Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
40-59)
Professor Martin Smith, Dr Richard Heffernan and
Professor Dennis Kavanagh
Dr Heffernan: I am Richard Heffernan. I teach at
the Open University and I am a professor at the University of
Notre Dame.
10 JUNE 2009
Q40 Lord Rowlands: Where
would there be a healthy constitutional division of responsibility?
Can you help to define it for us? Between the Prime Minister's
Office and Cabinet Office.
Professor Smith: Again,
it opens up a big question, because your starting point in a sense
would have to be what are the powers of the Prime Minister? What
can the Prime Minister do? If you make a decision—which
I think has happened in practice—that Prime Ministers can
autonomously innovate policy, then you would have to say the rule
that follows from that is that the Prime Minister can then clearly
direct departments in what they do in terms of policy direction.
I think that is the situation in practice but, in terms of the
written and unwritten rules of the constitution, that is not the
practice that exists, because the terms of the rules are that
decisions should go through Cabinet, that they are collective
decisions; once they are agreed, they are implemented by departments.
I think that there is a big slip now between the practice and
the rules.
Dr Heffernan: At the moment,
we do not know where the Prime Minister's Department begins and
where the Cabinet Office ends. We know that, for example, in the
reshuffle last week the Northern Ireland Secretary is also in
the Cabinet Office, reporting to the Prime Minister. We do not
know whether he is also reporting to the new Cabinet Office Minister,
Tessa Jowell. There is a whole mix-up in terms of where Downing
Street begins and where it ends. This has been an incremental
process. It is largely owing to the Blair administration but it
has precedence. John Major famously tried in 1994 to have David
Hunt in—if anybody remembers that occasion—as the
Cabinet Office enforcer. Cabinet Office enforcers do not work,
because the Prime Minister is usually his or her own enforcer;
but there is a real difficulty in knowing what the rights and
responsibilities of the Cabinet Office are. Somebody said in another
place, the equivalent to your Lordships' Committee, that the Cabinet
Office is a "bran tub", from which you go and pull out
what it is you want. I do not think that is really acceptable
in modern government. It also means that the one thing you do
not have a Cabinet Office doing rather effectively is monitoring
the Civil Service. Both chambers of Parliament have been asking
for a Civil Service Bill for a long time, and I know that the
executive is minded to give you one but one has not yet appeared.
I think that the real issue of understanding the role of the Cabinet
Office is to take it outside of the Prime Minister's remit, and
that would mean creating a Prime Minister's Department—which
may not necessarily strengthen the Prime Minister any more than
people have suggested in the past.
Q41 Lord Woolf: I think
that this is probably a question to Professor Smith. You have
indicated that the Prime Minister can initiate policy himself.
That is now accepted. If the policy is misconceived, in the sense
that it has not taken into account what is involved in implementing
the policy, would you identify any official who has the responsibility
to say, "Hey, Prime Minister, you won't be able to do that"?
Professor Smith: There
is a very interesting example of that, going back to the Blair
government, which is the issue of the street crime initiative.
In that instance, the Prime Minister decided that this was a key
issue and that it was an issue he was going to take up. In fact,
one of the Chief Constables, the one for South Yorkshire, said
that he did not think that was a problem for South Yorkshire,
and he did not stay in that position very long after. I am not
saying that there is a relationship between those two events.
Q42 Lord Woolf: I was
thinking of the demise of the Lord Chancellor.
Professor Smith: Yes,
again. Clearly there are people who can say to the Prime Minister,
"That's not a very good idea, and that's not going to work",
but that is not a formal position.
Q43 Lord Woolf: Should
there be somebody who is formally identified?
Professor Smith: I think
that formally it should be Parliament, should it not? It is supposed
to be a system where Parliament should hold the Prime Minister
to account, and so the mechanism, in a way, should not necessarily
be ...
Lord Woolf: That is post
the event. That is the only problem.
Lord Lyell of Markyate:
They did hold them to account in about five minutes, because frogmarching
people to cash points was so obviously dotty!
Chairman: The Chief Whip
has a role here. Lady Quin.
