| Previous Section | Back to Table of Contents | Lords Hansard Home Page |
Lord McIntosh of Haringey: My Lords, Lord North.
The Earl of Longford: My Lords, my noble friend says "Lord North". That was some time ago and I was not there. But terrible things may develop and we may need a code. By and large, civil servants are high-minded and honourable men. But there is always the problem of how far we press the policy that we believe to be right and how far we carry out orders. We can consider Question Time today, or any day, in any House. The Ministers come down heavily briefed by the civil servants. They are told how to cope with fiendish opponents like my noble friend Lord McIntosh. They
are given the answers. That is all part of the job--to defeat the Opposition. So it is a big problem and will always be a problem. If a code helps, so much the better.1.37 p.m.
Lord Haskel: My Lords, perhaps the most important asset any organisation can have is its brand or identity. It is through its brand or identity that we trust and relate with organisations and companies. We accept their quality, their reliability and their integrity. We rely on brands for medicines, transport and equipment. We trust and rely on organisations like the Red Cross, Save the Children or the RSPCA to deliver help for us where we cannot do it ourselves. We trust and rely on the reputation of schools, universities and hospitals. Of course, all those organisations have to progress and change with the times. But with change and progress, maintaining the reputation of the brand is essential. The most important thing about the brand is that its identity, its reputation and trust outlive the individuals. I would say to the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, that the Armed Forces have been outstandingly successful in that regard.
I can see noble Lords wondering what on earth all this businessmen's talk about brands has to do with today's debate. I will tell them. In this country we had a wonderful brand. It was owned by all of us. It had all of the attributes that I have just described--trust, reputation, integrity and continuity. It was called the British Civil Service. The British Civil Service had all those attributes, and they have been adequately described by my noble friend Lady Hayman and other speakers.
Then along came a group of managers who understood nothing about the value of a brand or an identity but thought they knew everything about cost. It was a management which looked no further than cutting costs, important though that is; in short, a management which knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. It set about running down the brand's reputation; by denigrating it with phrases such as "public bad" and "private good". It set about destroying the authority of the brand. Once that happens, the value of the brand is seriously eroded; a mistake for which any brand manager in one of our companies would have been sacked on the spot.
Perhaps one of the ultimate ironies is that many of the organisations which helped to dismantle the Civil Service brand use this work to build up their own identities. I cannot do better than to illustrate this by quoting the noble Baroness, Lady Park, who, during the debate on the privatisation of the Recruitment and Assessment Services, said:
- "If I were the Principal of Somerville today and an undergraduate came to me to ask for advice on how to enter the public service, I would have to advise not the CSSB procedure, but an early application to KPMG, Coopers and Lybrand, McKinseys, NatWest Markets, Price Waterhouse or some other city consultancy firm, for it is they who decide what will happen in the Civil Service".--[Official Report, 25/7/96; col. 1551.]
My noble friend Lady Ramsay described how the Civil Service depends on people. Indeed, the best people try to work for an organisation with a good brand
identity because part of the signal given out by that brand is that "the best people work here". Yet not only do the Government disregard the basic rights of civil servants who join the public service to be public servants; they also try to sell them as the intellectual property of agencies, and this without winning their loyalty. I suggest that the Minister should listen very carefully to what the DTI is saying to industry about the importance of human capital in today's knowledge society. Working with human capital means that you have to work with the grain, and the best achievements are those achieved through consent.Now, obviously, Ministers started to get worried about this poor management of people. Their solution was to introduce charters and charter marks to define the relationship between civil servants and the public. That was an extraordinary decision for two reasons. First, we live in an age when reputation and integrity are the signals given out by a brand. They are not proclaimed by certification. Certification depends on the brand, and not vice versa. Secondly, people wondered whether the charter was a stick with which to hit public servants or whether it was a set of standards in which organisations could take pride.
I imagine the truth is that it was intended to do both--the kind of "double whammy" so beloved of noble Lords opposite. The result is that the introduction of the charters which were meant to achieve two objectives have achieved none. Not only are people unsure of what the charters are meant to do but the charter marks are being exposed to ridicule. I know how talented the Minister is, but perhaps even she may find it difficult to explain how Severn-Trent Water can successfully be prosecuted 42 times for pollution and be awarded a charter mark.
