it is not unreasonable for a civil servant, who was probably
asked for his view, to say that, if the Queen's Government is
to aim to be able to be carried on, it would be a good thing to
avoid instability in the markets. Given that markets were in
a fragile state, a fragile condition, at that time, it is perfectly
reasonable for a civil servant, particularly if asked, to say,
"You should be thinking about the possible effects of what
is going to happen upon the markets," because the consequences
of not thinking about it could have been extremely serious.
Q118 Chair: Lord
Wilson, would he have been better to keep his advice private?
Lord Wilson: I
make it a practice never to comment on what my successors did,
but I think the role of the Civil Service is to support the Queen
and to help advise the Queen in her function of inviting someone
to form a Government. In the process of doing that, I think it
is proper for them to draw attention to something that was—I
guess; I don't know the facts of this case—pretty obvious
at the time, that there was a real danger of instability in the
markets. I think that is part of doing the job well.
Q119 Paul Flynn:
Part of the Manual is the role of the Sovereign. Do you think
there is a need now to redefine the role of the Sovereign, after
having had the present Queen, who has served for a very long period
without knowingly or publicly expressing any political opinion?
A future change will involve possibly Prince Charles, who frequently
expresses political opinions. Unless the role of the Sovereign
is redefined and restricted to a largely ornamental role, isn't
there a possibility of problems similar to those that occurred
in the 1930s with the Sovereign?
Lord Wilson: I
am sure Select Committees or their predecessors over many years
have said, "Should we be defining this?" The fact is
that, by not defining it over some centuries, we have actually
allowed the role of the Sovereign, in a very British way, to evolve
without creating crises. I think that is a peculiarly good achievement.
We are astonishingly lucky to have a Sovereign who has such a
source of political experience of public life—over half
a century and more, 60 years—who has met the Prime
Minister of the day, weekly, to talk in private about the affairs
of state. That is an arrangement that is reasonably clearly set
out here and reasonably well understood but, if you tried to put
it into the law, you would have great difficulty pinning down
the essence of it. The process of slowly cutting back on the
royal prerogative in legislation has been going on for a long
time. My own view on the whole question of a written constitution
is that it is much better to try to move forward incrementally,
bit by bit, rather than to attempt a comprehensive rewrite of
something that works, on the whole, pretty well and is quite hard
to define.
Lord Armstrong:
I am quite sure that the present Prince of Wales, who has been
around in that capacity for some decades now, knows very well
that his freedom of action and speech will be curtailed when he
succeeds his mother. I am sure that he is ready to adopt the
same constitutional arrangements, as to what he may say or do,
as she has followed.
Lord Wilson: I
should have said that. I absolutely agree with Lord Armstrong's
comment.
Q120 Paul Flynn:
The historian Robert Rhodes James, who was a former member of
this House, wrote that, at the time when the Conservative party
had decided to get rid of Mrs Thatcher as Prime Minister, there
was terror in the party that she would call a general election.
The Conservative party couldn't stop her; Parliament couldn't
stop her; the Cabinet couldn't stop her. Only the Sovereign could
stop any Prime Minister who was acting in her or his own interests
from calling an election at that time, which might have been contrary
to the public interest. Isn't it important that the role of the
Head of State is defined and strengthened in that particular area?
Lord Turnbull:
I was serving in Mrs Thatcher's private office at the time. I
do not recognise that description at all. The idea of an election—this
is, quite honestly, the first time I have ever heard of it. I
think it is a fantastical idea and has no real relevance to the
discussion.
Q121 Chair: Supposing
it was the case that a Prime Minister wanted to call a general
election rather than just face their own demise as leader of the
party, what would happen?
Paul Flynn: This was from
a serious historian who was at the heart of the Conservative party.
Lord Turnbull:
What is in this Cabinet Manual is a very important principle,
which is that the politicians, possibly eventually requiring a
vote in the House of Commons, sort this thing out and present
her with a solved problem and that she is never faced with having
to use discretion that might prove controversial. In two areas,
this is related. First of all, the choice of a leader of a party.
We will never again get 1963 or whenever it was, when the Sovereign
has to choose who should lead the Conservative party. All parties
now have proper processes to sort this out. At an election, the
political process would have to come to her and then present her
with this solution. I think that is a very welcome shift over
the last 30 years, and it means that the Sovereign is never
put in the position of having to take a decision that might be
contested, as most recently, although it is 30 years ago,
happened in Australia, when the GovernorGeneral took some
action that was controversial. The whole purpose of this Manual
is to say we must never put the monarch in that position again.
Q122 Charlie Elphicke:
The Manual is very focused on the duties of the Sovereign. I
have no doubt that Prince William will make a very fine King in
due course. It is focused on the whole issue about Ministers
and the Executive. Why is there no mention in this directly about
more of an emphasis on the people of the land, public service
and the sense of serving the people, which surely is at the heart
of everything? It always seems to be looking up to what the top
people want, rather than looking at how to ensure that there is
a greater engagement and a greater sense of public service, or
am I being unfair?