Q44 Baroness Quin:
I can certainly think of a couple of examples under the Blair
administration where the Prime Minister thought of an initiative
but eventually was dissuaded from it by the relevant department,
which was the Home Office. Obviously there are discussions and
negotiations between the Prime Minister and the Home Office. I
see what you mean about formal lines of accountability. I am not
arguing against that, but I think that in practice prime ministerial
power is curbable in various ways.
Professor Smith: The problem
in a sense is that it is arbitrary on what grounds it is curbable.
Clearly there are cases where somebody says, "That's not
going to work" or "That wouldn't be a very sensible
thing to do", but there are other areas where people might
say, "That's a good idea" and it goes ahead. But we
do not know what are the grounds on which the Prime Minister's
powers are bounded. They depend on the issue and the personnel
involved. There is not a formal sense of what the limits or extent
of the Prime Minister's powers are.
Q45 Lord Rowlands: There
is nothing new about Prime Ministers initiating policies. Prime
Ministers through the ages have initiated things. What is new?
Professor Smith: Two things
are new. One is the extent of the Prime Minister's initiation.
Clearly it has gone on, but if you look back at Prime Ministers
like Attlee, Macmillan and Callaghan, they tended to focus maybe
on one or two issues. Callaghan, of course, was very famous for
picking up the issue of education, which was seen at that time
as relatively unusual. The other thing that has changed with the
Prime Minister's Delivery Unit is the involvement of the Prime
Minister in the implementation of policy, and that really is a
considerable change. Before then, the Prime Minister might become
involved but essentially it was the departments that were left
to handle it. What has happened with the growth of the centre
and the creation of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit is that
departments to some degree have either been bypassed or have been
very strongly pushed by the centre.
Professor Kavanagh: Can
I pick up the point made by Lord Rowlands? I would like to broaden
it out, if I may. You are quite right. Prime Ministers have always
taken initiatives, particularly responding to particular crises,
when they are expected to get involved. What has happened since
1997 is the elaborate infrastructure in Number 10 and in the Cabinet
Office that the Prime Minister erected after 1997. The scale was
such that I think one could talk about a qualitative difference
in the perception that the Prime Minister took of himself. If
I may be so indiscreet, because the ten-year rule has now elapsed—the
Prime Minister said to David Butler and myself only about two
weeks after being Prime Minister, "Ministers have to understand
that they are agents of the centre. They have been sent to the
departments to carry out a strategy". I cannot imagine many
other Prime Ministers saying that. What he tried to do gradually
was to equip himself to do that. Because we are talking about
the Cabinet Office, can I remind you of something where this is
formalised? May I read out just a few lines? "Before Tony
Blair moved into Number 10, the Cabinet Office's official remit
was "To provide an effective, efficient and impartial service
to the Cabinet committees. The secretariat has no executive powers
beyond serving the Cabinet and committees and co-ordinating department
contributions". After 1997 the remit changed, and, in emphatic
typing, it has changed to this: The Cabinet Office is expected,
"to support efficient, timely and well-informed collective
determination of government policy and to drive forward the achievement
of the Government's agenda".[1]
In other words, there is a formal statement that the traditional
role of the Cabinet Office as an honest broker between departments
has now changed into being something like—I do not like
the term, it sounds like John Le Carré—an arm of
the centre, which is decided by the Prime Minister. I think that
is somewhat different. In practice and in terms of the behaviour,
it created problems for a number of Cabinet Ministers and it has
created problems for a number of permanent secretaries—particularly
when there were tensions. The other part of the centre that was
not really covered last week and may not be covered this week,
is the Treasury. At a time when Number 10 and Number 11 were speaking
with different voices, that also created a problem for departments.
It is all very well creating a centre, therefore, but where the
centre is overloaded, as clearly the Cabinet Office is now, as
the dumping ground, it has lost sight of its original objectives.
I would say that, of those three tasks, I do not think any of
them are performed particularly efficiently. One of the things
you may want to consider at some time, My Lord Chairman, is whether
the role of the Cabinet Secretary, which has expanded so enormously,
gives rise to looking again at whether you need a separate, specialised
head of the Civil Service, because I think that the duties on
the Cabinet Secretary's shoulders are so enormous these days.