The situation is rather like the magician who asked for the loan of a watch. A trusting member of the audience gave him a watch, a watch perhaps a little old fashioned but reliable. The magician took the watch, folded it up in a handkerchief and said the magic words over the folded handkerchief; magic words like, "public bad, private good". He then took the hammer, smashed the folded handkerchief and slowly unfolded it. There was the smashed watch.
The noble Baroness, Lady Park, has asked how we are going to put it together again. She is absolutely right. It will take a new administration to sort all this out and create a Civil Service operating in partnership with the private sector to achieve public goals; a Civil Service where people have pride and confidence in themselves and work with a sense of national obligation and are not demeaned by constant threats of being sold off for short-term gain; a Civil Service that helps business to add value, not one that apes some of its worst short-term failings; a Civil Service allowed to retain the values of its brand and identity in which civil servants and the public can take pride and which the public will trust.
To achieve this we require a Civil Service with a comprehensive statutory code of conduct and ethics to ensure that civil servants give impartial advice and do not carry out tasks which would jeopardise their political neutrality. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Hayman on moving the Motion.
1.44 p.m.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire: My Lords, this has been a very interesting and worthwhile debate, although marked, I regret, by the thinness of attendance on the Conservative Benches opposite and by the thinness of participants from the Conservative side of the House.
This is, after all, a constitutional issue. We know that as we enter the general election the Conservatives will be campaigning as defenders of the British constitution. We have heard a great deal in the past two hours about how much this central element of the British constitution--the role of the Civil Service at the core of the state--has been transformed in the past 20 years. Yet I remember the Prime Minister introducing Cmnd. 2627, the White Paper Continuity and Change, describing it as "a revolution in the structure of government". If it is a revolution, the whole defence made so eloquently by the noble Viscount the Leader of the House of the constitution as it currently stands falls apart. I, as a constitutional reformer rather than a constitutional conservative, would agree with the noble Lord, Lord Beloff, that we cannot go back to where we were before; we have to go on from what has happened in the past 20 years and reconstruct a coherent state for the 21st century.
There has been radical change over the past 20 years. There has been a reduction in the role of the Government, most of all over the economy. There has been the introduction of the management ethos of which the noble Baroness, Lady Park, spoke; the use of "management speak", the introduction of the "value for money" mantra which we have heard in this House on a number of occasions in the past year without, so far as I recall, on any occasion the Minister who used the term being able to define what "value for money" means, particularly in Civil Service matters; the move towards executive agencies and beyond that the introduction of privatisation into the very heart of government--into the Civil Service itself--with Recruitment and Assessment Services--with the attempt, so far resisted, to privatise the Civil Service College; and the introduction of the Private Finance Initiative into government buildings and their management.
Some of this takes us clearly too far. We have seen the erosion of the distinction between party and government and the erosion of the distinction between government and Crown. I was happy to see in the new Civil Service code a rather greater distinction between government and Crown than there was in the Armstrong memorandum. My definition of the Crown--the British state--is Queen in Parliament, which is to say that a civil servant's loyalty is not just to the government of the day but to Her Majesty's Government as represented by the state continuing and all Members of Parliament. Part of what has gone wrong in the past 10 to 20 years has been Ministers attempting to use civil servants to deceive Parliament, to disguise from Parliament and to withhold information from Parliament. We cannot get the structure of our Civil Service right again unless we also tackle the reform of Parliament.
The underlying argument made by the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, is the case for a statutory Civil Service code embodied in a Civil Service Act. That is a piecemeal constitutional reform which lies rather unhappily with a number of other piecemeal Labour proposals for constitutional reform. I worry that if they were all made they would add up to less than the sum of their parts. Once one starts tinkering with the unwritten British constitution, as our current Government have been doing, the whole thing begins to unpick. We have seen the whole thing begin to unpick.
One of my greatest worries about what has happened to the whole structure of British government and of the role of the Civil Service and Ministers has been that we begin to see the edge of the old corruption coming back as Ministers deal with companies dealing with privatisation, which are themselves contributors to the Conservative Party; as civil servants deprived of the ideal security of tenure begin, as one put it to me the other day, "To look over my shoulder to wonder where the next job is coming from and to worry whether now might be the time to move over into the private sector to join the company with which I am dealing as a civil servant". That is the beginning of a very dangerous slope and we are already beginning to slide to the top of it.