Lord Armstrong:
I do not think the Manual aims that high. As I say, I think it
is descriptive of what happens now and it is not there to provide
guidance about what you might do in other situations or for other
purposes. There would be lessons to be learnt from what happens
now and the previous development, but it is not the purpose of
the Manual to try to prescribe from those lessons. I do not think
that that is a fair criticism of the Manual as it is intended
to be.
Q123 Nick de Bois:
Lord Turnbull, given the statement that you just made saying that
never again should we put the Sovereign in a position of having
to make a controversial decision, or words to that effect, do
you still hold the view that we are not presenting the beginnings
of a written constitution here by making such judgments?
Lord Turnbull:
I do not think that we get nearer a written constitution. The
origin of this piece of work was a time when Gordon Brown went
through a phase of being rather interested in the constitution.
I think he was testing out the proposition. In my experience,
the minute you get to a written constitution, you quickly find
that the debate is not between people who want a written constitution
and people who do not but with people who want to make some changes
to the constitution and then entrench them in a written constitution.
I do not think this necessarily takes us that way. The fact
that for example, as has been mentioned by colleagues, the role
of the Sovereign has evolved, even in her reign, tells you that
there are some advantages in the flexibility that we have got.
Lord Armstrong:
May I go back to the night in October 1984 when the IRA blew up
the Grand Hotel? There was a period of about half an hour in
the middle of the night when I thought that the Prime Minister
might have been killed. I did do a lot of thinking in that time
about what one would do if a Prime Minister was removed from the
scene by that sort of thing. As Lord Turnbull said, the ultimate
solution is the election of a new leader. The Sovereign would
in effect be bound by that, and it would be for the politicians
to decide whether there should be an election. There would be
questions about the appointment of an interim Prime Minister to
carry on the Administration until the election took place, but
that process would in effect be resolved by the politicians.
Chair: By the Cabinet.
Lord Armstrong:
By the Cabinet. There would be some person within the Cabinet
who would be the obvious choice to be the interim Prime Minister.
As it happened in October 1984, it would have been probably Lord Whitelaw,
I think. What Lord Turnbull says is basically right about that.
I think that the Sovereign does retain an ultimate power to respond
to the request for a dissolution of Parliament. In 99 cases out
of 100, the Sovereign will grant the request. I think the discretion
remains in case you get a Prime Minister who has gone off his
or her head.
Chair: Which I think was
the basis of the original question.
Paul Flynn: I was too
nice to say that.
Lord Armstrong:
One has to think about it. There could be a Prime Minister who
went off his or her head. At that point, the Sovereign would
have to exercise his or her discretion and say, "Are you
sure that the Government cannot be carried on by somebody other
than you?" I hope it will never happen. I have yet to meet
a Prime Minister who has gone off his or her head, at any rate
while still in office. I think the discretion remains, and could,
in these I hope very remote circumstances, be rather useful.
Lord Wilson: This
comes back to the nature of this Manual. I think it is modest
and useful. In my experience, most of the situations that you
have to deal with are not covered ever by the guidance. You always,
as it were, have to take it as a starting point and then work
out what the practice is and what you should do in a particular
situation. I think this discussion has illustrated that.
Q124 Kelvin Hopkins:
Isn't it crucial that the Civil Service plays a role in maintaining
and safeguarding the conventions by which we govern ourselves?
If that is the case, isn't it absolutely vital that they are
permanent and that they retain their impartial nature? Obviously
in this situation it is difficult for you to make any comment
that might appear critical of the present Civil Service or its
leaders, but you have commented recently on what happened in the
past, most interestingly, in the Chilcot inquiry. You cannot
say so, but I can say that I thought it was a bit of a break with
these conventions that Sir Gus O'Donnell came out publicly
urging a coalition. One would expect the head of the Civil Service
to say that sort of thing in private, but not in public.
Lord Armstrong:
I should think that he was warning about the danger of instability.
That was perfectly within his rights. Of course I agree with
what you say about the need for the Civil Service to be nonpolitical
and impartial. I should think I speak for all three of us in
saying we have been constantly conscious of that while we were
in office. That is the important point about it.
Lord Turnbull:
Two developments in the last two or three years: first, the revised
Civil Service Code; secondly, the clauses in the Constitutional
Reform and Governance Act that that was passed just before the
election.
Lord Armstrong:
It got washed up.
Lord Turnbull:
It got washed up. There were important clauses enshrining the
concept of impartiality, so that has been entrenched. I do not
think that is something that is under political threat. I think
it actually is in better shape than it has been for some time.