Dr Heffernan: I think
that Lord Rowlands has hit the nail on the head. There has been
an exponential development in the role of the Prime Minister.
Prime Ministers have always never been, to quote Mrs Thatcher,
"a weak, floppy thing, sitting in the chair". There
are two members of your Committee who have experience of working
with Prime Ministers, directly sitting in Cabinet. I know that.
However, Prime Ministers always are the legal head of the Government,
in that they have the right to use the Crown prerogatives and
to be involved, either directly or indirectly, in any aspect of
government policy that they take an interest in or that they are
obliged to take an interest in. The variable matter of the Prime
Minister's individual power depends largely on his or her personal
power resources. Broadly speaking, if a Prime Minister is electorally
popular and politically successful, he or she will be more powerful
within the Government and inside Parliament than if he or she
is politically unsuccessful and electorally unpopular. A comparison
between Blair, shall we say, in his pomp in 1999 and the present
Prime Minister at the current time would demonstrate that. The
point, however, is that the Prime Minister's right to intervene
is presently subject to a variety of whims, in a way. For example,
the present Prime Minister has announced the National Economic
Council, the Domestic Policy Council, the Democratic Renewal Council.
We have no idea how these work. I suspect most ministers do not
know. Are they Cabinet committees? Are they based in the Cabinet
Office? We will find out in due course, once they are up and running,
but I think that this ad hoc approach to simply re-inventing
the machinery of government almost instantaneously is terribly
bad practice. That is why one suggestion in terms of reforming
the centre would be distinguishing what it is the Cabinet Office
should do and then determining how it should do it. The three
objectives it has at present are simply unsustainable. It is interesting
that the Cabinet Secretary's role has increased but his or her
personal authority has probably diminished in the past 10 years.
We have had four Cabinet Secretaries in 12 years and the Cabinet
Secretary is now no longer the chief adviser, in the way that
Sir John Hunt was to people like Callaghan and Heath.
Q46 Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank:
I may have missed a bit of the point and we may be moving forward,
but do I understand all three of you to say that effectively you
would like to see a slimline Cabinet Office, on the assumption
for example that it is as diverse as the Olympics on the one hand
and, say, the 30-year rule on the other? If indeed it should be
slimmed off—I am not asking department by department—where
would they go? Would they go out of government?
Dr Heffernan: I think
there is a case for a Civil Service Department, with a Cabinet
Minister reporting either within or without the Cabinet. There
should be a Prime Minister's Department formalised, established
and set up, reporting to Parliament, and accountable and transparent.
The other functions in terms of the intelligence service—if
the Cabinet Office was reinvented as a department for public service—it
would be useful in terms of keeping all of the disparate responsibilities
that are presently thrown into the Cabinet Office or taken out
of the Cabinet Office, depending on the whim of the Prime Minister.
I think the general problem is that machinery of government issues
are not statutory; they are not regularised. If you look at the
business in which we are employed, universities, we were formerly
run by DfEE, then by DfES, then by DIUS and now by BIS—all
in the space of five years or so. It is a problem of the way in
which we govern ourselves. I think that it is not entirely a slimmed-down
Cabinet Office but rather a more effective Cabinet Office, with
a better remit and a more manageable and accountable trail, headed
by a Secretary of State who is an authoritative politician—not
necessarily the case at present. Cabinet Office ministers are
usually people on their way up or on their way out. The fact that
you have a minister and not a Secretary of State—I think
the title might tell us something about the way in which we approach
the role of the Cabinet Office in its present form.
Q47 Lord Norton of Louth:
I was going to come back to the question about who should say
no to the Prime Minister, in terms of what the Cabinet Office
does do or should do. One of the things it has never really done
has been to be the mechanism through which one says to the Prime
Minister, "No, that can't be done". Presumably the role
of the office may have changed, but it is from a facilitating
body to more of a delivery body. At most, it would be the mechanism
by which, say, some reaction was channelled; but you would not
see a role for the office itself in that respect, would you?
Professor Kavanagh: It
is fellow politicians, it is fellow aides who do this—"Wait
a moment, Prime Minister"—that kind of thing. Perhaps
I could come back to something that has been raised by Dr Heffernan.