There is a risk that the Labour Party in government will be tempted in its turn to make the most of executive power against parliamentary scrutiny and public openness. I note that the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, is already speaking, as he said, in the mind-set of an alternative government. We have to be concerned not simply with government but with Parliament and democracy. I remind the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, that there are not just two possible outcomes of the forthcoming election. There is a third, in which no party might win an overall majority, at which point it might be a little easier to change the style of government itself and to move away from executive dominance.
We need a change in the overall style of British government, in the relation between government and Parliament and in that between Ministers and MPs. We shall not protect the impartiality of the Civil Service unless we achieve that. Sadly, I doubt whether the Labour Party has yet thought through the implications of changing the way in which government operates. We should note, for example, the extraordinary increase in the number of Ministers that we have seen in the past 20 years even as the numbers of the Civil Service have been cut back and government have retreated and hived off into executive agencies. I note that the Labour Party now has the largest single shadow team of Ministers that anyone has yet seen in British Government.
If we are to rebuild the principle of an impartial Civil Service serving the British Crown and the British state, and the long-term interests of this country, it clearly requires a shift in the balance of government and Parliament, which needs fewer Ministers and not more. It requires the recreation of an independent Commons with Members of that House who see themselves as Members of Parliament first and people who hope to become Ministers, second. The independent Back Bencher has largely disappeared. It requires stronger
parliamentary committees and more assistance and advice for those committees. It seems to me that part of the answer to the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, as to what one does with the Statistical Office is that, like the National Audit Office, it ought to be responsible to Parliament and not simply to the Government. That would give it the status and independence that it needs.It also requires us to redraw the boundary between the political and the administrative. If we are to have fewer Ministers, then we clearly need more political advisers. My noble friend Lord McNally and the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, have both suggested that we now need to move towards ministerial cabinets. We perhaps need to look very seriously in making senior appointments more open; subject to much more open ministerial decision and parliamentary oversight. That means that as we strengthen parliamentary committees we should be considering whether or not the heads of executive agencies should have their appointments confirmed by parliamentary committees.
We also need a more open process of government, which provides not only a freedom of information Act, but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsay, remarked, for officials to have more open relations with members of the opposition parties; with whoever may be in or out of government at the present time and direct relationships with parliamentary committees. Above all, we need a more consensual, less sharply partisan, process. That is rather easier to achieve with a multi-party government than with a switch from one team to another hungry for power and desperately feeling that it has been deprived of power for nearly 18 years. We need a statutory code, but that on its own is not enough. It is difficult to have a little bit of constitutional reform--and this is a little bit of it, welcome as it is--but if we are to achieve it we need rather more.
1.55 p.m.
Lord McIntosh of Haringey: My Lords, my noble friend Lady Hayman may well believe that, in introducing a debate on this topic today, she has hit pay dirt. She certainly has in the quality of her speech and that of the succeeding speeches, mainly from our Benches, but also from the other Benches in the House. The House must acknowledge its gratitude to her for raising this important subject at this time.
It is not only that the subject is of enormous importance--it can even be of constitutional importance as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, said--but in recent weeks we have been going through some very painful experiences concerning the abuse of relationships between Ministers and the Civil Service. Wrong conclusions have been drawn and wrong impressions have sometimes deliberately been given to the public about the nature of the disputes that have taken place. It is appropriate that this House, when the other place has gone off for the Christmas holidays, should take the time, as it has today, to address these issues.
Perhaps we may take the three essential characteristics of a successful public administration in this country. I believe that we can agree that they are
ministerial accountability, objectivity and free and open competition in recruitment and promotion. All those three principles have been under attack in recent weeks, months and years.Ministerial accountability has been under very recent attack although it is significant that the only Minister to draw attention to himself by resigning when he was criticised for his public activities rather than for any sexual or other less relevant activity was Mr. David Willetts. The criticism of him was not as a Minister but as a Whip. In other cases where Ministers have been under serious attack resignations have been very far from their minds. There have not been any examples of the admirable example given by Sir Thomas Dugdale in the Crichel Down case.
Ministerial accountability has also been under attack not only at a personal level, but because of the extent to which agencies have taken over the core functions of departments of the Civil Service. I do not say that that is administratively a bad thing. There are many ways in which the increased internal accountability of agencies is valuable. The fact that they are required to produce targets for themselves and to live up to and account for them, is of itself valuable. I do not attack the devolution towards agencies.
