Government: Leadership Training

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 16th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I start by apologising to the House and the noble Lord, Lord Norton, that I am the only speaker from the Liberal Democrat Benches. There were four Liberal Democrat names down but, unfortunately, my three colleagues had to return to distant parts of this country—the Scottish Borders, the West Country and East Anglia. I have heard from a number of Conservative Peers over the past few months the suggestion that all the Liberal elite are metropolitan. That is not the case. I suspect that the illiberal financial elite is a good deal more metropolitan than we are.

I have some interests to declare. My wife was for some years a civil servant, including a period teaching at what was then the Civil Service College. A number of my other relations and former students are in the senior Civil Service. I taught in a number of Civil Service College courses in the 1970s and 1980s, in senior management courses in the 1990s and in executive courses at the London School of Economics provided by the Spanish Government and a number of multi- national corporations and banks.

The noble Lord, Lord Maude, reminds me of the embarrassing occasion some 25 years ago when I arrived at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard to teach a series of seminars on British foreign policy and recognised among the students the newly-appointed Permanent Secretary of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. These things are not entirely new.

The noble Lord, Lord Herbert, also reminded me of the story of the Liberal Democrat Minister under the noble Lord, Lord Maude. The Minister’s private office explained that he could not have a car to take him back to his constituency. When he replied, “So I can take my red box on the train and work on it there?”, the answer was, “No, Minister, you can’t. The red box cannot be allowed on a train. It will be sent ahead by car.”

The Motion refers to the “introduction” of training for Ministers and senior civil servants. Civil servants have been trained, as I have suggested, for some time. Ministerial training presents an existential problem in a political system in which, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, and others suggested, Ministers are expected to answer in Parliament and to the media within a day or two of their appointment. There is a very strong case in general for a slower process of government formation.

I agree with the Commission for Smart Government’s proposals for a longer transition period between Governments—the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, suggested up to two weeks, on the Canadian model—and for

“an interval between announcement and taking up position, to enable incoming Ministers to read up and be … fully briefed before they start work.”

Effective use of junior ministerial appointments as training for senior roles would also help, although some Secretaries of State, in my experience, are remarkably uninterested in treating their junior Ministers as part of a team. Expert advisers—which is what spads were when first introduced—are also highly useful and desirable.

However, there is an underlying issue about political recruitment. Fewer lawyers now become MPs than 50 years ago, as do fewer with experience in local government or elsewhere managing within the public sector. The Commons offers a narrow talent pool. The emasculation of local democracy means that MPs now spend more and more of their time on local issues and less on national or international ones. A Commons Public Administration Committee report in 2015 recommended a parliamentary Civil Service scheme along the lines of the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme. That should be considered further.

However, more Ministers in the Lords, or even non-parliamentary Ministers, will not win support from MPs. I agree strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Young, that fewer Ministers must be part of the answer.

Training for civil servants, by contrast, has a long history, from the Fulton report to the Civil Service Department, then to the Civil Service College, which became the National School of Government. A Conservative Minister abolished the NSG in 2010 and sold off the campus. The PACAC report The Minister and the Official noted in 2018:

“It is now widely accepted that the closure of the National School of Government has left a gap”


in the training and professional development of civil servants that has not yet been closed.

What is now proposed is in many ways reinventing the wheel—which does not make it any less desirable. I have heard highly critical remarks from some civil servants about the contracted-out courses that have been provided since 2010 and I strongly support proposals to reconstruct a physical centre for Civil Service training, which would also bring together people with experience across the wider public sector and beyond—what the senior management course used to do.

Mutual trust between Ministers and officials is essential to effective government. Ministers too easily treat efforts to point out the complexities of policy changes as attempts to resist or undermine what they want to do. Many Labour Ministers in 1997 assumed when they came in that officials were naturally conservative and therefore unsympathetic to Labour proposals. Many Conservatives in 2010 believed that officials were pen-pushers and bureaucrats, who would be out making more money in the private sector if they were any good and were concerned primarily with defending their own jobs and privileges. Some still believe that today.