Q125 Kelvin Hopkins:
I speak as someone of the left who was deeply critical of the
Blair attempts to change the nature of our constitution. I know
from your comments last week, and also one could guess, what your
feelings were, about the attempt to drive down the power of the
Civil Service perhaps to govern with a small coterie of advisers,
even marginalising the Cabinet and so on. The Blair revolution
did not quite come off in the end and I think we are now stepping
back from it. Did it not make you feel uncomfortable? Would
that not have made Britain a fundamentally different place, if
we had moved towards a presidential style of government, where
the president has his small group of advisers and makes decisions
without very much reference to anyone else?
Lord Armstrong:
I think all three of us would be likely to agree with the last
paragraph of the Butler report, some years ago, about sofa government,
written in very coded language but none the less very clear in
its meaning. Speaking personally at any rate, I think that one
of the interesting results of a coalition is the return of a more
collective form of Cabinet government. The collective system,
with which we are all three familiar, of Cabinet government and
the use of Cabinet committees to establish collective responsibility
has received a boost, because you can only run the coalition if
you are doing that. The coalition increases the need for collective
government and collective responsibility, and for the mechanisms
by which you achieve that.
Q126 Kelvin Hopkins:
Clearly Jonathan Powell was hostile to the Civil Service, from
his comments. I personally was seriously concerned that we were
losing what I saw as the traditional role of the Civil Service,
which I very much supported—the Sir Humphrey model
that I personally thought worked very well. I would not suggest
that you were quite in the same model as Sir Humphrey, but that
was a better way of running things than what we saw later. Do
you not agree?
Lord Wilson: When
I was doing the job, Peter Riddell had an article headed, "West
Wing meets Sir Humphrey". To some extent, that resonated.
The position that Lord Turnbull and I were answering questions
about last week was quite an unusual one in constitutional terms.
It is not in my experience common for a Prime Minister to be
in such a very strong position. It only happens if you have a
Cabinet that is happy for that to happen, a parliamentary party
that is supportive, a trade union movement and political party
and public opinion. If you have all of those constitutional checks
and balances lying down in the same way, then the Prime Minister
is in a very strong position. To extrapolate from that to a general
observation about how we run the country I think would be a mistake.
Normal conventions will reassert themselves, as I think is happening.
Lord Armstrong:
Mrs Thatcher was a very strong Prime Minister, but she understood
the importance of Cabinet government, and she took great pains
to ensure that decisions went the way she thought they should
go, but she did it within the framework of Cabinet government.
Q127 Chair: We
must move on. This is all fascinating but we are miles behind.
The Cabinet Secretary says in the document that this Cabinet
Manual is not intended to have any legal effect. Lord Wilson,
in your bitter experience of judicial review after judicial review,
do we really have confidence that the Cabinet Manual is not going
to be cited as evidence on one side or another that proper procedures
have been followed? To that extent, does it not become justiciable?
Lord Wilson: You
can never stop people citing things. However, the intention is
clearly that it should not be binding, and I think intention matters.
It is drafted in a way that is, as you heard earlier, descriptive
not prescriptive, and any evidence that a court had about the
Manual would have to take account of the fact that the intention
is that it should not be binding and not be, in itself, a justiciable
document. This is a matter for lawyers, but I would have thought
that the fact that it is not written as, and not intended to be,
a legally binding document or a rulebook of the kind that is meant
to create legal obligations on Ministers would be pretty conclusive
proof that it is not itself a legal document of that sort.
Lord Armstrong:
I went though the Manual and noted with interest that the words,
'should', 'ought' and 'must' hardly appear at all.
Q128 Chair: Very interesting
comment. Would not a senior civil servant, perhaps, trying to
advise a Minister to do or not to do something, be likely to refer
to this document? Rather like the way legal advice is received
by Ministers, would not there be an obligation on a Minister to
accept that advice? If they ignored that advice and got into
legal difficulties as a result of it, the Cabinet Manual would
be cited.
Lord Turnbull:
It is important the way this document has been put together.
By and large, the civil servants who have drafted it are able
to reference some other source for the statements that they are
making, which exists already. There's the Ministerial Code, the
special adviser code and various other pieces of hard and soft
law. If they have been successful in that, there are very few
statements in here that are new. The intention is almost that
nothing should be new; you should be able to say, "I have
written this because I've based it on that principle that is known
already and I can tell you where I've got it from." The
amount of new purchase, you might call it, that it creates for
judicial review is small, and that is certainly the intention.
Q129 Nick de Bois:
I must confess I am a little confused as to who is actually going
to read this book. I will not ask you your opinion on that, but
I would like to explore very briefly, Lord Turnbull, if I could
start with you, what role you think this Manual could play in
terms of the way in which Parliament holds the Executive to account.
Is it just simply going to explain to Ministers what to expect
from Parliament?
Lord Turnbull:
I think it is describing the status quo. It is certainly not
commenting or glossing Erskine May, the rules under which the
House of Commons operates. It is explaining how they would react
in certain circumstances. I doubt it is going to change that
to any great extent. When it comes to the House of Lords, it
does not for example deal with the interesting question about
whether the Salisbury convention is changed or not changed by
virtue of there being a coalition. It is careful not to try to
change anyone else's rules.
