Civil Service

I think that we do understand how it works. I am not sure what putting it on a statutory footing would mean. The hon. Gentleman may be proposing a Prime Minister's Department; I do not think that that would be the right thing to do. Let me deal with some of the other allegations made by the right hon. Member for Horsham. He has this figure of 3,000 spin doctors in Whitehall, which he trots out every so often when he has nothing better to do. The true number of press officers is less than a fifth of that number. The rest, listed in what has become the infamous White Book, include those providing information to the public through publications, websites and campaigns to do with issues such as road safety, public health and smoking. The right hon. Gentleman did not raise the issue of quangos, which was sensible of him, because—I do not want to rub salt into the wound—after he lost his seat in 1992 he was appointed to a quango in 1994—[Interruption.] Unpaid, he says. Presumably, if he is worried about the accountability of quangos, he was worried about his own appointment. However, it will interest him to know that there are fewer quangos than there were in 1997. I was disappointed by the right hon. Gentleman's failure to talk about what we are doing as regards the civil service Bill and other aspects of constitutional reform. The other disappointing aspect of his remarks was that he seemed to subscribe to what I would call a ““golden age”” view of the civil service. His remarks implied that we need only preserve the civil service in aspic—somewhere around the 1960s or 1970s, I guess—and all will be okay. I must be honest with him about this. I do not hold to that view, not because I think we should breach the impartiality of the civil service—quite the opposite; that is why we are legislating for an impartial civil service—but because the challenges faced by a modern Government and civil service are enormous, and that is why the civil service needs to evolve.