Civil Service

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but I do not subscribe to the notion that one is a scumbag if one has spent one's life in business, and a wunderkind if one has done so in public service. However, having been part of both worlds, I am conscious of the differences in culture. It is not necessarily an easy translation from one to the other. I believe that the business community can be tempted to perceive the process of secondment not as a strategy to help public service perform better but as an easier route to influencing and shaping. That might apply not to the individuals but to the companies from which they are seconded. I do not claim that that necessarily happens, but we should consider the possibility when we manage the process. Earlier, I mentioned promotion and movement in the civil service through merit and open competition. I struggle to understand why that should not form the basis of every appointment that is not of a special adviser, instead of excluding several posts. I hope that the Minister for the Cabinet Office will tackle that. Seventy is the figure that constantly floats around for the number special advisers. That venerable journal PRWeek, which has dominated the debate, reported on 24 April that hordes of senior Labour special advisers were said to be passing their CVs to head-hunters and recruitment consultants amid concern that their stock was falling. Perhaps the number will fall below 70. However, that number of people, with a great deal of influence and power, can have an impact on the behaviour of several thousand. It is silly to suggest that 70 people cannot overwhelm the civil service. What limit should we set? Why is not there a cap or some negotiated mechanism for limiting the number? If 70 is fine, is 700 fine, or is that ridiculous? Should the number be 100? Whatever it should be, having some sort of cap would give Parliament and the public confidence that special advisers were used on an ““as needed”” basis to execute the Government's mission, and were limited to such roles. Although the Minister for the Cabinet Office implied that special advisers had no line management responsibility, the draft Bill does not specify that. It would therefore be good to include the prohibition of line management on the face of the Bill. Of course special advisers can commission work, and many people perceive that, if it is misused, as a form of line management. I fully accept that the Government do not intend to include a provision to repeat the Order in Council that enabled Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell to be appointed with special executive powers. However, taking that a stage further to ensure that there is no loophole for commissioning to spill over would be useful. So far, I have considered the civil service largely in the abstract. However, those of us who have been involved in the battle over Heathrow are worried about the creeping loss of neutrality in the civil service. The hon. Member for Putney (Justine Greening), through her diligent pursuit of freedom of information requests, has exposed an incredible amount of integration and co-operation between BAA and the Department for Transport in presenting what is supposedly an impartial consultation to the people of south-west London on an issue about which people care enormously. There is a genuine sense that, in its determination to pursue a Government objective, the civil service suspended its independent judgment and allowed itself to be overridden by BAA's preferences and biases. Some hon. Members will remember that in 2002, my hon. Friend the Member for Northavon (Steve Webb) requested information from the Government about disabled people in hospital, and was told that it was unavailable. Through the Data Protection Act 1998, he obtained a draft answer, which made it clear that the information was available and that he had been given an incorrect response. The Government apologised to the Speaker and to my hon. Friend for that, but the House and the Public Administration Committee had to pursue them before that could be achieved. Frankly, hon. Members will not go through that sort of exercise. We must ensure that the responsiveness is there from the beginning. To speak personally and poignantly, I lost several acquaintances on 11 September 2001—and I will never get beyond the behaviour of special adviser Jo Moore, who said:"““It's now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury.””" That conveys a genuine warning, which underscores the importance of getting the Bill right. Jo Moore was in a running battle with the civil service elements of the press office in her Department, in an arena where one would have thought that such a clash of values should never occur. The Conservatives do not get off lightly. For all their claims that there was a golden age under a Conservative Government, the Thatcher era sowed the seeds. On 24 May 2007, Lord Lipsey, a widely respected Labour peer, who spent many years in the civil service said:"““The present generation of civil servants grew up in the Thatcher years, when the question, 'Is he one of us?' resounded around Whitehall, and giving your opinion fully and frankly could be a barrier to advancement.””—[Official Report, House of Lords, 24 May 2007; Vol. 692, c. 772.]" In many ways, Blair and Campbell were the true heirs of Thatcher and Ingham. I was only on the sidelines of politics at the time, but many of us remember Jeremy Paxman's questioning of the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard), when he was Home Secretary, about whether he had improperly overruled Derek Lewis, the director general of the Prison Service. There is, therefore, no clean slate. The motion refers to quangos, and although I personally agree with its language, it took me aback for a moment, because when it comes to the pot calling the kettle black, the Tory policy of establishing an NHS board—the mother of all quangos—to be responsible for commissioning NHS services, allocating NHS resources and delivering objectives to improve outcomes for patients, is extraordinary. I therefore hope that the language in the motion will be conveyed over into Tory policy. A call for senior appointments to quangos to be subject to scrutiny by the relevant Commons Select Committee is missing from the motion and the draft Bill. That is an especially important element to returning to parliamentary control and giving the public confidence in the impartiality and objectivity of the services that are delivered to them. Some people think that our focus on the impartiality of the civil service is a little piece of nonsense. Indeed, there is envy of the US system, which is openly politicised and where the winner takes the spoils, as it were. However, having lived for many years in the United States, I think that those people have completely missed the checks and balances, which are an inherent part of the US system, between the judiciary, the Executive and the legislature, which mean that an entirely different set of issues are confronted. In our parliamentary system, not having the impartiality of the civil service carefully enshrined in law would totally upset the balance of power. If we ever wanted to guarantee the potential for a presidential Prime Minister, that would do it. Let me close by saying that it is about time that the Northcote-Trevelyan report of 1854, which established the principle of a permanent, independent and politically neutral civil service, found its way on to the statute book. Something in excess of 150 years is probably a long enough gestation period for any piece of legislation.