But there can be no doubt that that has led to a diminution in ministerial accountability to Parliament. Questions raised by Members of Parliament to Ministers are in fact answered by director-generals of agencies. We have to be absolutely sure in our minds, which I am not, that Ministers do not hide behind those answers and sometimes even alter them when it is politically convenient to do so, while still not acknowledging responsibility for them.
I turn to the issue of competition in recruitment and promotion. In that sense this is properly a Bancroft memorial debate. Lord Bancroft has been referred to with admiration so many times and so rightly because he led the fight for the Civil Service against the privatisation of the recruitment service. This factor also applies to promotion within the Civil Service. It must be a principle that those in the Civil Service are advanced on their merit rather than on their opinions. There are suspicions that that is not always the case, particularly at higher levels. There are certainly suspicions that the variety of career paths brought about by the Next Steps agency process damages the advancement of the most able.
My noble friend Lady Hayman gave many examples of ministerial abuse of the Civil Service in recent months. There was the unpleasant episode of the search for "proponents of our policies". There has been the issue of leaks and the blame for them which has been placed on civil servants. My noble friend gave so many examples that I do not need to--indeed, I could not--equal the authority with which she made her case. What is interesting is that instead of there being any sense of humility among Ministers, Ministers have instead turned to attack the Civil Service for the things that have been going wrong. It is Ministers--notably, the Deputy Prime Minister but also the Minister without Portfolio, Dr. Mawhinney, the chairman of the Conservative
Party--who have been talking about a "culture of leaks" rather than accepting that there might be something wrong with some of their actions.The case of Helen Goodman is a very good example. The noble Lord, Lord McNally, referred to that earlier and said that it was only yesterday that Mr. Heseltine was obliged to apologise to Giles Radice, the chairman of the Select Committee on the Public Service. Even so, Mr. Heseltine was not really apologising; he was blaming press reports for the gross injustice which he perpetrated on Helen Goodman by blaming her, as a would-be Labour candidate, for leaks of a document which indeed ought not to have been leaked. The Treasury inquiry proved conclusively that it was not leaked by Helen Goodman, but Mr. Heseltine made no reference to the fact that she had been completely cleared by that inquiry of any impropriety either in terms of being a parliamentary candidate or in relation to the report in which she played a part. Helen Goodman had no opportunity to reply, yet the Treasury (having cleared her) made no attempt to protect her from police intrusion and made no attempt to correct the misrepresentations that had been made about her. That was only compounded by the slur upon her which Mr. Heseltine uttered and which he has now partially retracted.
Who has been defending the Civil Service and its objectivity? As my noble friend Lady Symons has made absolutely clear, it is the First Division Association which has led in terms of protecting the neutrality of the Civil Service and which, as my noble friend Lady Symons did this afternoon, has always condemned any leak of confidential documents from the Civil Service. That body and other trade unions in the Civil Service have been outstanding in the defence of Civil Service standards, as have individual civil servants themselves. It is they who have stood up against the ministerial pressure to which noble Lords have referred. It is they who have provided the defence against the attacks which I have described.
The issue before us is whether there should be a statutory code rather than the present code under an Order in Council. The noble Baroness, Lady Park of Monmouth, referred to the need to waive the Royal Prerogative. I take it that she means that there should no longer be such an Order in Council, and that the provisions should be statutory.
The noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, and the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig of Radley, resisted that view on the ground that a statutory code would be difficult in law. The existing code is, however, part of the terms and conditions of employment of civil servants and could therefore be referred to in, for example, an industrial tribunal. It is thus in effect secondary law. Let us recognise that fact; let us put such a code into legislation in a Civil Service Act as the Labour Party and my noble friends have proposed. That is necessary not only in itself and because of the demands of the freedom of information Act which the Labour Government will introduce, but also because of the repatriation of our obligations under the European Court of Human Rights. If we have those general principles of freedom of
information and of human rights enshrined in our legislation, civil servants will need to be guided by a statutory code.The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, described that as "piecemeal constitutional reform". If I was a member of any Administration in which the noble Lord might participate, I would not look forward to the general constitutional reform legislation which the noble Lord appears to prefer to reforms which he describes as "piecemeal". I prefer to address the issues as they arise and to deal with them in a finite way. That is what the Labour Party proposes.