I am awfully struck by the decline in the standing of the Cabinet
Secretary in relationship to the Prime Minister. I think that
Lord Armstrong was the last person who could speak very authoritatively
to a Prime Minister, and when you think of Bridges, Burke Trend,
and these kind of people, Prime Ministers—I will not say
that they looked up to them, but they really could appreciate
that there is the majesty of the state there, as it were. That
has ceased to be the case. Particularly since 1997, it is the
granting under Orders in Council of the authority to instruct
Prime Ministers that was given to the press secretary and the
chief of staff. A novel appointment—a chief of staff in
Number 10. Before then, it had always clearly been the Principal
Private Secretary. Then you had the Principal Private Secretary
Jeremy Heywood joining those two as a key adviser to Tony Blair,
and he is probably the most significant figure around Number 10
and the Cabinet Office nowadays. So that is a real problem.
Q48 Lord Norton of Louth:
On that point, to what extent should we draw a clear distinction
between the role of the Cabinet Secretary and the Cabinet Office?
Professor Kavanagh: Traditionally,
the Cabinet Office, let us say before Britain's entry to the European
Community in 1973, did have a restricted and pretty clear role.
You could not say that the Cabinet Secretary was overloaded or
had loads of committees and loads of duties to do. It was mainly
the Cabinet committees and servicing the Prime Minister. Now you
have this tremendous proliferation of duties. I think that kind
of central role, of being an influential figure vis-a"-vis
the Prime Minister, has become attenuated.
Professor Smith: Also,
it is part of a wider change. This was clearly the case with Gordon
Brown in the Treasury and it was true of Tony Blair in the Prime
Minister's Office that they both depended on their own advisers.
They did not depend on civil servants for advice. I think that
is partly as a consequence of the way in which the roles of the
Prime Minister, and to some extent the Chancellor, have become
much more political. Often what they are concerned with are actually
political issues rather than policy issues. There is an argument
about how the role of the Civil Service more generally has changed,
because politicians have seen their role as something very different
from what it used to be.
Q49 Lord Lyell of Markyate:
I think that Professor Kavanagh—and you probably all agree—put
his finger on it when he read that very interesting passage from
an earlier period, where one of the key functions of the Cabinet
Office was co-ordination. That has now completely dropped out
as one of its functions. As you are telling us, and I certainly
agree, the Cabinet Office has become grossly overloaded by the
attempts to drag everything into the centre, bully the departments
and think that it can all be done by special advisers. The co-ordinating
aspect seems to have gone out of the window.
Professor Smith: One of
the problems historically—I do not know if the others will
agree with me—is that where the Cabinet Office was weak
was in co-ordination. This is a point that Lord Norton made very
strongly. Traditionally, we had ministerial balance and policymaking
went on in departments. It was not unusual, and it is still the
case, that departments often did things that were completely contradictory.
The Cabinet Office, although at an administrative level it was
very good at co-ordinating because it was run by very bright civil
servants, I think that at policy level it failed in the co-ordination
function. That is one reason why Prime Ministers have tried to
build up their office: because they have tried to create co-ordination
in government that has never existed.
Q50 Lord Lyell of Markyate:
Have they succeeded?
Professor Smith: I do
not think they have, no.
Q51 Baroness Quin: I want
to go back to what Professor Smith said a minute ago about both
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown relying on special advisers rather
than the Civil Service. The problem is that it does not seem to
accord with my own experience, in that it seemed to me it was
a mixture of the two. If I think of the preparation of European
summits, for example, the role of senior civil servants in the
Foreign Office was extremely important, both in terms of negotiating
strategy and in terms of actual goals. It certainly does not accord
with my own experience that special advisers on those occasions
were even the prime source of information. They were one of them,
but not the sole source.
Professor Smith: Yes,
I think that is fair and possibly I exaggerated for effect. One
of the things that has happened, however, is that there has been
a pluralisation of policy advice, whereas, if you go back 20 or
30 years, advice came solely from senior civil servants. Also,
if you look at other departments, the role of special advisers
is quite limited. If you look at the Treasury and the Prime Minister's
Office, if you look at the key appointments, they were not called
"special advisers" but the key appointments that Blair
made were political appointments. They became civil servants but
people like Stephen Wall, people like the director of the Prime
Minister's Policy Unit, these were all people who had been political
in the past and became civil servants once appointed.
