The Future of the Civil Service

Lord Forsyth of Drumlean Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, on bringing this important debate to the House. It seems these days in this place, that the more important the subject—whether it is the balkanisation of Britain, our membership of the European Union or the future of the Civil Service—the shorter the time that we are allowed to make speeches. I have only three minutes so I will content myself with saying that I agree with everything that the noble Lord said.

However, I would add one bit of emphasis, which is that I think that the mischief is not so much ministerial choice but having candidates who have come from outwith the Civil Service system. The key point here is that we must maintain not just the non-political nature of the Civil Service but its independence. It is that that I want to talk about in the context of the Civil Service Code.

I received a Written Answer this week from the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire. In my Question, I asked whether the Government,

“intend to ask the head of the Civil Service to report on whether the preparation and publication of Scotland’s Future by Scottish civil servants complied with the Civil Service Code of Conduct”.

The Answer which I received from my noble friend was:

“Questions relating to compliance with the Code of Conduct of the Civil Service in Scotland are dealt with by the Scottish Government in the first instance”.—[Official Report, 13/1/14; col. WA 1.]

However, my complaint was about the Scottish Government. It was raised in debate, and the Minister said it was not a matter for him.

The document I referred to, Scotland’s Future, contains within it one page headed, “Gains from independence—whichever party is elected”, and another headed “Gains from independence—if we are the first government of an independent Scotland”. Included in those “gains” are: the renationalisation of the Royal Mail; the abolition of the bedroom tax; and a reduction in corporation tax. None of those things is within the responsibility of the Scottish Government. This is a manifesto in a document paid for by the taxpayer, written by civil servants and costing £800,000. In common with everybody else in Scotland, I got a leaflet through my letterbox, paid for by the taxpayer, urging me to read the document. There are billboards and advertising hoardings.

We used to have a Civil Service code of conduct which was enforced; it is not being enforced, and it is an absolute dereliction of duty on the part of the head of the Civil Service not to bring this nonsense to an end. It creates a precedent, and the Civil Service operates on precedent. I believe that upholding the Civil Service’s code of conduct is a priority if we are to maintain the integrity of our systems of government. I think that it was a great mistake to separate the roles of head of the Civil Service and the Cabinet Secretary and to diminish both offices in the process. This goes to the heart of what is going on.

When people say that those of us who are concerned about the issues that the noble Lord has raised are out of date and do not really understand how things have changed from Victorian times, Ministers should remember that the monarch acts on their advice and Ministers are advised by civil servants. If we break that link, we will have lost our way and we will slide into chaos and further reinforce the contempt and dismay that we see among the electorate in our country.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the Government are not opposed to intelligent inquiry by Parliament. One of the many things that has changed over the past 40 years is the relationship between Parliament and civil servants. Parliamentary inquiries by my honourable friend Bernard Jenkin’s committee, Margaret Hodge’s committee and others are a regular part of life in a way that they were not 40 years ago. That is a desirable development. We are now having to think about how we rewrite the Osmotherly rules to fit in with this new development.

I have heard a diversity of views in this debate about how far civil servants and senior officials should be directly answerable to Parliament for the major projects that they have been leading. That is another area that is worth examining. After all, we are light years away from the Crichel Down affair, when a Minister resigned over a failure in his department about which he knew little. We would not want go back to that. This is another area where the relationship among Ministers, senior officials and Parliament has evolved, and it will no doubt need to evolve further.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

I think I heard my noble friend say that the Government were not opposed to a parliamentary inquiry into the Civil Service. Does that mean that, should Parliament decide to set up an inquiry, it would have the support of the Government?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I said that the Government are not opposed to parliamentary inquiries. The Prime Minister is not currently persuaded of the case for a massive commission of inquiry of the sort that my honourable friend Bernard Jenkin’s committee recommended. No doubt there will be further discussion on that and on the sorts of topics that it would be reasonable to address.