Attacks by Michael Gove and others on “the Blob”, which, for Simon Heffer in last Sunday’s Telegraph, covers the Civil Service, higher education, the Church of England, the BBC—of course—and the leadership of the NHS and the Metropolitan Police, do not help build confidence that this is a Government open to challenge and willing to listen to argument, and who value a well-trained and politically neutral public service. The quality of ministerial leadership in recent Governments has been, at best, mixed. Bad Ministers blame their officials, as bad workmen blame their tools. Ministers have to earn the respect of their officials and hold it. I have seen Conservative Ministers expressing their distrust of the Civil Service in front of senior officials—a leadership style that does not strike me as very effective. I have noted excellent senior officials with whom I worked in government leaving because they felt they could no longer work with Ministers who dismiss reasoned argument. That does not promote smart government either.

I felt there was an air of fantasy about the declaration on government reform this June and the speech by Michael Gove that accompanied it. It spoke of the success of the management of the pandemic, of rational policy-making without concern for tactical advantage, press presentation or partisan patronage. There was no mention of the fiasco and excessive cost of test and trace, of the smell of corruption in the way contracts were handled or the enormous profits that outsourcing companies have made by providing services that local authorities and local public health officers could have managed more cheaply and effectively.

The Commission for Smart Government report also has some fantastical elements. If departmental boards are really intended to provide vigorous challenge to ministerial and official groupthink, then recent appointments of non-executive directors have been extraordinarily ill chosen.

The government of England is dreadfully over- centralised. Ministers in Whitehall concern themselves with the details of issues that were entirely within the hands of local government 40 years ago. Sending bits of Whitehall departments to Middlesbrough or Manchester will not do much to bring citizens and government together. That requires a revival of effective and democratic local government, which would enable Westminster and Whitehall to reduce the numbers of central Ministers and officials, and even to shrink our bloated Cabinet to a size where it might again become an effective body. It is time for a careful review of the cost effectiveness of outsourcing of many public services after a pandemic in which the profits of outsourcing and consultancy companies have risen sharply, with the Government supporting far larger salaries for the flood of consultants than in-house experts would have cost.

If we are to be really smart about good government, we should attempt reforms that will last longer than the life of any one party in power. The Fulton report managed that. I encourage the rational reformers, such as the noble Lord, Lord Herbert, to resist the uber-partisans within the Conservative Party who want to push ahead without consulting anyone outside the Conservative Party, and try to create reforms with wider support that will outlast the next election or two. This is the sort of issue that might usefully have been covered by a constitutional commission, as promised in the Conservatives’ 2019 manifesto. Sadly, the promise to establish such a commission has been broken.

Standards in Public Life

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, this is the third occasion this week on which the House has considered related aspects of the Government’s disregard for the advice of different bodies on the standards of public life. The noble Lord, Lord True, was a close adviser to John Major when the Committee on Standards in Public Life was set up and, we must assume, then agreed with his reform to strengthen propriety and ethics in government. I hope he will not now deny that there is a real problem of declining propriety in this Government. Our Prime Minister seems to think that the rules which govern our constitutional democracy do not apply to him.

The Minister and other Conservatives dismiss concerns on a number of grounds. The noble Lord, Lord True, has told us several times that the Government’s overwhelming majority in the 2019 election allows them to behave as they wish. Another argument is that only the metropolitan liberal elite worries about such fine distinctions on the rules of political behaviour and that most people accept that Governments share the spoils of office with their friends. I remind the Government Benches that their apparent majority in December 2019 rested on 43.5% of the popular vote.

I also remind them that one prudent rule for any democratic Government is that they should refrain from actions that they would strongly oppose if they were taken by a Government of a different colour. We can all imagine the raucous opposition that Conservatives and the Conservative press would create if a Labour Government or—even worse—a left-of-centre coalition dominated by metropolitan liberals bent the conventions of constitutional propriety. This Government will not be in power for ever—unless they manage to bend constitutional financial rules a lot further.

Constitutional democracy is not a contest, as the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, said, in which the winner takes all and the losers have to swallow whatever humiliation is inflicted on them. It is about limited government, checks and balances on executive power, the rule of law, transparency and respect for minorities as well as for the majority currently in power. The new book of the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, Governing Britain, spells this out very well and I recommend it to all on the Conservative Benches.

