PART 5: SUMMARY OF GENERAL
EVIDENCE ON THE PUBLIC SERVICE AND THE COMMITTEE'S CONCLUSIONS
AND RECOMMENDATIONS (continued)
The Effect of Recruitment from
Outside
196. During the 1990s
a policy was introduced of filling some Senior Civil Service posts
by open competition rather than by promotion from within the Service
(see paragraphs 79 and 93 above). Of the 131 executive agency
chief executives recruited or in post in October 1996, 69 per
cent were recruited by open competition and 37 per cent of the
posts were filled by candidates from outside the Civil Service.
The present Government shows no inclination to reverse this policy:
Dr Clark told the Committee (Q 1855), "I think it is right
that on occasions various jobs have been open to open competition
and people have come from the outside to perform them. I think
they have gingered up and added a new dimension, new blood, into
the Civil Service".
197. Sir Robin Butler
suggested that recruiting from outside could have a positive impact
on morale in the Civil Service, saying (Q 2129), "if somebody
is appointed to a Permanent Secretary post against outside competition,
that gives them more confidence than if it has been a closed shop
appointment".
198. Professor Hennessy
(QQ 1920 to 1924) saw no objection to filling some Senior posts
through open competition, observing that the Civil Service was
not, after all, a job creation scheme for a certain sort of graduate.
Many outsiders had in 1939-40 been brought into the Civil Service
for the duration of the war, which had brought a "tremendous
improvement and advantages to the lifers in the Civil Service
as well as to the nation as a whole". However, while it had
been possible to dragoon some of the country's best talent in
time of war, current Civil Service salaries were not sufficient
to attract from the private sector "the ones you really want".
His only serious concern (QQ 1929 and 1930) was that the system
of recruitment might not be proof against people being brought
into senior posts because they were in sympathy with the views
of the Government of the day.
199. Mr Keith Burgess
of Andersen Consulting, which has done much work for Government
departments over the past two decades said (QQ 711 and 716) that
during that period only two people had been attracted from the
Civil Service to join his organisation and that none of his colleagues
had been poached for top Civil Service jobs.
200. One result of recruitment
from outside was recognised by Dame Gillian Brown (Q 57) who suggested
that the sense of dedication to public service probably grew within
individuals over time, and that if people worked only for a brief
period in the public service that sense might not develop its
full potential. Lord Armstrong of Ilminster (Q 39) thought that
"it is possible that, as people see the public service as
a thing they might do for five or ten years and then move on to
something else, it will perhaps weaken the ethos. I hope it will
not do so irreparably."
201. Sir William Reid
said (Q 594) "I think that if you bring in as the head of
one of these executive agencies someone who has had no experience
of the public service ethos, you run the risk that they may behave
in a slightly improper way." He agreed (Q 595) that part
of the public service ethos was a duty to the public service of
which one was a part, and a duty to the corps, which is not held
by those who do not belong to that corps: "I have in mind
people who will come in and then go, who do not regard their time
in the public service as necessarily public service, but as a
step in their career without necessarily having regard to the
service they owe to those whom the agency they head is supposed
to serve."
202. Sir William Reid
also expressed some concern (Q 592) that too much change could
lead to discontinuity: "so many things change so much of
the time that I find it appears to be a bit demoralising and the
way in which public business is done is not handed on in the same
way as it seemed to me it was done, say, 30 years ago." Dr
David Richards of Birmingham University (Q 396) referred to the
manner in which in Whitehall information about how Government
works "is based on this informal community where information
is passed by word of mouth from one generation of officials to
the next generation of officials", and added (Q 399) that
in the absence of a written constitution, "officials in effect
are carrying around the constitution in their own minds".
The Committee's
Conclusions
203. There is
a likelihood that, when outsiders are brought in to top positions,
existing officials will individually be disappointed by the effect
on their promotion prospects. We have not had evidence that this
so far has had a generally harmful effect on either ethos or morale.
There may, however, be a risk of such a harmful effect if a disproportionate
number of top jobs are filled by external recruits.