Lord Armstrong:
In the sort of situation you have described, a civil servant might
say, "Well, here is what has been done in the past. It doesn't
mean it is what you should do now, but it perhaps does mean that
you should think twice or three times before doing it differently.
Perhaps you should talk to the Prime Minister before you make
such a change."
Lord Wilson: Strong
Ministers will still want to act in a strong way, but it just
provides a reference point. As to the audience, I am sure this
great Committee and its successors will be regularly reading the
Manual to see whether they can quote it to witnesses sitting here.
Q130 Chair: This
is not the empire striking back against sofa government.
Lord Wilson: I
would not want to describe any of this in the language of Star
Wars.
Q131 Nick de Bois:
Lord Wilson, I read from the evidence to the Chilcot inquiry that
you seem to have a lot of faith in the way successful businesses
conduct their board meetings, and went so far as to suggest that
you would take an element of that and canvass opinion from Cabinet
Ministers about the performance of the Prime Minister, which I
found intriguing and a good idea. Is that something you would
like to see in this Manual, if you think the Manual has any weight,
so that it could actually become something the Prime Minister
could not overrule or becomes de facto part of being a
Cabinet Minister?
Lord Wilson: My
comment was that I found it ironic, when I started taking up appointments
in the private sector, that the Government that had been imposing
increasingly stringent requirements of governance on the running
of companies was itself following processes that were less stringent.
I took one example from the current code, which was that boards
of companies should arrange, either internally or externally,
to evaluate the performance of the board—it is not just
the chairman—and consider whether they were getting the
papers they wanted, whether they were happy with their own performance,
each other's performance and so on. I think that is rather a
good discipline, and it was interesting to think of it being applied
in the situation of a Cabinet. Either the Cabinet Secretary or
someone else—it does not have to be the Cabinet Secretary—should
go and ask the members of the Cabinet whether they were happy
with the way it was running, whether they would like to see more
papers, whether they would like more information or whether they
thought the way that discussions took place could be improved.
Q132 Chair: Lord
Wilson, you intend this to be empowering.
Lord Wilson: Yes,
empowering of Cabinet Ministers. That was the underlying point,
thank you.
Q133 Chair: It
would seem a little revolutionary if you were Prime Minister,
wouldn't it?
Lord Wilson: We
have collective government in this country, in which the Cabinet
as a whole takes responsibility for the decisions it takes. Therefore,
what is wrong with a process that underpins that by giving Cabinet
Ministers an opportunity to say whether they can see ways in which
the way they discharge their responsibilities can be improved?
Chair: I think it is an
excellent point and very well made, if I may say so.
Lord Armstrong:
I sat in on the Cabinet under three Prime Ministers, and each
of them ran the Cabinet in his or her own very different, very
personal way. It would be very difficult to prescribe permanent
rules as to how this is done, because it depends so much on the
personality and the strength of the Prime Minister of the day,
and his or her relationships with her colleagues and the way they
do business. The way that Sir Edward Heath conducted his Cabinet
was quite different from the way in which either Mr Wilson or
Mrs Thatcher conducted their Cabinets. They were different from
each other. It is so different that I think it is quite difficult
to make any general rules about it.
Q134 Chair: You
do not agree with Lord Wilson that there should be some check
to strengthen the hand of individual Cabinet Ministers?
Lord Armstrong:
I think it would be interesting to have that, but I do think that
the differences between one Cabinet and another, and one Prime
Minister and another, set limits to what you can do about that.
Lord Turnbull:
Having heard Lord Wilson's suggestion, I thought it was a good
idea, but there was one particular variation from the private
sector practice. Directors of a company are elected by the shareholders,
not by the chairman. Therefore, it is not in the chairman's power
to deselect a director.
Chair: Something to which
Lord Wilson's comments actually refer.
Lord Turnbull:
Therefore, if you are criticising the way Cabinet's run, you are
actually passing those criticisms over to the person who can decide
whether you are a member of that body or not, so it makes it more
difficult. In a well-run Cabinet, I think the Prime Minister
should be having a regular series of bilaterals with his colleagues.
One of the things you notice is some people see the Prime Minister
every week, several times a week, and there are other Cabinet
Ministers who go weeks on end and never have a bilateral. This
is the point at which the relationship should develop. You say,
"How do you think it is going? Are the ways in which we
can improve?" That is the dialogue that I think is missing.
We have to find a way of getting some feedback, but recognising
it is slightly more difficult to do than in a corporate situation.