The noble Lord, Lord Beloff, made a distinction between "constitutional conservatives", which is how he described my noble friend Lady Hayman, and the noble Lord, Lord McNally, who was more inclined to change the relationship between the political process and the Civil Service. I think that that is a false distinction. In this case, the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, is right. The description "constitutional reform" is perhaps better. If we want to strengthen the objectivity and effectiveness of the Civil Service it will be necessary also to strengthen the ability of our political process to operate effectively. To that extent, I disagree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, who thought that it was proper to ask that we should eschew party politics. I think that party politics and an objective Civil Service are the necessary corollaries of each other. That is the basis on which we should be approaching reform.
I know that I am over my time, but as there is still time available for the debate, I should like to make one final point about objectivity. There is a distinction between objectivity of behaviour and advice and objectivity of thought. I address these remarks particularly to the noble Lord, Lord Beloff, who in my view did not seem to appreciate the difference. It is the responsibility of an objective civil servant to behave in an objective way and offer objective advice to Ministers. That must be so, and I believe that it has been the case in the vast majority of instances in recent years. But that does not mean that members of the Civil Service are supposed to be eunuchs and should not have their own views and thoughts about political, administrative and other matters. If that were so we would exclude the brightest and the best from the Civil Service, and we would lose that remarkable character of the Civil Service--good people with their own views who serve governments objectively. It must be that for which we strive.
2.8 p.m.
Baroness Trumpington: My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, so newly arrived in this House, not only for her courage in bringing to our notice a subject of such importance but for having attracted so many distinguished speakers. One regret I share with many noble Lords is that Lord Bancroft is no longer with us. I am sure that he would have made an invaluable contribution to the debate.
I cannot applaud the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman. To me it was a travesty of the truth. Your Lordships have raised a wide range of important points.
I should like to address most of those points before summarising the view of the Government. In reply to my noble friend Lady Park, who spoke about funding of the FCO, no part of government can be exempt from the need to seek ever greater efficiency and effectiveness. The Foreign Office, too, must respond to changes in demand and use available funds in the best possible way to achieve value for money.The noble Lord, Lord McNally, and a number of other speakers referred to a culture of leaks. I note that the noble Lord did not examine the figures in the memorandum submitted by my right honourable friend the Deputy Prime Minister to the Select Committee. Since 1980 over 400 leaks have been notified to the Cabinet Office. That represents between 30 and 40 significant leaks every year, compared with 13 in 1982, for example. I suggest to the noble Lord that the expression "culture of leaks" may not be misplaced.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, spoke about special advisers. Special advisers were a development formalised by the last Labour Government. This Government have set out clearly and openly the roles that both special advisers and civil servants must play, and that is the important matter.
The noble Baroness, Lady Symons, expressed concerns about accountability and responsibility. The Government made clear their position last month in response to the report on ministerial accountability and responsibility by a Select Committee of another place. The Government accepted many recommendations of that committee. The proposed resolution of the other House on these matters was accepted in principle. It is now the subject of cross-party discussion. The noble Baroness also said that an FDA survey revealed civil servants' concern about political activities. I entirely endorse the concern of the noble Baroness that there must be a clear separation between political activities and the proper duties of civil servants. Perhaps I should declare a type of interest as a former temporary civil servant. Appeals made to Civil Service commissions under the Civil Service code have not so far included any relating to political activities.
The noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, drew attention to the Armstrong memorandum and the Civil Service code. Those answer the concerns raised in this debate. I fully agree with the views of the noble Lord. I strongly welcome his expert contribution based on his long and highly distinguished career in the Civil Service.
The noble Baroness, Lady Ramsay, said that the Civil Service felt isolated from Opposition. The need to avoid that problem is precisely the reason why the Prime Minister has enabled the Opposition to benefit from factual briefings from senior civil servants for a longer period before the next general election than ever before. The noble Baroness also spoke about recruitment and the promotion of those whose faces fit as "one of us". I reassure the noble Baroness that the Civil Service strictly maintains fair and open recruitment and promotion on merit. Recent moves such as the expansion of the role of the First Civil Service Commissioner and revision of recruitment provisions serve to underline and reinforce those principles.
The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig of Radley, spoke of the tried and tested personnel system in the Armed Forces. I am grateful to him for reminding the House of the importance of this critical area of the public service. We take very seriously his point about the need to continue systems that underpin the absolute political neutrality of the Armed Forces.
The noble Earl, Lord Longford, mused on how far it was intended that civil servants should carry out and create policy. The noble Earl raised an important point. The Government are convinced that civil servants should give honest and impartial advice to Ministers concerning both options for new policies and how existing policies should best be carried out. That point is covered explicitly in the Civil Service code.
