Civil Service

I beg to move, "That this House notes with concern the Government's management of the Civil Service; condemns the excessive increase in the Government's spending on communications, advertising and marketing; further notes with alarm the increasing number of civil servants employed as press and communications officers despite the aims of the Gershon Review to reduce the administrative costs of Government; observes the increase in the number of political ministerial adviser appointees; further notes the creation of bodies and quangos which are unaccountable to the public; considers there to be widespread failures in the efficient implementation of Government policies by No. 10 Downing Street, Government departments and agencies; and calls on the Government to enshrine Civil Service independence in law in a Civil Service Act, bring in a strengthened Ministerial Code and a more transparent means of enforcing it, ask the Committee on Standards in Public Life to establish a code of conduct for the impartiality and accuracy of Government publications and advertising campaigns, and to take urgent steps to restore trust in the UK system of government by making it more efficient, transparent, accountable and effective." I start by declaring the interests against my name in the Register of Members' Interests. The Tony Blair era of Government became synonymous with spin. At the very outset of that Government back in 1997, there were huge increases in the number of special advisers; the figure more than doubled. Two special advisers in Downing street were given, completely without precedent, powers to give orders to conventional civil servants. In addition, a large number of departmental press secretaries who were already in place, and departmental heads of the information service who were permanent civil servants in the Government Information and Communication Service, were replaced with appointees who were more or less partisan. At the time, eyebrows were raised and mildly controversial concerns were expressed, but after all, the Government were elected with a substantial majority and nothing that was done could be said to be illegal. However, it was nakedly a sharp turn away from the conventional approach of reliance on an impartial and professional civil service. That became the hallmark of the Blair era of government—the subordination of all considerations to the partisan political interests of the Labour party. In no Department was there a greater dedication to the cult of spin than in Her Majesty's Treasury. We all remember—I do so vividly, as I was shadow Chancellor: one of many holders of that post—the notorious double-counted spending increases in the pre-Budget report of autumn 1998, in which spending increases for the whole comprehensive spending review period were conveniently added together to give a sum much greater than that which was being spent. That was the first indication that with the then Chancellor—now Prime Minister—it was wise to count the spoons carefully and decipher the fine print with a magnifying glass before deciding to rely on what he said. Despite that history, it is fair to say that when the Prime Minister took office in the middle of last year, there was a sigh of relief that the first announcement of the age of change was that the era of spin was definitively over. Parliament, we were told, was to be told about things before the press and the media. Spin was consigned to history—a relic of the Blairite-Mandelsonist era of the past. The right hon. Gentleman said that"““one of my first acts as Prime Minister would be to restore power to Parliament in order to build the trust of the British people in our democracy.””" At the time, the soon to be elected deputy leader of the Labour party—now the Leader of the House—made an even more explicit promise:"““In future, under a Gordon Brown regime, we need to have no spin, no briefing, no secrets, and respect for Parliament””." The right hon. and learned Lady's final point about treating Parliament with respect and making statements to the House before the media was instantly more honoured in the breach than in the observance. We have worked out that on average, the media have been briefed about two announcements a week before they are made to Parliament. Often, announcements are not made to Parliament at all, even after the event. What of the pledge to cut back on spin, and put the era of spin in the past? The simple truth is that there has been no reduction in the number of spin doctors and special advisers from the Blair era, or perhaps only a tiny one. The age of change turns out to be the age of no change. The publication of the White Book by the Central Office of Information, which was delayed until September last year to take account of the changes since the Prime Minister took over from Tony Blair, effectively shows that there has been no reduction at all. In fact, it took some time for the document to be published, and a number of questions from my right hon. Friends and myself to elicit that information. Indeed, the Government's answers, to specific questions, Department by Department, on the scale of the spin machine are a master-class in the spinning of information to give a false impression. They exclude, for example, the majority of communications personnel, limiting the numbers to the narrowest possible definition of ““press officer””. The White Book directory tells the full story of a Government spin machine that has spiralled out of control. Advertising costs have also spiralled. The Government have spent over £800 million on advertising in the past five years alone. The annual spend has quadrupled since Labour came to power. No doubt under the rigorous financial stewardship of the Prime Minister, assisted by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster as his adviser for much of the time, it was spent immensely prudently. Is the advertising spend simply the overhang of the reckless Blairite era? No, because the figures clearly show that since the Prime Minister took over, the advertising spend has increased still further by four times the rate of inflation. Taxpayers are entitled to ask whether they are getting a good return on the money that is being spent. Many Conservative council candidates who fought elections last week may think it was well spent, because the results were not bad for them. Even taxpayers who belong to, or support, the Labour party are asking that question because, after all, Labour's electoral interests were clearly intended to benefit from those huge spends, including on advertising to promote the merits of neighbourhood policing in the middle of the local election campaign. That is a questionable use of taxpayers' money in supposedly non-partisan information programmes. The results of last week's elections suggest that, from the Labour party's point of view, it was a wretched use of money, because it led—I believe directly—to its worst position since the war; I do not mean the last war but the first world war. We have to go back a very long time indeed to the infancy of the Labour party to find a time when it did as badly as it did last week. It is worth spending a little time looking at the Prime Minister's explanation last weekend of what went wrong, because it bears directly on the substance of today's motion. He said,"““I've spent too much time…looking at the detail of solving people's problems.””" He also said,"““I've spent too little time thinking about how we can get our arguments across””." He was saying that the Government were not doing enough spinning; they were spending their time earnestly looking over the fine detail of policy programmes to be absolutely sure that they had got them right. That was supposed to conjure up an image of an incredibly high-minded Prime Minister blundering around Downing street in the small hours of the morning, setting off security alarms while trying to unlock his office, because he was desperate to refine subsection (27)(a) of the bin charges Bill, or to rewrite paragraph 147 of his Chancellor's Budget speech, or to work out with mathematical precision exactly why 42 days' detention without charge was the right answer, rather than 40 or 44. For somebody supposedly obsessed with substance, as the Prime Minister constantly tells us at the Dispatch Box, and the detail of ““solving people's problems””, he has not made a fantastically good fist of it. Abolishing the 10p tax rate was entirely his idea; indeed, it was his idea to create it in the first place. However, when it came to be implemented—