Q135 Nick de Bois: I
think I'm picking up from what Lord Wilson said, that the onus,
Lord Turnbull, on a nonexecutive director in a plc is that,
just because there's a tough chairman, he still has the duty of
care and responsibility to ask those tough questions. That emerged
from the Maxwell days and so forth. Why is that any different
for a Cabinet Minister? In fact, I would have thought a Cabinet
Minister should have more spine to be able to stand up and make
those recommendations. By the process that Lord Wilson is recommending,
would you not agree that it gives them a little bit of an oomph
to do that?
Lord Turnbull:
The difference I am pointing out is that Cabinet Ministers do
not have the same protection as a nonexecutive director
has and, therefore, you have to find some other way of getting
to this desirable end that there is some feedback.
Q136 Nick de Bois:
A nonexecutive director could go to jail, and I am not sure
a Cabinet Minister would if he did not ask the right questions.
Lord Armstrong:
Their political careers could be ruined.
Q137 Robert Halfon:
Going back to the Cabinet Manual, do you think it will have any
effect on what was termed the Crichel Down principle, where Ministers
are actually responsible for things that go wrong in their Department?
That seems to have weakened over the last 1520 years.
Chair: Can we leave that
for a moment? We are going to come back to that later.
Q138 Paul Flynn:
I come to the argument now that the worst decision in 25 years
was the decision to send British soldiers into Iraq for the second
time, the result of which was the loss of 179 British lives.
We know now that decision was taken without the full knowledge
of members of the Cabinet. Parliament supported it on false information
supplied to it. Isn't this a very powerful argument against sofa
government? I disagree with the Chairman. I think we have to
say that we must press, on the basis of those 179 lives,
for more collegiate government in future. Do you agree?
Chair: I am not disagreeing
with that.
Lord Armstrong:
I strongly support collective government, and I think that undoubtedly
on certain occasions, including that, Mr Blair fell short of it.
Lord Wilson: I
stand by what I said to the Chilcot inquiry, which is on the public
record.
Q139 Chair: Can
I move on? Lord Turnbull, you also made some interesting comments
at the Chilcot inquiry about the Campbellisation of the information
released by government. Comparing it to the disciplines that
a plc would have to follow on the release of information, those
disciplines just do not apply to government. Government can selectively
leak, can selectively announce, can partially withhold information
in order to get the right political effect of the information
released, in a way that would see directors of a public company
prosecuted. Would you like to enlarge on that and do you think
there is enough in the Cabinet Manual that addresses that?
Lord Turnbull:
I do not think this issue is discussed in the Cabinet Manual.
I was struck by reading part of the Campbell diaries, where news
emerges that Cherie Blair is expecting another baby, and then
there is a row as to, "Do we tell The News of the World
or do we tell The Mirror?" This should never have
arisen. This should have been a piece of news that just came
out of No. 10 to all people, including citizens, at the same time.
Chair: So it is an abuse
of patronage really?
Lord Turnbull:
It is an abuse of patronage, yes and, as I indicated in my evidence,
the corporate world is going rapidly in the other direction, because
not only do your results have to appear through the RNS, but other
forms of communication, particularly for financial services companies,
are being questioned by the FSA. If you hold an investor day,
investor briefings and interviews with journalists, there are
questions of whether, by the back door, information is being released
selectively to various people. That is being clamped down on.
At the moment, there is no restraint although, in the area of
official statistics, I think we have won some ground back. There
is now recognition that the GDP and inflation figures are produced
according to a calendar, and go out and are not selectively leaked,
but other forms of government announcement are still pretty much
a freeforall.
Q140 Chair: Are
you ever concerned that our political leaders in government have
used nonpolitical people, like members of the armed forces
or senior officials, to make the case for something or to announce
something in a certain way, which is an attempt to validate, with
an impartial person, what is essentially a political decision
or a political message? I am thinking particularly, most recently,
of the letter in The Times from the Armed Forces Chiefs
justifying cutting the Harrier, against very strong opposition
from a previous First Sea Lord. Can you think of other occasions
that have left you uncomfortable?
Lord Turnbull:
I am not particularly uncomfortable with that one, because I think
the military leaders went through a review and eventually agreed
a settlement with their Minister and in turn with the Treasury.
It seems perfectly reasonable, if that is the decision they have
reached collectively, publicly to defend it. Whether it is before
a Select Committee or a letter to a newspaper, that is what they
are doing, so I am not sure that it meets the description of being
leant on.
Lord Wilson: There
is a very important distinction between explaining the Government's
position and becoming an advocate for it. I think it is perfectly
proper and necessary for a public servant or civil servant to
explain what the Government's position is and what the reasons
are, and this happens all the time with Select Committees, but
there is a very fine line between that and a public servant getting
into a position where they are actually arguing for something
in a partisan way. That is a constant danger and one has to patrol
that boundary.
Q141 Chair: Is
it something that should be better reflected in the code or in
the Manual?
Lord Wilson: To
be honest, I have not read the code to check that point, but it
is a very important point.
Lord Armstrong:
Some of these points are dealt with in the Ministerial Code, which
is a separate document.