Baroness Quin: Stephen
Wall? He is a career civil servant.
Q52 Lord Morris of Aberavon:
He is a diplomat.
Professor Smith: I am sorry, but Geoff Mulgan and
people like the director of the Policy Unit.
Professor Kavanagh: Ed Balls at the Treasury.
Professor Smith: These people came in as political
appointments but became civil servants. If you look at the Prime
Minister's Policy Unit, the people in key positions were political
and not civil servants.
Q53 Lord Rowlands: Until
some remarks by Professor Smith a couple of minutes ago, all three
of you were leaving me with an impression that there was this
golden age, when you had great, good government because you had
Cabinet Secretaries being looked up to by Prime Ministers. That
golden age made some horrendous mistakes. All my parliamentary,
political and ministerial life, we have been trying to strive
for joined-up government. I thought that was trying to correct
departmentalism and one department not knowing what the other
was doing. Are you saying that there was a golden age or not?
Dr Heffernan: I do not
think there was at all. The high point of cabinet government in
terms of collective decision-making—Lord Morris sat in it,
I think—was over IMF in 1976, dealing with a crisis. Tony
Blair has always said that he thought his problem as Prime Minister
was not that he was too powerful: he was not powerful enough.
He always said that, looking at it from Downing Street, he thought
that he did not have enough control over government. That is why
he built up, incrementally, ad hoc, with some mistakes,
the kind of central capacity of Downing Street—which is
why I am an advocate of a Prime Minister's Department. I do not
think that it necessarily strengthens the Prime Minister but it
helps make the process of co-ordination better. The best form
of co-ordination was "Tony wants", which was said to
be the catchword in Whitehall, certainly in the first Parliament
when he was first Prime Minister. "Tony wants" meant
that things got done. That was because he was politically successful
and electorally popular. I think that what your Lordships' Committee
needs to think about, if there is a need to regularise the work
of central government, is that there is a reality that the Prime
Minister is much more now than primus inter pares. Even
a weak Prime Minister such as the present incumbent is much more
powerful. The old days of Baldwin and Attlee as chairmen of the
Cabinet have gone, for good or ill; they are not coming back.
The Prime Minister will be much more significant than other ministers
and there are lots of checks and balances upon his or her power,
but one check and balance there is not is an institutional base,
because the Cabinet Office does not remotely play that role; and
it should play a role in supporting the Cabinet beyond the Prime
Minister. At present all it tends to do is support the Prime Minister,
because you do not know where Number 10 ends and where the Cabinet
Office begins. I think that is a great problem in terms of good
government. It is also a problem for the Prime Minister, incidentally.
I do not think that having that really assists him or her in doing
the job they need to do.
Q54 Lord Morris of Aberavon:
I listened very closely to what Professor Kavanagh was saying
about the importance of the Cabinet Secretary. I think that we
should explore this, perhaps on other occasions, a little further.
It may well be that Lord Armstrong was not a happy choice. Some
people may say that when he virtually became deputy Prime Minister
he came to a sticky end.
Professor Kavanagh: No,
that is a different Lord Armstrong. He was not a Cabinet Secretary.
It is Robert Armstrong.
Lord Peston: William Armstrong
never even got a peerage.
Q55 Lord Morris of Aberavon:
I am very glad you have cleared that up. Mind you, he did me a
very good service—but that is another matter. Before the
Flood, when I was a junior minister, there were honest brokers
and clerks in the Cabinet Office. They have changed. How much
have they changed in 30 years and how has the role of the special
adviser or the Policy Unit or the policy adviser, whatever he
calls himself, impinged upon the Cabinet Office and other advisers?
One only has to read, and I have read it recently, the two autobiographies
of Bernard Donoughue, of the battles that Sir John Hunt had in
order to try to control him and get him under his wing. Has the
role, the numbers, the activities, the influence of special advisers,
impinged on the core functions of the Cabinet Office to support
the Prime Minister, support the Cabinet and strengthen the Civil
Service?