Fixed-Term Contracts
204. Given the constitutional
importance of continuity within the Civil Service, it seems curious
that the introduction of fixed-term contracts has attracted little
debate. Fixed-term contracts are being used with increasing frequency
and it is clearly the case that for this and other reasons, many
Civil Servants no longer see the Civil Service as a job for life.
Dr Clark spoke of a problem in the Civil Service which arose "because
sometimes the workload just peaks and goes away and that has got
to be addressed in management terms and cannot always be dealt
with by human wastage. The only way forward in a modern society
is short-term contracts" (Q 1870).
205. Mr Hammond, the
Treasury Solicitor, (Q 1173) mentioned security of employment,
which of course has an effect on continuity. "We live in
an increasingly insecure world and the Civil Service is not immune
from that. The Civil Service has reduced in size. That has applied
to lawyers -at any rate, in the Senior Civil Service-as it has
applied to administrators as well. I do not think security is
quite such a powerful factor now as perhaps it was when I joined
the Government Legal Service."
The Committee's
Conclusions
206. The Committee
recognises that the modern Civil Service is a profession of people
who will not necessarily stay there for the whole of their careers.
In a country where officials "carry around the constitution
in their own minds" a strong element of continuity is, however,
highly desirable in the Civil Service. This continuity may be
threatened by over-use of recruitment from outside and the use
of fixed term contracts. The Committee therefore considers it
to be essential for Government, in pursuing these policies, to
look to the future, and to have regard to the impact of them on
the morale of Civil Servants, the collective memory of the Senior
Civil Service, and the political impartiality of Senior Civil
Servants. The Committee agrees with Dr Clark's view (notwithstanding
his view that the use of short-term contracts is the only way
to deal with an irregular workload) that such short-term contracts
should be used to the absolute minimum.
Interchange of
Staff
207. Sir Christopher
Foster and Mr Francis Plowden (Special Report, p 18) wrote of
the importance of ensuring that Civil Servants in departments
and agencies had wide knowledge of each other and of their different
ways of doing things. "Cross-posting between departments
and between them and agencies, would already seem to be less common.
Unless at least as much cross-posting remains as in the past,
there is a serious danger that the Civil Servants in the rumps
of the departments, which are left, will come to have a narrower
experience too similar to that of the politicians they serve.
That is likely to make them both of less use to politicians and
less highly regarded. One can already see Civil Servants being
drawn into developing news-handling as their primary function
and their presentational skills as most likely to earn them Ministerial
respect. It is in this area perhaps that the dangers of future
politicisation of the Civil Service are greatest."
208. Sir Terence Burns,
Permanent Secretary at the Treasury, (QQ 1367 and 1368) attached
much importance to the movement of Senior Civil Servants across
departments. Of the top 70 or 80 people in the Treasury, about
20 came from bases in other departments. "We are very anxious
to keep a good movement going on in the Senior Civil Service because
in the Treasury we benefit enormously from people from other departments
who have a different perspective on things. In a central department
where basically you have no real contact with the outside world,
and all our work is in relation to other bodies, if you have the
same group of people who spend all their lives doing that then
they start to become quite insular and it is terribly effective
to have someone from another department who is used to being on
the other side of the fence, so to speak, come in and have to
do expenditure control bearing in mind some of the lessons they
have of what it was like being on the receiving end and seeing
how it is that they set about doing their job. We get a lot of
value out of that." Asked whether the delegation of pay and
grading to individual departments might inhibit such movements,
Sir Terence said "I could see how that might happen, but
it has not happened yet. I have never known of a case where one
person's grade or the salary that they were on under this system
had meant that they could not move between one department and
another."
209. Mr Michael Scholar,
said (Q 1615), "At the moment we have about 200 secondments
out and 200 secondments in the Department [of Trade and Industry].
We have people working in the European Commission. We have people
in many companies. We have people in other Government Departments.
We have people from all those places actually in the Department
on secondment. We intend to keep up that level of interchange
and increase it if possible".
210. In relation to
the DSS (where 98 per cent of staff are in the five large agencies
run by the Department) Dame Ann Bowtell said (Q 427) that the
interchange of staff between the different agencies was regarded
as important, and "particularly between the agencies and
headquarters, because we very much need the people doing the policy
to be informed by experience of the operational end and vice-versa".