Q142 Greg Mulholland:
All three of you have clearly had long and distinguished careers
in the Civil Service and have seen a number of the reforms that
have come forward from political leaders. When you look at the
last century particularly but the last 10 years as well,
it seems that each generation is trying to reform essentially
the same things and each time saying we have to get to grip with
the same problems that are being identified. Is the conclusion
that we take from that that all Civil Service reform ends in failure?
Lord Wilson: No.
Lord Armstrong:
From my point of view, I think the process is one of constant
adaptation. Yesterday's reform does one thing, then you find
some other need and you have to modify and go to that, and that
is a new form of Civil Service reform. You go through some periods
where there is no reform, and that will be followed, particularly
under the stimulus of a very active Prime Minister, by periods
of quite a lot of reform. It is a process of constant adaptation
within the general principles of the Civil Service's responsibility
to Ministers, and Ministers' accountability to Parliament.
Q143 Greg Mulholland:
Is that not really the crux of this: that it is constant adaptation,
which is exactly what the Civil Service wants, and yet you have
leaders, particularly strong leaders—Margaret Thatcher,
Tony Blair and now David Cameron—coming forward with these
grand reform schemes that are going to change everything from
top to bottom. What happens really is that it is Sir Humphrey
who is in charge, making sure that constant adaptation is what
actually happens.
Lord Turnbull:
I think I would describe it as being that we stand on the shoulders
of our predecessors and build on their work. I will give you
an example. When Richard Wilson was the head of the Civil Service
and I was the permanent secretary in the Treasury, there was a
group that produced a report called Bringing in and Bringing
on Talent, and it was about opening up senior Civil Service
posts to a wider range of applicants. It was started in his time,
and continued and accelerated in mine. It was not a case of coming
along and simply reversing something that had happened before.
Very few things get reversed; they get built on.
Lord Wilson: I
agree with that. The Civil Service that I left was very different
from the Civil Service I joined. It had moved on immeasurably
in important ways. Some of the changes are very big and important
changes. I am going to use this as a small visual aid: the Next
Steps policy, which was launched in 1988, was a profoundly important
step. The financial management initiative was a profoundly important
policy and the Citizen's Charter was a very important idea. Each
wave follows the previous wave and moves the service on, and that
is how these things are bound to work. Every Government needs
something a bit different from the previous Government. The Civil
Service that John Major left did not have all the skills and all
the people we needed for new Labour. It is bound to be a process
of constant adaptation and development, rather than a big onceandforall
change that alters it.
Q144 Greg Mulholland:
Do we need next steps? Do we need the post-bureaucratic age or
is it really the civil servants who will dictate the pace of reform?
Lord Turnbull:
Post-bureaucratic age is a new expression of a preexisting
idea. In 2001, Tony Blair said something like, "We need
a new dynamic in public services—services built around the
interests of the user of those services--patients, parents and
the lawabiding citizen--rather than being structured around
the requirements of those providing the services." That
is a central precept of the post-bureaucratic age. There is also
the whole idea of choice and what we are seeing in our own lives.
I can remember a time when, if you had a telephone at all, you
quite likely shared it with the people next door, and you only
had one appliance in your house. People have different expectations
about the services that they receive, whether they come from the
private sector or the public sector, and this phrase, post-bureaucratic
age, is capturing that and accelerating that process. Many of
the ideas in it giving greater weight to the way people want the
services delivered to them, already existed but under different
labels.
Q145 Charlie Elphicke:
In terms of the Civil Service reform, I am very struck that two
thirds of civil servants now work in Government agencies. We
have had written evidence from Professor Kakabadse, who came to
see us in our previous session. He says there are three key core
Civil Service capabilities, namely policy design and development,
service delivery excellence and agency relationship management,
that is to say sourcing, outsourcing and the management of wholly
owned government subsidiaries. Would it be fair to say that a
logical extension of the agencies would actually be to raise productivity
by contracting them out altogether?
Lord Wilson: It
depends on the particular situation. The next steps concept,
which Lord Armstrong played a major part in introducing, applies
to an enormous variety of different kinds of activities around
the Civil Service, and some of them are ones where contracting
out has taken place. For instance, the prison service has contracted
out to private sector providers the provision of some prisons.
There are numerous examples of different agencies performing
different kinds of functions and, in some cases, contracting out
has taken place. It is very hard to generalise, but in principle
that can happen.
Q146 Chair: Professor
Kakabadse also points out that to do the post-bureaucratic age
and the Big Society, the Civil Service actually needs a fourth
skill, which he describes as "the formation of powerful community
groups to provide service but also be able to effectively interact
with the Civil Service". Would you agree with that? This
kind of transformation of the Civil Service would require a great
deal of training and reeducation of the Civil Service and
its capabilities. Would you agree with that analysis?