Professor Kavanagh: Yes,
I think it has. The Policy Unit under Bernard Donoughue in the
second half of the Seventies lived in a very different world than
the Policy Unit lives in today, with a 24/7 media. It is a much
bigger job. Donoughue just looked at a few particular areas. The
Policy Unit now tries to look across the board. Can I just give
one figure? When John Major left Number 10, I think he had seven
special advisers. That had been pretty well the norm, even going
back to Harold Wilson and Bernard Donoughue's time. Under Tony
Blair it reached nearly 30. Gordon Brown reduced it but it is
going back up again. This is a quadrupling. He is really equipping
himself with lots of political advisers. Between 2001 and 2005
there was a particular initiative that was very little noted,
and that was the amalgamation of the Prime Minister's Private
Office, consisting entirely of civil servants, and the Policy
Unit, consisting almost entirely of political appointments. Incredible!
Cheek by jowl, political appointments and civil servants working.
After 2005 they went back to what they used to be. I think that
under Blair the Policy Unit was very important. It was illustrated
in the very first year. The draft White Papers from John Prescott
on Transport and a draft White Paper by Margaret Beckett on fairness
at work—these were both entirely rewritten by the Policy
Unit, to the chagrin of the two, pretty powerful, senior secretaries
of state. When they objected, they were told "These corrections
carry the imprimatur of the Prime Minister". You can think
of the particular field of education where, in higher education
tuition fees in particular, it very much germinated within the
Policy Unit—to the consternation of the then Secretary of
State. It has therefore been very powerful. It is physically present
in the building with the Prime Minister. It bumps into him in
a way that the Cabinet Secretary never can. The Cabinet Secretary
very often has his Monday morning routine with the Prime Minister,
going through the progress of the various Cabinet committees,
but some cabinet secretaries pop in at the end of the day, to
find out what is going on. That is a very different relationship
than used to be the case with cabinet secretaries 30 years ago
or more—very different.
Professor Smith: One of
the issues is that, until Edward Heath, Prime Ministers had no
policymaking capacity whatsoever. They were dependent either on
departments or the Cabinet Office to involve them in policymaking.
What we have seen since then is Prime Ministers continually trying
to increase their ability to make policy independently within
Number 10. I think that is a very significant change. The question
is whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, but that is one
of the things that has happened.
Dr Heffernan: According
to an NAO study of the Cabinet Office, there were 169 people working
in the Prime Minister's Office as of last December. This is tiny
in comparison with most chief executives' offices. It is, not
only if you compare it to the United States' President, who employs
9,000 people in the executive office dealing with the White House,
but also even the Irish Taoiseach has more people than that. In
terms of special advisers, I think that they are an inevitability.
I think that there is an issue with them with regard to ensuring
that they are on a statutory footing. If there was a Civil Service
Bill, then you would be able to define more clearly the relationship
between special advisers and civil servants. There are probably
not enough technocratic special advisers. Most special advisers
simply leak and brief on behalf of their principal—for all
the good and ill that that has caused. There is one issue with
special advisers which is perhaps beyond the remit of your Lordships'
Committee, but I thought that I would just mention it. Nine members
of the present Cabinet have spent time as special advisers. Eight
members of the present Cabinet, appointed last Friday, were special
advisers after 1997. I think that the idea that you are creating
a political class of career politicians through the rubric of
the special adviser model is of severe concern to democratic issues
more widely; and if you add in the other two members of the Cabinet,
who were not special advisers but were party functionaries before
entering Parliament, then you see that a large amount of our political
class is drawn from this kind of administrative political sector,
which I think is of grave concern. Special advisers are necessary
and inevitable. There is no point complaining about them; it is
about regularising the relationship they have. I think the Prime
Minister probably needs more special advisers, but in a technocratic
sense. It is absurd, for example, that his defence and foreign
affairs adviser, his European adviser and his domestic adviser
are based in the Cabinet Office. They ought to be in Downing Street,
even if there is not a Prime Minister's Department regularised.