The debates that surrounded the drafting of the US constitution set out these principles well. In Britain, our constitution has evolved through a series of understandings about limits on executive power. If those in government throw over those understandings, they undermine our unwritten constitution and threaten to slide from good government to corrupt and authoritarian government.

Standards matter, too, and the CSPL sets out a number of concerns about current shortcomings, such as a lack of transparency in many public appointment processes and the limited independence of the Prime Minister’s officially titled independent adviser on the Ministerial Code. I particularly noted the reference in paragraph 35 to the implications of the massive growth in government outsourcing and the opportunities for corruption that it has opened up—as we may have seen in the management of the Covid pandemic. Other CSPL reports have focused on the regulation of electoral finance and the importance of the Electoral Commission. Careful regulation of money in politics in vital to the maintenance of an open, democratic system. The weakening of limits on campaign spending in the USA has clearly damaged the quality of American democracy; we need to avoid the same happening here, and the forthcoming Elections Bill threatens to do that.

The Minister has adapted remarkably easily to the transition from John Major’s style of ethical government to the rule-bending populism of Boris Johnson. I nevertheless hope that he will reassure the House that he remains committed, personally as well as on behalf of the Government, to the seven principles of public life, to ethical standards, to transparency and public accountability in appointments, and to maintaining broad public trust in government. The Prime Minister likes to speak about the UK as a beacon of democracy for the world; it is the Minister’s responsibility to ensure that that beacon does not get dimmer.

Government Departments: Non-Executive Directors

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 8th September 2021 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what professional expertise and qualifications they look for when appointing non-executive directors of Government departments.

[The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Lord True) (Con)]

My Lords, departmental non-executive board members are appointed by the Secretary of State following the principle of selection based on merit. The majority of roles are advertised on Her Majesty’s Government’s public appointments website. The corporate governance code for central government departments states that appointees shall be

“experts from outside government … primarily from the commercial private sector, with experience of managing large and complex organisations”.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

The Minister will be aware of the comments that the Committee on Standards in Public Life made in Standards Matter 2. Paragraph 88 states:

“However there is an increasing trend amongst ministers to appoint supporters or political allies as NEDs. This both undermines the ability of NEDs to scrutinise the work of their departments, and has a knock-on effect on the appointments process elsewhere.”


Does the Minister accept that criticism and does he also accept the strong recommendation of the Committee on Standards in Public Life that the appointments process for non-executive directors of government departments should be regulated?

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, the Government obviously respect the recommendations in any report from the Committee on Standards in Public Life, and we will consider and respond to those recommendations in due course. I believe that talent is not confined to people of a single political opinion. Therefore, I do not follow the noble Lord in the implication that anybody who has ever supported the Conservative Party should be disqualified from one of these roles.

House of Lords Appointments Commission

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 6th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, attacks on the alleged metropolitan elite entrenched on the Cross-Benches and on these Benches by wealthy Conservatives who grew up in the Home Counties and made their careers in the City of London are absurd. For the record, I spent the Recess on the outskirts of Bradford, not in Islington or Surrey.

Fundamentally, as the Minister will recognise, this is about the power of the Prime Minister to exercise prerogative powers without restraint. As the ability of the monarch to constrain her Prime Minister shrunk, the exercise of Crown prerogative powers by the Prime Minister was moderated by the willingness of successive political leaders to behave within the limits of what was regarded as acceptable behaviour. Eton educated political leaders were assumed to be the most trustworthy in this respect. They had been taught the importance of conventions and constraints on power, and the sense of shame for those who broke them.

Now we have an Etonian Prime Minister who does not accept the importance of constraints or of advisory bodies in ensuring that conventions are observed and who appears to have no sense of shame. Today we are discussing the Lords Appointments Commission, but this also applies to observance of the Ministerial Code, the appointment of non-executive directors to Whitehall departments and to many other aspects of the standards of our public life.