Lord Turnbull:
Yes, I do. It is coloured by my experience, which I shared with
Lord Wilson, of being permanent secretary at the Department of
the Environment. There are many areas in local government where
you have to bring together in a local area, say with a regeneration
project, many players. Civil servants need the ability to influence,
to be able to go to a public event, listen and persuade. Increasingly,
we are looking for people who have that skill and there is less
place, and they thrive less well, for highly cerebral people who
operate in Whitehall, write well but do not like speaking or interacting
with local people. My experience in the Department of the Environment
was that there were lots of them, and a lot of them were in the
regional offices, the regional development corporations or whatever,
but it is absolutely right that getting people to join you in
a common enterprise is a very important skill.
Lord Armstrong:
You must always have regard to what Parliament and the public
expect Ministers themselves to be responsible for. The Next Steps
initiative, which was introduced in 198788, created as the
initial Next Steps agents things like the Passport Office and
the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, where the great bulk
of the work done is purely that of issuing licences or issuing
passports. Ministers are not really concerned with that detailed
administration; they are concerned with, in the case of the DVLA,
the licence rates and with the budget for that organisation.
That seems to me a perfectly sensible thing. The difficulties
began to emerge with the Prison Service at the time of Mr Derek
Lewis, where the Prison Service was taking decisions as a Next
Steps executive agency, which eventually came back to haunt the
Home Secretary of the day. That is a problem that you constantly
have to have in mind. Ministers find themselves held responsible
for things that they have not actually been concerned in the creation
of.
Lord Wilson: I
recognise what Lord Armstrong has described. I can think of specific
situations that arose, where somebody within the Prison Service
exercised their discretion in a very entrepreneurial way, which
is very good but, when Parliament heard about it, it was seen
as a scandal. This was about a prison governor who invested an
endyear surplus in the provision of an allyearround
playing field, which I think was a very good piece of leadership.
When Parliament heard about it, they knew that the local village
playing field had been sold off, and they thought it was scandalous
that the inmates had better treatment than local schools. The
boundary between politics and management is quite often really
difficult, and it is one of the differences from working in the
private sector.
Q147 Charlie Elphicke:
Lord Turnbull, this is a followup on my earlier question.
During your time there was created, and I quote Lord Wilson,
"a dizzying array of units for 'modernisation' and 'delivery'
armed with centralised targets and league tables" that did
not foster any engagement with the wider populace. People didn't
like it; it came to be severely criticised. Would it not be a
good idea to allow more local empowerment and decentralisation?
Lord Turnbull:
There are two and possibly three themes in that. One is: did
we create too many units? We are down to the old joke of Bird
and Fortune that there are all these units in the Cabinet Office,
and there was the Social Exclusion Unit for anyone who couldn't
find a place in any others. When I arrived in 2002, there were
too many units and we tried to rationalise that. The Office for
Public Service Reform was probably surplus to requirements and
gradually it was taken out, and its work was absorbed in other
units.
The second theme is really about targets, and
there I have some sympathy with this, in the sense that, if you
are giving the health service £100 billion a year to
spend, do you simply say to the professionals, "Do your best
with it. You choose what outputs are going to be delivered."?
Some of the improvements that took place in the Health Service,
particularly the reduction in waiting times, did respond to the
pressure that was put by the setting of targets. On the other
hand, targets get gamed against and they do create friction with
the professionals. There has been, somebody said, a retreat from
them. I do not think we should lose sight of the fact that people
are entitled to know, if many billions of pounds are being spent
on a particular service, what is being achieved, right down to
the level of what any school is doing. If you do not like the
league tables in which schools feature, you can either abandon
them and retreat, or you can say, "Let us try to work on
measures that are more sophisticated, which capture value added,
for example." To say we are not going to make any attempt
to measure or compare the performance of different parts of the
organisation is a dereliction of duty.
Q148 Chair: In
the private sector and the armed forces, they do not try to do
this. They train the people down the line, so they become more
autonomous and more capable. Delegated mission command seems
to be something that the public sector is not very good at.
Lord Turnbull:
Boards I am on have things called KPIs. There's a report from
the CEO at each board meeting on sales, profits, assets under
management or whatever. They use this system. It is easier for
them, because these are very often verified and they are not qualitative
to the same extent.
Q149 Chair: The
entrepreneurs we want in the public sector, the head teachers
and hospital managers, are driven out of the public service by
the directions and paper raining down at them from on high.
Lord Turnbull:
There is a sense in which an idea that had an element of merit
went too far and there has been a retreat from it. I do not think
you then go to the point where you say, "We will make no
use of delivery targets," and the Public Service Agreements
will simply say, "Here are the budgetary allocations for
departments, for agencies, and you will be told nothing about
what is expected to be delivered."
Lord Wilson: It
is a big topic this, but I lean in the direction more of setting
people clear objectives and giving them discretion within that,
with good training, to pursue those objectives. You can get into
a situation where people are all pursuing their targets, but they
lose sight of what they are trying to do.
