Civil Service

It is a great privilege to follow the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright) in addressing these matters. He interestingly went back into history and paid tribute to the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms. In many ways that might be right, as far as the integrity of the civil service is concerned, but I would advise him to read a forthcoming work on the subject which puts a wholly different complexion on whether those reforms were beneficial for the efficiency of the civil service. It is written by a civil servant—a gentleman called Mike Coolican—who advised me when I was at the then Department of Social Security and, no doubt, my Labour successors in due course. I urge the hon. Gentleman to put that on his reading list. I should like to put the hon. Gentleman right on the impression that he might have created—even though I do not think it was his intention to do so—that there was a degree of politicisation in the selection of permanent secretaries under the Thatcher Administration. That was not my experience. I remember when I first got my foot on the lowest rung of the ladder and became a Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister responsible for local government—indeed, the Minister responsible for the abolition of Ken Livingstone, the Inner London Education Authority and all that sort of thing. The Bill to achieve those changes was introduced by the Government, and Mrs. Thatcher was very much in favour of it. It was a key centrepiece of the Government's Administration. The official in charge of it made it absolutely clear to Ministers that he thought that it was a barmy idea, that it was wrong in principle, and that it would be damaging in practice. None the less, it was his job as a civil servant to tell us how to achieve our aims in the least damaging and most effective way. As a result, he caught the attention of Ministers, who found him all the more effective because they knew that, rather than soft-soaping them, he was telling them how a bad Bill could be made less bad. He rapidly became permanent secretary, over the heads of his rivals in the then Department of the Environment. That was how it worked. Mrs. Thatcher liked people who answered back and who told her the truth. I suspect that there might be a difference between that attitude and those that pertain nowadays. There was certainly no party political import at that time. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude) on raising this extremely important issue. The integrity of the civil service is a pearl of great price, and anyone who has lived or worked in a country that does not have an impartial civil service will recognise just how valuable it is. The possession of an information service within the civil service, that is dedicated to honesty and integrity, is also of immense importance to the operation of democracy. The accountability of Ministers to Parliament, and of civil servants to Ministers, is central to the working of parliamentary democracy. All those things are now under threat—or have been threatened—under this new Labour Government. Even the fact that the Government are introducing this legislation is a recognition of the fact that there is grave concern about these issues, and that the Government are trying to respond to that, perhaps in good faith, and trying to reverse those things that have been put under threat over the past 10 years. This is unique to new Labour. Historically, the Labour party and Labour Governments have been respectful of the conventions and traditions that uphold the civil service and the integrity of its management. The other night, I was browsing through Roy Hattersley's admirable autobiography, ““Who Goes Home?”” in which he refers to his experience ahead of, I think, the 1979 election. He had discovered that the retail prices index figures, which were coming out a day after the election, were going to be very good. He said:"““So I asked the Prime Minister if I could announce, or at least leak, our success””—" in getting down inflation—"““on the eve of the poll. Jim could not have been more scandalised if I had confessed to doctoring the figures.””" So the attitude of that Labour Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, was full of integrity and respect for the system. Callaghan in turn explained to Hattersley how a junior Minister called Dugdale, as a young Member of Parliament and Minister in the post-war Labour Government, had questioned Sir Stafford Cripps as to whether it was really necessary to announce a proposal to reduce the already inadequate cheese ration by a further 2 oz, just before a general election. Stafford Cripps replied that he was not sure of the questioner's identity, but"““whoever he was, if he allowed political considerations to influence his judgement, he was not fit to be one of Her Majesty's ministers.””" Thus there has been a tradition on both sides of the House to uphold the integrity of the processes of Government, and that is why we have retained an impartial civil service until recently.