I turn to the politicisation of the Civil Service, which a number of noble Lords have touched on and expressed concern about. In my experience over the past three and a half years, I have found special advisers, both those within the Deputy Prime Minister’s Office and those working for Conservative Secretaries of State, to be extremely helpful in easing the relations between the coalition partners and in assisting private offices in the division of work between what is entirely administrative and what becomes political. Perhaps it would be appropriate for a parliamentary committee to look at the expansion of special advisers but I certainly would give evidence in favour of their usefulness in the scene. Whether or not the expanded ministerial office will be that different from what one saw in Gordon Brown’s private office, for example, where the spads were very much part of the office, I am not entirely sure. Again, we should recognise that practice has already evolved and will evolve further.

There has also been concern about the question of choice in Permanent Secretary appointments. We have been round this many times before. I am old enough to remember as a student the great spat between Richard Crossman and his Permanent Secretary. Since then, a number of Secretaries of State—Jack Straw and others—have insisted that they have in effect chosen their Permanent Secretaries. This is an area in which it seems that the recent suggestion that the Prime Minister should have the ultimate say on the appointment of a Permanent Secretary is an acceptable move in this evolving set of relations.

The move to fixed-tenure Permanent Secretary appointments also seems a worthwhile step forward. We are conscious that there has been a fairly rapid turnover in the past two years, although I point out that the average tenure of Permanent Secretaries currently in place and those who have retired since 2010 is about four years. This is not too violent a change.

How do we strengthen Civil Service accountability? That takes us to the Osmotherly rules and the question of how far Parliament and parliamentary committees should be examining officials directly. We have already gone a long way down that road, as we well know. That requires some further study and investigation because of course one wants to protect officials from too aggressive parliamentary scrutiny. That question therefore relates to Parliament as much as Ministers.

The Civil Service reform plan has been very much concerned with the capabilities, skills and training of the senior Civil Service and with contract management and improving commercial skills. I said to one of my former students the other day that I was not entirely sure about the recommendation that there should be substantial additional payments for some senior officials. I had my ear chewed off by a bright young civil servant who said that we need to buy in commercial and management skills from time to time and if we have to pay more for them it is worth doing. That, after all, is part of what we are now trying to do.

We are carrying through the digital revolution. I have just written a rather sharp note to the Department for Transport about some of the design problems in the DVLA online form for over-70s renewing their driving licence, and had an extremely good reply from the Secretary of State. We are improving, as noble Lords know. The gov.uk website received an award last year.

The role of the head of the Civil Service has also been touched on. Over the years, we have moved from a combined head of the Civil Service and Cabinet Secretary to occasional splits between the two. From my time on the Civil Service Board, it seems to me that the current division works well. Others in later periods may differ again, but that is the preference of the current Government.

Having now worked in five different departments in the past four years, I am concerned about the gap between the departments and the centre. The obscurantism of one or two departments—unnamed—is worrying. The difference in quality of civil servants at the middle level in a number of departments is worrying. Therefore, I am strongly in favour of providing more shared services from the centre as we hope to shrink the central administration and push more delivery down to the local level.

This has been a worthwhile debate. I come back to where I started: the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, should not regret having to call for a debate such as this. It is very much the job of the House of Lords to hold debates about the structure of government and the nature of the state. That should be part of our prime purpose. There is an awful lot of institutional memory inside this Chamber. Sometimes perhaps we think that there was a golden age or that we would like the world to be the way it was 20 to 30 years ago, without fully recognising the challenges we have now. Nevertheless, we have a great deal to contribute.

I thank all those who have contributed, one or two of whom I can remember interviewing when I was a junior academic—

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

Before the noble Lord concludes, will he deal with the serious point I made in my speech, which the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, also raised, about the upholding of the Civil Service Code and the failure of that to be done in Scotland, and the responsibility that lies with the head of the Civil Service in England because of the precedents it will create to deal with this?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I would prefer to write to the noble Lord on that extremely sensitive issue. I think he will understand why. Such matters under the Civil Service Code are for the Scottish Government in the first instance and will be dealt with by the relevant Permanent Secretary. But I will go back and write to him. I know where he is coming from and the point he is trying to make.

We have had a worthwhile debate. It is very good to have a range of different contributions from people who have seen the evolution of British government—