Q150 Paul Flynn:
I cannot lose this opportunity of having so much experience of
the Civil Service—it is a rare event to have you all together
here—to ask a question that Oliver Letwin asked, and that
is on the policy of prisons. In spite of the efforts of government
after government, over a period of 40 or 50 years, recidivism
has never changed. It is exactly the same in spite of all those
efforts. You could say the same about drug policy, which in fact
has got worse, in spite of the huge efforts that have gone into
it. It seems to be mainly because government policy has been
evidencefree and prejudicerich. Do you feel, looking
back on your careers, that you would like to see a measurement
of outcomes to see what failures governments have chalked up because
they have been following the popular policy, the tabloid policy,
rather than going ahead on intelligent, informed evidence?
Lord Wilson: I
do think we are not very good at going back and seeing how successful
policies were, or indeed at thinking, "What is government
good at and what is government less good at?" If you want
brief answers, that is where I would stand.
Q151 Kelvin Hopkins:
Just a question before you go, which betrays my prejudice, the
Civil Service is often portrayed as being negative and acting
as a brake on what governments want to do and what radical politicians
want to do. In fact, after the Second World War the Civil Service
facilitated a social democratic revolution. That was tremendous
and immensely successful; for two or three decades we had something
that really worked. Since then, we have had a number of radical
Prime Ministers, radical politicians with fanciful ideas, and
there is a sense in which the Civil Service has been uncomfortable
with all of that. I completely sympathise. To what extent have
you had to bite your tongue or keep a straight face, while politicians
come up with fanciful ideas that are really not going to work?
Lord Turnbull:
Radicalism I have no problem with; initiativitis is where I think
I part company with it.
Lord Armstrong:
What happened after the war is an enormous subject. During the
war, there was a singleness of objective and a great deal of working
together, of co-operation, between the Government, the civil servants,
and the politicians on the one hand and industry on the other.
Not only was there a great deal of working together but a great
deal of friendship and collegiality developed. The legacy of
this lasted us through almost until 1970 really, but the situation
since then has of course changed, because those generations have
passed on.
Lord Wilson: The
Civil Service has shown that it is able to manage large change
repeatedly. The size of the Civil Service—from memory—between
1979 and around 1997 shrank from something like 750,000 to less
than 500,000. That is a very big change. Some of that was hiving
off and some of that was reduction, but we did that very quietly
and it was big change. You may not agree with the privatisation
programme but actually the carrying out of it was very successful
and a pretty big change. The service has shown that it can adapt
and do the things that Ministers want, but I go along with the
comment that it is initiativitis, if that is the right word, which
is more difficult.
Q152 Robert Halfon:
I go back to my question I asked earlier: what effect will the
Cabinet Manual have on ministerial responsibility for things that
go wrong and Ministers resigning, as opposed to blaming it on
the Civil Service?
Lord Wilson: Can
I just say a word about Crichel Down? I think what Crichel Down
illustrates, because it was what you mentioned, is that a Minister's
ability to remain in office depends on whether he or she retains
the confidence of the Back Benchers of his Government and of the
Prime Minister. That was what happened in Crichel Down. There
is a lot of academic study of this. I do not think that the research
bears out the statement that Ministers resign when civil servants
get it wrong. I think it is about whether Ministers retain the
confidence of their Back Benchers and of the Prime Minister.
Q153 Robert Halfon:
Does the Cabinet Manual delineate the responsibility of the Minister
to resign if things go wrong? Are there any guidelines?
Lord Wilson: The
only guideline is whether a Minister retains the confidence of
the Prime Minister.
Chair: Or Parliament.
Lord Wilson: And
of his Parliamentary party, the party on the benches behind him.
Lord Armstrong:
If I may say so, I do not think the Manual is intended to tell
you that. As I said, that would be more prescriptive than it
intends to be. In that respect, I agree entirely with what Lord
Wilson has said. The reasons for resignations very often are
a question of whether the Minister concerned still enjoys the
support of his Back Benchers. I think back to the resignation
of Lord Carrington in April 1982. I do not think he had lost the
confidence of his Back Benchers and I am sure he had not lost
the confidence of his Prime Minister. I think he came to the
conclusion that he was unable to defend himself in the House of
Commons because he was a member of the House of Lords, and I suspect
he thought that, because of the outbreak of the war in the Falklands
and the failures particularly of his Department in the previous
time, a head had to roll and his was the head that should roll.
It was in that sense a very honourable resignation.
Chair: My Lords, thank
you very much indeed for your time with us. We have run over
time. We could have run for another hour easily. It is been
absolutely fascinating and I can sense my Committee is rather
frustrated. They all want to ask more questions. We may follow
up in writing one or two issues, if we may. Thank you very much
indeed. It has been extremely helpful to us.
Lord Armstrong:
Thank you. We've enjoyed our time here.
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