Professor Kavanagh: It
is no good just looking at the numbers who work for the Prime
Minister in Number 10, because there are severe space constraints
in Number 10. That is why the Strategy Unit is deposited in the
Cabinet Office. There is no room in Number 10, so there is an
overflow. Looking at the numbers in Number 10, which is two 17th
century townhouses joined together, it is never going to be a
big, powerful centre like that. The Prime Minister has sent his
staff elsewhere—an overflow.
Q56 Lord Lyell of Markyate:
Briefly on that, when one walks through—and I was astonished
when I first did it—all right, there are just two houses,
but there is a total rabbit warren which goes under Whitehall,
that comes up into the old Cabinet Office by the tennis court.
It seems to go on forever. In one sense there is far more space
than your initial statement suggests. Regarding this next question,
I am not sure that I entirely agree with its premises but I think
that co-ordination is an incredibly important question. In my
view, that is one of the things that the Cabinet Office ought
to do efficiently. This question asks how the relationship between
the Cabinet Office and the other two key co-ordinating bodies
in government, the Treasury and Number 10, has evolved during
this period. Number 10, I could see, might have a co-ordinating
role. The Treasury has a policy and money role, but I do not think
that it is really co-ordinating. My real question, which I think
the Committee want to know the answer to, is this. In the last
10 years, has the co-ordination function been working effectively?
Professor Smith: I think
it goes back to a point I made earlier: that in a way co-ordination
has never worked particularly well. As a consequence of that,
the Treasury has to some degree filled that vacuum; because, whereas
the Cabinet Office has very few levers over the departments, the
Treasury has very strong levers over departments. You can see
Chancellors of the Exchequer, going back quite a long time, using
public expenditure as a way of trying to create some co-ordination
of government policy. That became even stronger under Gordon Brown,
where performance indicators could be used as a very direct tool
for Gordon Brown to have a high degree of influence over the co-ordination
of domestic policy; and that is actually what happened. It again
goes back to the unwritten rules of the British constitution and
people not really knowing what is going on. Formerly, co-ordination
was supposed to have gone on with the Cabinet, but in fact it
slipped to some degree to the Treasury and what we have seen over
the last 10 or 15 years is that it has slipped again, increasingly
to the Prime Minister's Office.
Q57 Lord Lyell of Markyate:
It seems to me that there are three good examples in the last
10 years where co-ordination—admittedly, I am a lawyer and
come from a law officer's background—has failed very badly.
The cock-up over the Lord Chancellor's appointment in 2003 I find
absolutely astonishing, even given that it was done on a sofa,
trying to keep it secret from Lord Irvine, which was obviously
part of the problem. That the department itself should not have
said, "You can't just abolish this"—I was not
in the House of Lords then—with regard to what they attempted
to do, and that you then have Tony Blair and the BAe case and
his saying, "We can't allow this case to go on. We'll lose
thousands of jobs", when he had just taken us through the
OECD agreements, which said "That is completely not permitted"—how
could that happen without a complete failure of co-ordination?
Then, when in 2007 Gordon Brown comes in, he says he is going
to give all sorts of powers back to Parliament and take away powers
from the Attorney General—powers which actually the Attorney
General had never exercised, though they did have a controlling
role. That is just ignorance, through lack of co-ordination. My
impression is that, in the previous 10 years, telephones would
have been buzzing and those mistakes would not have been made.
Dr Heffernan: If you look
at last week's changes in the machinery of government, the reinvention
of BERR, the dismantling of the Department for Universities, Innovation
and Skills, created only two years ago, I imagine that less than
four hours' thought was given to the reconstruction of these government
departments. They were essentially done largely to politically
reward the now First Secretary and Lord President of the Council
for his political service. Fine. I am sure that he will be a very
admirable departmental minister. He is a very able and talented
minister. But we do these things on the back of an envelope. In
the United States, federal governments' departments are restructured
only with the permission of Congress. They have created one federal
department in the last 15 years, which was the Department of Homeland
Security. It is up to the House and the Senate to agree with the
recommendations presented by the President of the day. Here, Prime
Ministers reinvent government at a moment's notice. Abolish the
Lord Chancellor one day, recreate him the next—simply because
he could not do that, because it is a statutory appointment. In
terms of whether you wish to have universities run by a Department
of Education, by a Department of Universities, Innovation and
Skills, or by the Department of Business, Innovations and Skill,
it is entirely a matter for the Prime Minister of the day. I do
not think that it provides for good government, to be honest.
