Civil Service

That is an interesting observation. I was trying to argue that although such charges are made for political reasons in each period of government, they do not stand up when tested against the question whether the character of the civil service is being fundamentally altered by what is happening. The Select Committee on Public Administration, which I have the honour to chair, considered this issue in some detail just a year ago. We produced a report called ““Politics and Administration: Ministers and Civil Servants””, which examined the politicisation charges made over the years. It is worth quoting a paragraph that sums up the evidence that we received. We said that:"““despite the regular accusations of politicisation, Britain clearly remains singularly unpoliticised. External appointments to the senior civil service are regulated by the Civil Service Commissioners, and no witnesses suggested ministers were able to exercise significant powers of patronage. Although ministers are able to make political appointments to special adviser posts, there was broad agreement that the scale of political appointments was so small, in relation to the size of the civil service, that it did not undermine principles set out by the 1854 Northcote Trevelyan Report and, in significant respects, protected them. Moreover, in relation to appointments to public bodies, the role of ministers has actually been reduced by recent changes.””" That is an accurate summary, and shows why the general charge of politicisation, whether under Conservative or Labour Governments, simply is not sustainable. In any serious discussion on this issue, it is worth discussing the appropriate balance between the political element in government and the permanent element. It is worth having that discussion here and in any comparable political system, and there would be different answers for the different systems, all of which claim to uphold the principles of democratic politics. I remember being introduced to the Australian Cabinet Secretary, some years ago, and discovering that he was a political appointee. In Canada—another Commonwealth country—the permanent secretaries, whom they call deputy ministers, are all political appointees. What is the correct balance between the political and permanent bureaucratic elements of government? That question can be answered in a variety of ways, and is always open to dispute. Internationally, we are at an extreme end of that spectrum, with our small element of political appointment within government. Given the arguments about this issue that we have had in this country over the years, one would think that we were right at the other end of the spectrum. Extraordinary attention has been paid to the appointment of special advisers over the years, but there is minute political involvement in government here. To return to my comments about radical reforming Governments sometimes revisiting the issue, the case is sometimes made for changing the balance fundamentally. That argument was put forward by Sir John Hoskyns, who ran Mrs. Thatcher's policy unit for the first three years of her Conservative Government. He was an interesting man—one of Mrs. Thatcher's business men and can-do people whom she brought in. He spent a year working out exactly how Britain was governed and what the problems were with that method, and put his findings in a diagram. When Mrs. Thatcher was shown the diagram—she was a chemist, as we know—she said that it looked exactly like the plan of a chemical plant. John Hoskyns was impatient about the balance between the political and civil service elements, and wanted to change it. After he left that job, he said:"““If a country's problems require radical remedies, you need a radical government. But how can you have a radical government without radically-minded officials?””" He went on to say:"““We need to replace a large number of senior civil servants with politically appointed officials on contract, at proper market rates, so that experienced, top-quality people would be available.””" I did not give that quote simply to make a political point, to damn that political period or to revisit matters that provide a political opportunity. There is a perfectly proper argument to be had about the balance between the political element in government and the permanent civil service element. All political systems have that discussion, as we do. We allow exemptions to appointment on merit through secondments and short-term contracts, and we could have a grown-up discussion about such matters if we wanted to. In recommending a civil service Bill in 1854, Northcote and Trevelyan said in their report:"““a few clauses would accomplish all that is proposed””" They were right. My Committee has always taken the view that we do not want an over-elaborate Bill. We want one that is as simple as possible and that tries to set some of the constitutional boundary lines into statute. We want a move from a rule by prerogative to one of Parliament and statute. That is what we want to do, and it is has been quite a job getting such a Bill. It has been much promised, but not delivered, and we have been frustrated by that. In 2004, to mark the 150th anniversary of the Northcote-Trevelyan report, we published our own Bill. I think that it was the first time in modern parliamentary history that a Select Committee has published its own Bill to show what could be done. That approach has borne fruit, because the Government then produced a draft Bill and have now produced a serious proposal to legislate with the draft Constitutional Renewal Bill. There will be reasons to ask the Government to strengthen the Bill in a variety of ways—the hon. Member for Richmond Park helpfully mentioned some of them. I think that our Committee and the Joint Committee on the Constitutional Renewal Bill, which is going to consider the Bill, will say that the Government are on the right lines. Indeed, they are doing the right thing and are on the right lines. I shall end with one observation on the process. I have been considering this matter over the years to see why it has taken so long to get to this point. It is easy to attack previous Governments for inertia, but I particularly wanted to explore why the last Conservative Government decided not to legislate, despite the recommendation of the former Treasury and Civil Service Committee that they should. Discussions in that period show that the people inside the Government who were responsible for the matter were anxious, and for good reason. They did not want to disturb the essential constitutional position of the civil service and did not want to legislate in a way that would ossify the service. However, there was also a political consideration. They did not want to start down that path if it meant that the proposal simply became a matter for political dispute. It was thought that if the civil service were brought into the political arena and if agreement could not be reached, that would do more harm than good. David Hunt, now Lord Hunt, who was leading for the Conservative Government at the time, said, in evidence to the Treasury and Civil Service Committee on 14 June 1995:"““I would not want to start the process without a clear indication from all sectors of the House that in fact we would not see the civil service become a party political football in terms of the amendments being proposed and put forward.””" That was a very proper worry. Having discussed this issue with all kinds of people over the years, and having taken evidence from former senior civil servants and former Cabinet Secretaries, I have found that they all express the same worry: can we legislate on the civil service without it becoming an opportunity to have a political dispute about the civil service? If not, they felt that it would be better not to do anything at all. That is a profound consideration. Sometimes, we in this House like to say, between ourselves, that we think that this should be a matter for consensus. However, having watched the protestations of commitment to consensus over the years, I have to report that that breaks down at the first whiff of political opportunity. That is the way our system is; that is how we do it. If we see the opportunity to score a political goal or to make a political point, we take it, even if we are notionally committed to a consensus approach. This is a huge test for us. It is unfinished constitutional business. We all know that it needs to be done. We know that we would like to put the civil service into statute and to draw some constitutional lines in the sand. The question is whether we can collectively do that without it becoming a political football. The motion today refers, as such things always do, to restoring trust in the political system. Our record on that could make one quite pessimistic. The truth is that, for the past 15 years, we have had an auction on trust and distrust in this country. In a sense, we started it. We quickly realised that making allegations against the Major Government brought huge political dividends. If we look at the figures, we see that it was then—in the 1990s—that trust really started to go down, and it has never recovered since. We piled in making all kinds of allegations about the sleazy character of Conservative politicians; then, after 1997, the Conservatives decided that, in order to equalise the balance, they had to make similar charges against us. The effect has been to pull us all down. The reputation in which we are all held has declined immeasurably during that period. In the short term, such activity might seem like good politics, but I can assure the House that it is really bad for the reputation of public life in this country. The challenge for us now is to do something about that, but, as David Hunt said all those years ago, we can succeed only if there is genuine consensus in the House and determination on all sides to create a good, coherent civil service Bill that will last.