Civil Service

I agree very strongly with that. I would like to draw on my own experience—the best way for me to contribute—rather than provide mere assertion on that and other issues. When I became Secretary of State for Social Security, I was told about all the skeletons in the cupboard. There was one particular skeleton—I forget exactly what it was, but it was a difficult piece of information to handle—and I was told, ““Minister, you are going to have to think about how to deal with this””. I got up one morning to find that that piece of information was the headline in The Guardian. It so happened that my first meeting was with my chief press officer, Stephen Reardon, the responsible official in the Department. I asked him how that newspaper had acquired that piece of information and he told me, ““I gave it to them””. I will not repeat to the House exactly what I said, but I was intemperate—wrongly intemperate, as I should not have been intemperate with a civil servant, but I was for a moment. When I asked him how he had come to do that, he replied that the newspaper had asked him a question to which that information was the answer. It was not confidential information, he told me, and he said: ““My job, Minister, is not to work for you, but for the public. My job is to tell the truth and to give to the public the information that is theirs by right, which cannot be withheld as confidential””. When I had calmed down, I began to think that this man was rather valuable. He would stand up and tell the truth to all and sundry, including to me; I found him to be an invaluable civil servant throughout my period in office. If I asked him how a particular announcement would be seen by the media, he would give me an honest and accurate prescription. Within just a few weeks of the appointment of the new Labour Government, he was out—he lost his job; he was sacked—because they could not put up with that sort of integrity. I think that they damaged themselves, as I believe that it strengthens the Government to have people who can be trusted to tell the truth and provide a reliable conduit of information between Departments and the media. Secondly, I want to deal with the importance of officials telling the truth directly to Ministers in confidence, helping them to speak truthfully when they are operating in Parliament and correcting errors if Ministers accidentally make them. From time to time, I am invited to speak at the civil service college at Henley and I talk about what Ministers want from officials. I talk about many things, but towards the end I include the point that when we Ministers make a mistake, it is the job of civil servants to present us with a little note saying, ““Minister, when you said there was no precedent for x, what you actually meant was that there were seven precedents, which are as follows””. It can happen very occasionally; even I might say something in the heat of debate or without proper thought that turned out to be incorrect. In those circumstances, officials should present the Minister with a statement of the mistake and it would become the Minister's job to put the record straight immediately, usually in Committee, or perhaps later to the House. When I tell today's civil servants that that was and should be the practice, they look at me aghast and in amazement! They first ask how it would be possible for them to do that when all the time Ministers say things that are not true; and secondly they say that the attitude of the Government and Ministers is not the same any more. It is a very sad and sorry state of affairs when some officials seem to be too cowed to stand up to Ministers. A great many probably retain their robustness, which is essential to proper relations between them and Government Ministers. In my experience, it is important to have officials working for us even if they do not necessarily agree with all our policies. I carried out an analysis of where policy had, in my view, gone wrong in its formulation or implementation in the Department of Social Security—needless to say, before I took over. I looked into the Child Support Agency. Part of the reason why it had gone wrong was that everybody was in favour of it: officials, especially women, were in favour of it for feminist reasons; Ministers were in favour of it because it chimed well with dealing with feckless fathers; and no one on the committee preparing for the Bill was against it. No one said, ““Hang on a minute; will this work? Is it really so sensible?”” That is why I think it desirable to have officials who are robust enough to stand up and criticise Ministers or the policies that they are putting forward by suggesting that they should think again while a policy is going through a process of development. Civil servants need self-confidence and belief in their own integrity in order to do that. Thirdly, there is the issue of accountability. Officials are accountable to Ministers; Ministers are accountable to Parliament. It is difficult to get the balance right. We cannot expect Ministers to take responsibility for every little thing that happens in their Department. We cannot expect a Minister for Transport to resign whenever there is a car crash, even though it is his job to reduce their number. None the less, when something major happens in the Department, the first implication should be that the Minister is responsible