When politicians refuse to observe established conventions of appropriate behaviour, it becomes necessary to strengthen those rules by statute. Decisions on the size of our second Chamber and the qualifications for membership of it have constitutional implications. I accept that David Lloyd George in his time abused prime ministerial power in Lords appointments. That was corrupt. Boris Johnson is abusing prerogative power in the same way. To paraphrase Lord Acton, all power corrupts; unconstrained power corrupts without constraints.

National Insurance Numbers: Electoral Register

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 22nd July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con) [V]]

My Lords, we will have many hours to discuss these matters on the Elections Bill. Time is short now, but I reject the view that that Bill is anything to do with voter suppression. I think the Labour Party has adopted a position on that which is contrary to the overwhelming view of the public that voter ID is sensible. So far as automatic registration is concerned, I can only repeat that the Government have no plans to introduce it.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, one person’s forced registration may be another person’s citizens’ rights. When I was the Lords’ Minister in the Cabinet Office, some years ago now, government digital experts were discussing the greater integration of local and central public data and the idea that digitisation might well extend to the electoral register. Is that still on the cards? Is this something that we may expect to be covered, either positively or negatively, in the Government’s digital strategy paper, when next it appears?

[Lord True (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I have indicated that the Government do not see attractions in producing a single national electoral register or centralised database. It is one of the aspects of our position that we should not move forward to automatic registration, and there are others. I have to disappoint the noble Lord on that score.

European Union (Future Relationship) Act 2020 (References to the Trade and Cooperation Agreement) Regulations 2021

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 21st July 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]]

My Lords, this takes me back to when I first started to work on the European Community. The EU is a legal construct; clauses, subclauses, chapters and treaties all matter a great deal—usually in French and English, with others to be carefully compared.

I remind the Minister that, when I started to work on this, Margret Thatcher, the then Conservative Prime Minister, was pushing hard to create a single market by removing non-tariff barriers, which she rightly saw as bigger barriers to trade than tariffs. All Conservative Ministers learned and well understood this. I find it very sad that so many Conservatives and current Ministers appear to have forgotten that a mere 25 to 30 years later.

One of the many things that this Government have declared and then had to go back on is that Brexit is done. We are learning that Brexit is far from done; there is a great deal more to be sorted out. That is of course partly because of the chaotic way in which the TCA was negotiated at the last minute against the deadline—in the clear hope from the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, that this would leave very little time for Parliament to scrutinise or find holes in it.

Now we have a technical SI on the negative basis to correct some aspects of it. Can the Minister confirm whether he expects there to be further SIs that will deal with minor—or indeed major—amendments to the TCA and, if so, may I warmly suggest that they should in all cases be affirmative SIs? We are trying to redesign our relationship with the European Union and we all have an interest in that relationship not becoming a hostile and ill-tempered one. If we are to achieve that, however, it requires a good deal more to be sorted out, including foreign and security policy co-operation, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, said.

In this respect, the very 19th-century view of the noble Lord, Lord Frost, of sovereignty as much more fundamental than international law is clearly a barrier to reasonable negotiation and reasonable arrangements. We all understand that the greatest difficulty with the Northern Ireland protocol is that, for ideological reasons, the British Government have refused to negotiate a phytosanitary agreement—or veterinary agreement, as the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, called it—on the grounds that this would impinge on British sovereignty, not that the British Government have said, so far, that we wish in any way to move away from existing European regulations. That seems to me to be a triumph of ideology over national interest—and, incidentally, it begins to threaten the union and peace in Northern Ireland.

I have some sympathy for the Minister in his position. Honest Conservatives now working for a chaotic Government—I hope not quite as chaotic as Dominic Cummings claims—must find themselves in some difficulty defending the position of a Government who often deny responsibility for what they negotiated less than three years ago. The Government must take responsibility for their future relations, however much they may wish to tilt towards the Pacific. I have to say that I was very amused to discover the other day that the Government are planning to send fishery protection boats to the Pacific in order to enforce fishery protection there, while we are so short of fishery protection vessels in the UK that we could do with another dozen or two here.

There are a number of illogical elements in this Government, which I am sure the Minister quietly regrets as he loyally continues to serve. Can he assure us that further amendments to the TCA, which we unavoidably expect, will be presented, whenever possible, as affirmative SIs and debated on the Floor of the Chamber? We all have strong interests in this relationship becoming a stable and friendly one, and we are some distance from that yet.