Ms Ann Chant, Chief Executive of the Child Support Agency, added
(Q 539) "Now, the importance of getting operational administration
right and of a high calibre has actually in some ways elevated
the status of senior managers in agencies and in fact I have two
colleagues who have, as it were, come in from elsewhere in the
Department specifically to have their careers developed with a
spell in the Executive Agency Board which somewhere else would
not be able to offer them".
211. Mr Hammond (Q 1184)
said that increasingly there was a great deal of movement of Civil
Service lawyers throughout Whitehall: "it matters much less
now which department a lawyer happens to be in because there is
so much movement within Whitehall across departmental boundaries
that people no longer regard themselves as being lawyers in the
Home Office or the DTI or whatever. I think they increasingly
regard themselves as being part of the Government Legal Service."
212. The Committee notes
that the 1994 White Paper, The Civil Service, Continuity and
Change stated that reasons for introducing the Senior Civil
Service included the need to promote an understanding of the collective
interest of Government, in support of collective Cabinet responsibility,
by encouraging movement between organisations.
The Committee's
Conclusions
213. The balance
of the evidence which the Committee received suggested that the
creation of agencies had not had an adverse impact on the interchange
of staff. Opportunities are, if anything, wider than before, as
officials now have the chance to gain experience in executive
agencies as well as the core departments. The Committee takes
the view that such interchange is of vital importance to the overall
unity and coherence of the Civil Service. We therefore recommend
that interchange of staff within and between departments and agencies
is a matter which should not be left to chance, but which should
be fostered by the Head of the Civil Service, and made one of
the explicit responsibilities of the Minister in charge of the
Office of Public Service.
Co-ordination
across Structural Boundaries
214. Baroness Hollis
of Heigham (Special Report, p 256) pointed out that since executive
agencies tended to deal with a single issue, each might optimise
its own performance at the expense of overall performance in processes
which involve more than one agency. A saving for one agency might
be an additional cost for another and she had no confidence that
such cross-agency, let alone cross-departmental, considerations
informed decision-making.
215. Sir Peter Baldwin
considered (Special Report, p 206) that, notwithstanding the various
good intentions behind privatisation of Government functions or
their transfer to executive agencies "the price of this has
been limited managerial horizons, concentrating the attention
of the heads of public agencies upon the performance of their
respective agencies rather than that of the parent department
or the Government machine as a whole". Sir Peter Kemp admitted
that there was a need "to make sure the agency is continuing
to develop and deliver the Minister's policy, not as it were the
chief executive's own policy ... That is still an area that we
need to look at." (Q 1327)
216. Professor Hennessy
said (Q 1901) that because of the federal system of departments
with a collective, rather than a single, executive it was very
difficult to work out who really was running the Civil Service.
217. Professor Michael
Clarke, Head of the School of Public Policy, wrote (Special Report,
p 225) that one problem which arose from the fragmented nature
of Government was how to develop public policy across the internal
boundaries. "It is exacerbated by the multiplicity of agencies
and other public organisations which should have an input into
the policy-making process. The point is all the more important
given the increasing predominance of issues ('wicked' issues)
on the agenda which do not seem to be the preserve of any one
department or narrow group of bodies."
218. On the other hand
Dame Ann Bowtell reassured the Committee (Q 419) about co-ordination
in the DSS: "It is now one of my main roles to see that the
Department which is split up in this way behaves as a corporate
whole. I do that through the use of the departmental board on
which all chief executives sit, which meets monthly and which
considers issues which are common across the Department. ... There
are a number of cross-departmental bodies which would be under
my supervision-we have a cross-departmental body of finance officers,
personnel officers, there is a policy committee which runs across
the Department". She explained (Q 421) that "What we
have is some common departmental policies which the agencies will
then translate into their own environment, and then there are
other things where agencies can do their own thing. But we place
a lot of store on keeping a coherent Department across the board".
Similarly, Mr Turnbull described arrangements in the DETR for
maintaining relationships between the core Department, its agencies
and its NDPBs (Q 2190) although in the DETR (unlike the DSS),
agency chief executives are not members of the management board
(Q 2185-2187).