Professor Smith: These
problems of co-ordination are everyday and they are historical.
Peter Mandelson will presumably be telling universities today
that they can reduce their funding gap by having more overseas
students. The Home Office is making it extremely difficult for
overseas students to come into this country. That sort of policy
contradiction is constant, because there is not and there has
never been a mechanism within the British political system to
co-ordinate those sorts of day-to-day policy details. It can work
at some grand strategic level within the Prime Minister's Office
and it can work at some administrative level within the Cabinet
Office, but it is never really properly co-ordinated in terms
of policy detail.
Professor Kavanagh: I
would agree with this. I have talked to ministers about joined-up
government. This was the big theme of the first couple of years.
It was a buzzword among civil servants. They all wanted to be
part of this. There is a kind of weary resignation that it is
so much more difficult actually to achieve than the original high
hopes vested in it. I find that there is much less talk now about
joined-up government, because they have been so disappointed,
facing so many obstacles. Regarding the point made by Lord Lyell
and the questions you ask—and one of them was raised last
week—we do not know whether the Prime Minister was given
advice and he chose to ignore it. We do not know whether he was
warned about making his decisions about the Lord Chancellor's
Department and so on. We do know that Lord Butler, Sir Robin Butler
as he was then, automatically assumed that the Cabinet would be
informed of the decision to give interest rate policy to the Monetary
Policy Committee of the Bank of England, and Blair just said,
"They'll pass it. There's no need to tell them". This
is a case where maybe the Civil Service should have been more
assertive; but one gets the impression of ministers riding pretty
well roughshod, or the Prime Minister at times riding roughshod,
over cautionary advice they were getting—particularly at
the early stages of a new government, which thinks that a Civil
Service may have got used to working with the opposition party
for the previous 10 or 15 years or so.
Q58 Lord Lyell of Markyate:
I find it a little surprising, with the three examples I gave,
if they received advice and they have simply blundered on, regardless.
Professor Kavanagh: There
may be other examples as well.
Dr Heffernan: If they
had spent a month preparing, they may well have made fewer mistakes.
If they spend a day preparing this dramatic change, they are likely
to make mistakes. If you approach something, prepared for it to
be ill-considered, it will be ill-considered.
Q59 Lord Lyell of Markyate:
This is government on the hoof, is it, or policy on the hoof?
Professor Smith: I do
not think this is new, because if you go back to the Scott Report,
the arms to Iraq, the whole reason that occurred was because different
parts of Government were following their own interests and paying
no attention to what was going on in the rest of the Government.
Sometimes it was even known that they were all doing things that
were contrary to a particular policy that was set out by the Government.
I do not know whether this problem is soluble, but it is a key
feature of British Government.
Dr Heffernan: The Department
of Economic Affairs in 1964—invented on the back of an envelope
in the back of a taxi, apparently. It is an inevitable problem
but, if you do take some time, if you do have to report to Parliament
on the structures and functions of government departments, you
will be able to address this question of co-ordination much better.
Presently, the Cabinet Office only co-ordinates government by
assisting the Prime Minister in his or her ability to do so. The
Treasury has different functions under a very powerful Chancellor
such as Brown, where they would have these accounting meetings
and so on for Public Service Agreements, which strengthened the
role of the Treasury in terms of following the money; but a Cabinet
Office that dealt with the machinery of government would be much
more effective, I think, or would have an opportunity to be more
effective. These are, I agree, time-old problems, because often
government is about fire-fighting problems as much as it is about
laying out co-ordinated plans. However, that is one way in which
you would get a Cabinet Office that was more focused, if not streamlined.
It would help the Prime Minister and the Cabinet in the conduct
of business much more effectively if it did not have to do all
of these things.
1 D. Kavanagh and A. Seldon The Power Behind the
Prime Minister, p309 Back
|