Security of Ministers’ Offices and Communications

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 29th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Lord True) (Con)]

My Lords, on private emails, government guidance is that official devices, email accounts and communication applications should be used for communicating classified information. Other forms of electronic communication may be used in the course of conducting government business. Each Minister is responsible for ensuring that government information is handled in a secure way. The specific quantitative points the noble Baroness raised I cannot respond to at this point. But, in answer to another of the noble Baroness’s questions, the official information held in private email accounts is subject to FoI.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the government guidance seems to be not entirely clear. When Ministers are using private emails for official business, does this mean that their officials, including their own private offices and Permanent Secretaries, have access to these or are they outside the regard of civil servants? Can we be sure that CCTV is securely held? Are private contractors engaged in this? Is the technology—hardware and software—also secure or is some of it procured from, for example, China?

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise to the noble Baroness opposite for not answering the question on CCTV, which was a lapsus memoriae—we are not supposed to use Latin, but it was. As I understand it, the Department of Health is looking into the specifics here. It constitutes a leak and is a serious matter with security implications. I can tell the House that our understanding is that this is certainly not a covert camera, nor is there a general policy of such cameras across Whitehall. As far as the question of emails is concerned, Ministers will have informal conversations from time to time in person or remotely, but significant contact relating to government business from such discussions should be, and is, passed back to officials. That would be in line with the relevant guidance on information handling and security. The Cabinet Office has previously published guidance on how information is held for the purposes of access to information. We obviously review this from time to time. I would expect all Ministers to seek to conform to the guidance.

Constitution Inquiry

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 14th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, the Government will continue to apply the law of the land until the law of the land is changed.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the commitment to constitutional integrity and the absolute sovereignty of the UK Parliament comprise a piece of legal purism which I think the Government would criticise if the European Commission displayed such a tendency. Does the Minister recognise that the commitment to absolute UK sovereignty was what led to the division of Ireland? Does he not accept that insistence on it with regard to Northern Ireland and Scotland now is likely to lead to further division?

[Lord True (Con)]

No, my Lords, I do not agree. We currently have a constitutional settlement in which there are reserved and devolved matters. I think we all believe that devolution has benefited the United Kingdom, and the Government’s priority—as the priority of all of us should be—is to make that work in amity and with commonality, as we were reminded earlier.

UK–EU Trade and Co-operation Agreement: Meetings of Bodies

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I share my noble friend’s distaste for bureaucracy in all its forms, even though I have spent most of my life working in one. It is, unfortunately, a characteristic of international relations nowadays that there is a substantial bureaucratic component, and we have to work with that. I hope that the various committees that have been created will help us to resolve problems. I can reassure my noble friends that the bureaucracy is, at least, much less than when we were a member of the European Union.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, is it the Government’s objective, nevertheless, to get the full panoply of relations and committees working well, as we have to manage a very wide agenda of continuing close relations with the European Union? Do the Government have it in mind that they could take the Swiss option, as it were, and break the series of complex negotiations and treaties that they have with the EU—which, as he will know, the Swiss have just done?

Size of the House of Lords

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 18th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Baroness that the role of the Official Opposition is extremely important, and new Peers have been appointed —the Prime Minister has nominated people to the Labour Party Benches. Indeed, I had the great privilege of hearing the maiden speech from the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, only last week.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]]

My Lords, may I follow the question of the noble Baroness, Lady Smith? The Labour Party acted with great restraint in the first 11 years after the 1999 reforms. It was six years before there were more Labour Peers than Conservative, and at the end of the Labour Government there were only 26 more Labour Peers than Conservatives. We now have 83 more Conservative Peers than Labour, almost as many as there are all other party Peers. Do the Government intend to respect the convention that no group should have a majority in this House or do they intend to carry on appointing more until they approach an overall majority?

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, the Conservative Party has only about 33% of the seats in the Lords, which obviously is way short of its share of the vote. This House has always benefited from negotiation and balance. However, there is a fundamental principle of our constitution that the Queen’s Government must be enabled to carry on, and everybody watches very closely the relationship between this House and the House of Commons.