219. Mr Robin Mountfield
described (Q 1977) how, following recent concentration on the
"vertical delegation" of defined tasks to executive
agencies and so on, there was now a need to concentrate more on
"horizontal co-ordination". He spoke (Q 1978) of the
need to overlay the present vertical structure with "a concentration
on the awareness of the links between different kinds of activities,
for example, between various bits of the social services and health
fields, and one can replicate many examples". He added (Q
1979) that there was an increasing use of "task forces drawn
together on a rather ad hoc basis to address particular
problems which cut across departmental boundaries".
220. This sort of approach
is encouraging; but co-ordination across boundaries is affected
not only by structures, but also by procedures. Sir Christopher
Foster and Mr Francis Plowden (Special Report, pp 15 to 16) described
certain "non-structural changes" in the way in which
the Government conducts its business which they said had led to
a decline in the co-ordinating machinery of central Government.
The examples they gave included the less frequent use of Ministerial
and official Cabinet committees, and the taking of decisions by
Ministers without first seeking the advice of their Civil Servants.
"Taken together these changes have had a profound effect
not only on the conduct of business but also in fragmenting and
altering the public ethos, through threatening the coherence and
consistency of Ministerial and Civil Service interactions across
departments."
221. In oral evidence,
Sir Christopher said (Q 108) that traditionally the Civil Service
used to "make sure that every part of Whitehall, every department
which was involved in major decision making or policy making,
for example a Bill, had its opportunity to state its case, and
assume that its interests had been considered. A high proportion
of Bills actually do involve more than one department. Their job
was to ensure through this Sherpa-like activity that every issue
of this kind had been fully gone into and had been cleared by
individual Ministers, so when something came to the Cabinet Committee
it was as well-founded and agreed as possible. The fact is the
co-ordination does not work terribly well at the present moment.
It is often done by Ministers and political advisers, the role
of the [No. 10] Policy Unit to some extent usurping that of the
Cabinet Office. That does alter the role of the Civil Service
greatly. There is a danger, we believe, that as a result the necessity
of many of the traditional qualities of the Civil Service is being
eroded."
222. Drawing attention
to factors which do still ensure co-ordination across boundaries,
Sir Terence Burns said (Q 1441) that ensuring that the Cabinet
system of Government worked as a coherent structure depended on
two things: "One is the Cabinet Office machinery at the centre
of that and the second is the Treasury working as far as the financial
aspect of that is concerned and it brings integrity to the system,
it means that people can go out there in their departments prosecuting
their own policies as effectively as they can whilst we make sure
that it is all done in an envelope that Government can afford."
The Committee's
Conclusions
223. The Committee
considers that if the Civil Service is made up of a large number
of small administrative units, then care must be taken to ensure
that all the parts work together for the good of the whole. The
Permanent Secretaries who gave evidence to the Committee were
all able to describe measures in place in their departments designed
to ensure intra-departmental co-ordination. The Committee has
no reason to believe that the establishment of agencies has had
an adverse affect on the co-ordination of policy within
departments.
224. Co-ordination
between departments is another matter. The Committee is
concerned by the evidence given by Sir Christopher Foster and
Mr Francis Plowden about the decline of Cabinet committees and
decreasing consultation of officials under successive Prime Ministers.
The question of co-ordinating policy between departments is not
a new one, and the Committee can only draw attention to the constitutional
importance and inherent good sense attached to the consultation
of officials when inter-departmental issues are discussed.
225. The Committee
notes that it is a specified objective of the Office of Public
Service to "maintain the essential coherence of the Civil
Service while securing the benefits of devolution and management
delegation". The Committee considers that overall monitoring
of changes in the Civil Service is of the greatest importance,
in order to ensure that there is some consistency of approach
in changes made in different parts of the Civil Service, and to
ensure that proposed structural changes are based on adequate
information and that they reflect an overall, well-planned strategy.
226. We recommend
that a Civil Service Act should include a requirement for the
Government to report annually to Parliament on the recent and
proposed structural changes to the Civil Service. We further recommend
that whenever such a report is received, it should be referred
to a Select Committee set up for the purpose of considering it.
We think it desirable that the Government's Report, together with
the Committee's Report on it, should then be published together
with a recommendation as to whether the Committee's Report is
made for information or debate.
| 
