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Ministers and Civil Servants

Yes, Sir Steve Robson is one of the people who entered the civil service without any great respect for the ethos that we all like to praise. I am afraid that there are others with similar views. The civil service is a changed body with a different culture from the one that we long believed existed. Some people have been politicised in a certain way, very much along the agenda of the Thatcher Government—of moving towards privatisation, in the belief that that is right. I remember when the executive agencies were first set up. That development had a great deal of support in many quarters. We do not really recognise that most civil servants now work for the next step agencies. At the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, more staff work for the Rural Payments Agency in Newcastle than directly for DEFRA in London. When those agencies were set up, they were so remote than when hon. Members asked questions about them, their questions appeared in Hansard, but their answers never appeared. Instead, they were sent to the individual Members. With the help of the Rowntree Trust, I set up a private enterprise project that printed all the answers every month in a booklet called ““Open Lines””, because it was a denial of information programme. About a year later, the Government nationalised my private enterprise project, reversed the trend and started to publish the answers. It has been suggested that there is something we could do about the appointments body, and I believe that there is. The appointments body is made up of the great and the good, and we have spoken to its members. There seems to be dissatisfaction among the members with the limits of their power. I suggest that the appointments body should have the power to impose limits and to say to people who are taking these high offices and jobs after their retirement that they should not be lobbying in certain ways or that they should not be active for a year or so; it put a certain limit, two years, on one former Minister to avoid problems. What would perhaps be useful is if we could have a system whereby civil servants and perhaps Ministers too are banned from working in those areas that are related to the Departments in which they served. They should not be allowed to take retirement jobs in those areas. That would remove the temptation, and the possible accusation, that they are looking for cushy retirement jobs when they take their decisions as civil servants. I believe that we need a strengthening of the appointments body and that that would generally improve the quality of civil servants. I would like to come back to the original point of the report. There is a powerful case for a civil service Bill, for the benefit of both civil servants themselves and the country, because we want to continue to have the wonderful service that has been supplied to us for a couple of hundred years at least by a civil service that is still in many ways the envy of the world.