rather than, as happens all too often nowadays, the naming, shaming and blaming of the civil servants. When I was Financial Secretary to the Treasury, I was responsible for the Inland Revenue. If it had been responsible for losing all the data of every family in the country, I would at least have tentatively offered my resignation to the Prime Minister or Chancellor. I may have hoped that it would be refused, but I would at least have put forward that resignation. [Interruption.] I do not pretend to any great personal valour in these matters, but it is important for Ministers to accept that, at the end of the day, they are responsible and cannot escape blame by blaming officials. To give the Minister an example, I had to consider resigning on such grounds when I was dealing with the allegation that my predecessors had sanctioned the export of chemical weapons precursors and nuclear weapons precursors to Iraq. The only way to kill that allegation dead was to publish the details of every single export licence relating to Iraq in those categories in the years preceding the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein. It took a long time; there were thousands of licences. The officials eventually came back and said, ““All clear, Minister; not a single example. Only the export of two hunting guns were possibly against the sanctions regime.”” I then summoned in the members of the press one by one, and said to each of them, ““Look, there are the 14,000 export licences. You can read them yourself, but I can assure you that you will not find an example of anything out of line.”” After I had seen the last member of the press, and they had all gone away rather disappointed that this fox had been shot, a civil servant came to see me and said, ““I'm frightfully sorry, but one of the very first documents we looked at did actually contain reference to the export of some chemicals which at the time were not considered to be chemicals weapons precursors, but which were subsequently so designated by the United Nations.”” I asked, ““Are you sure that that is the only one?”” and they said, ““No; we will go and have a look.”” They then came back and said, ““Actually, there are five or six shipments, Minister.”” I said, ““Do you realise that although you think this is very amusing, I will have to take responsibility, and I will almost certainly be required to resign?”” As it happened, I wrote an open letter to the Chairman of the Select Committee, and everyone was on holiday, and the Press Association wrote the story up very favourably to me and I got away scot-free. However, Ministers are ultimately responsible for the advice they take, and if they take bad advice on a serious matter on which they have given serious assurances, their heads are on the block. Let me finally make some brief observations about the reforms that are needed. In response to the hon. Member for Cannock Chase, I referred to the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms. They entrenched in the British civil service a belief that generalism, not specialism, is the only way to the top, and in terms of promotion and internal recruitment and recruitment from outside, we need to bring in people with specialist experience. It is my experience in business that someone who knows a lot about repairing motor cars can be made into a good librarian, but someone who knows nothing about anything probably cannot be made into a good manager of anything. So specialist expertise is important. That went out of the civil service with the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms. Before then, the Indian civil service had at least required people to learn Indian languages, but as a result of those reforms Haileybury college—it is nothing to do with the school—where the civil servants were taught was closed down and thereafter they learned Greek and Latin in order to go off and govern India. We have suffered from that ethos ever since. More significant, in my experience, was the paucity of people in the civil service with project management experience and skills. That might explain why so many major projects go wrong: to get promotion in the civil service, staff should want to be a policy adviser, not a manager. Normally, staff in the civil service do a job for only a couple of years before moving on to something else, hopefully higher up and away from actually managing anything to advising Ministers. Therefore, very few people in the civil service have had any prolonged experience of managing anything through to completion. I raised that with the head of the civil service, and now there is at least some attempt to provide for the formation of project management skills, but I suspect that it does not go far enough. I congratulate my Front-Bench colleagues on introducing this motion, and on focusing on the importance of bringing back to the centre of our debate integrity, truth in information and accountability in terms of Ministers' policies and the actions of their Departments. Driven by the criticisms that have been made of their stewardship for the past 10 years, I hope that the Government will forge ahead and introduce a Bill that will entrench the integrity of the civil service; that should not be necessary, but alas, it is. I also hope that my Front-Bench colleagues will live up to what they are saying now when they are in government after May 2010.