The noble Lord, Lord McIntosh, said that Next Steps agencies dilute ministerial responsibility. Not so, my Lords. Nothing with regard to agencies affects the rights of a Member of this House or the other place to demand a reply from a Minister. The Minister remains fully accountable to Parliament for all the activities of his department and agencies.
Let me sum up the Government's view through a quotation:
- "The British Civil Service is a great national asset. Since the 1870s, it has been the permanent and impartial instrument of all administrations. Governments have always seen it as their duty to preserve its efficiency and honesty for their successors".
As a former Under-Secretary in the Department of Health and Social Security and as a Minister of State in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, I should like to pay my humble tribute to the quality of service and huge help, although not always what I wanted to hear, which I received from the civil servants with whom I came into contact--not least, I would add, for today's debate.
The Civil Service plays a vital part in underpinning the constitution, and in sustaining good government in this country. As my noble friend Lord Beloff said, it has done so since the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms. It still does. The important challenge facing us all is to retain and strengthen the traditional principles--independence, impartiality, integrity, objectivity, permanence, recruitment through fair and open competition--that have made the British Civil Service the envy of the world.
Our system of government benefits hugely from our tradition of a politically impartial Civil Service, offering frank and objective advice to Ministers. A clear example of that is shown in the advice given by Sir Robin Butler in the matter described by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, as, "the cheerleaders". The noble Baroness has summed up the sequence of events. It was never intended that civil servants would do that work.
With regard to the panel, the record of the seminar recorded that the panel of public service providers might include prison governors. It was accepted subsequently
that that was not appropriate since prison governors are civil servants. No action whatever was taken to involve them.The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, calls attention to the need for a code of ethics for the Civil Service to ensure that civil servants give impartial advice and do not carry out tasks which could jeopardise their independence. We already have such a code. The Civil Service code came into force on 1st January this year. Clearly, it deserved more attention than it received, evidenced by the fact that we are having this debate today.
The Civil Service code provides a succinct statement of the constitutional framework of the Civil Service and the values--integrity, honesty, impartiality and objectivity--that every civil servant is expected to uphold. It restates that civil servants owe their loyalty to Ministers--of whatever political complexion--and that Ministers must account to Parliament. Pocket-sized copies of the code were distributed to all civil servants.
The code also sets out the role of Ministers in ensuring that those values are upheld. It provides a new, independent line of appeal to deal with cases where civil servants feel that they are being asked to do something they should not do.
Where a civil servant has reported a matter and believes that the response does not represent a reasonable response to the grounds of his or her concern, he or she may report the matter in writing to the independent Civil Service Commissioners.
The Government's commitment to a politically impartial Civil Service has never wavered. However, one might argue that there was at one stage a need for more clearly and publicly spelling out the relevant rules and requirements. That has now been done. The rules covering the political impartiality of the Civil Service are clearly described in five pages of the Civil Service management code, which sets out regulations and instructions to the departments and agencies regarding the terms and conditions of service of civil servants. The essence of those rules is distilled in Section 9 of the Civil Service code, distributed to every civil servant, from which I have quoted extensively.
Nor is this simply a requirement on civil servants. The corollary that Ministers must not misuse the Civil Service for political purposes is set out in paragraph 1 of Questions of Procedure for Ministers, and again that is repeated in Section 3 of the Civil Service code. Every one of those documents is open and can be found in the Libraries of both Houses. The Government are prepared to consider going further. They have an open mind about legislation concerning the terms and conditions of employment of civil servants and the powers of Civil Service Commissioners. They have offered discussions with other parties on that. The ethics of the Civil Service could now hardly be more clearly defined and publicly laid down.
Stewardship of the Civil Service is a vital task. I submit to the House that, judged by any standard, the Government have carried out this task, as they have others, responsibly, effectively and well. They will continue to do so over the next five years. In conclusion,
I trust that the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and all Members of this House will acquaint themselves with the Civil Service code. Let us be reassured; there is no need for a new code of ethics as it already exists.2.22 p.m.
Baroness Hayman: My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in today's debate. Their contributions made me realise that my fears when I saw the distinguished cast which my Motion had invoked in your Lordships' House were fully justified.
Perhaps I may respond briefly to the noble Baroness, Lady Trumpington, and assure her that I have my copy of the Civil Service code even as I speak--
Next Section
Back to Table of Contents
Lords Hansard Home Page