Civil Service: Impartiality

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Thursday 17th September 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I recognise the problems that the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, describes, and will illustrate with some examples. I led Ofsted, a non-ministerial department with some 2,000 staff, for seven years until 2023. I was a Crown appointee and my staff were all civil servants. We had statutory obligations and were bound by the frameworks for all government departments, including the public sector equality duty and Civil Service HR policies, and I saw at first hand that the principle of Civil Service impartiality has, very sadly, been eroded over the years and urgently needs restoration.

Much of the decay has been driven by the worthiest impulses, especially the impulse to do all we can for those with any kind of disadvantage. Yet, in practice, this means that activism has been embedded at many levels, in many ways. As chief inspector, I was acutely aware that I did not have democratic legitimacy and must always act within the spirit as well as the letter of my powers. Early in my tenure, I ordered a review of our framework equality plan and was relieved to find just a couple of small areas of overreach, which were immediately adjusted, but some staff were visibly puzzled. In their eyes, it was virtuous to overreach if it felt morally right. I had to do a lot of explaining, but I will say that my staff respected my lead.

A little while later, I became aware of activist pressure in relation to various protected characteristics. Some came from external lobby groups, some from our own staff networks and some from within government. For example, our London landlord, the Ministry of Justice, wanted to make our lavatories mixed-sex. After polling staff anonymously and finding strong opposition, I refused, but I realised that MoJ officials probably wanted to score Stonewall diversity index points, and I do not think that that push came from Ministers. I then ordered a full review of our HR policies to identify any overreach, and the main culprit was a long-standing gender identity policy that was pure self-ID. It was little used, but it clearly took a position that had been twice rejected by Parliament. I challenged this and was told that it was good practice to go beyond the law, but I did not accept this and withdrew the policy, which I had the authority to do. Again, I had to explain my view. This was not about my views about trans-identifying individuals, but about the principle that the Civil Service sits downstream of Parliament and should never make policies that may appeal to the senior Civil Service and staff but which sit in contradiction to decisions of the legislature.

I must make clear that this was not about Ofsted. The Civil Service, at its centre, was a powerful driving force for this kind of thinking. For example, the current Civil Service diversity strategy says:

“We will use positive action where needed in relation to training, support, recruitment and promotion to ensure the broadest range of diversity is achieved”.


In other words, there is a strong push to produce equality of outcomes, not just of opportunity, which goes beyond the current legal framework. That pressure has consequences. I know of a Permanent Secretary who told their senior team that they should prefer an appointable candidate from an ethnic minority, even if the candidate was not the highest performing. More generally, the concept of “bringing your whole self to work” has encouraged both senior and junior officials to believe that they are entitled to sway policy or its implementation to fit their personal political preferences. This is critical, because it blinds them to their loss of impartiality. All this is corrosive and must end. The Cabinet Secretary is famously grippy, and she has some gripping to do here.