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Ministers and Civil Servants

It is a pleasure to work under your chairmanship, Mr. Jones. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright) and his formidable Committee colleagues on securing this debate and removing me from the onerous task of going in the rain to Hamleys in Regent street to shop for three hours. My hon. Friend said that there were no vacancies on his Committee. I am certain that there is a relationship there with the number of vacancies that have occurred for junior Cabinet Office Ministers over the years. I hope that I can be a rule breaker on that one. He is right to say that the Committee has had many successes over the years through its quiet and patient application of pressure on the Government, and all Committee members should be commended for that. Because of the randomness of parliamentary questions, this is my first opportunity to welcome the hon. Member for Ruislip-Northwood (Mr. Hurd) to his new position. He draws down on a great body of experience, both from the civil service and his ministerial lineage. I wish him well in his new post. The hon. Gentleman said that we must understand the historical context behind the changes that have been made—and the ones that we intend to make—to the civil service. It is not possible to understand the direction of change without looking back over 150 years at the relationship between politicians and the civil service. The repercussions of those changes and the recommendations that have been made by the Committee go far beyond Whitehall. As my hon. Friend the Member for Pendle (Mr. Prentice) said—a little too often for my liking—if the civil service and Ministers do not get policies and the implementation of those policies right, the people whom we are elected to represent suffer. What matters most to my constituents is that Government deliver efficiently on their commitments. I hope that hon. Members will agree that that is the key to the whole debate. How can Ministers and the civil service adapt and respond to the increasingly complex changes to the world in which we all live? As my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase said, let us look back at the reforms that have taken place. Peter Hennessy described those changes as"““the greatest single governing gift of the nineteenth to the twentieth century: a politically disinterested and permanent Civil Service, with core values of integrity, propriety, objectivity and appointment on merit, able to transfer its loyalty and expertise from one elected government to the next.””" As members of the Committee know, that gift began with the Northcote-Trevelyan report more than 150 years ago. Before Northcote and Trevelyan, servants of the Crown were appointed to office by Ministers. Governance was a family business—I am not making any wisecracks at the relatively new hon. Member—based on who one knew or was related to. Stafford Northcote and Charles Trevelyan were determined to remove untrammelled patronage from the system, not simply because it was corrupt, but because it was inefficient. The Northcote-Trevelyan report recommended a proper system of examination before appointment; a proper system of transfers between Departments; that promotion by merit should be strictly supervised; and that annual increments of salary should be conditional on satisfactory work. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Pendle would like me to reassure Mr. Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, that we do not intend to change those principles. When it comes to increments, I think that they will remain in place for the foreseeable future, although we may have a dispute about the way in which increments are calculated. My hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase explained how Back Benchers had to resign their parliamentary seat when they joined the Executive. It was Gladstone who ensured that civil servants had to resign from their post before being elected to Parliament. That detachment from political life is one of the things that is meant by the term ““permanent civil service””, which has such a long and significant history. The hon. Member for Chichester (Mr. Tyrie) challenged the notion and said that we might have to change the idea of three decades in the civil service. We have made many changes in recent years to ensure that we can mix up the gene pool. I hope that he will acknowledge the progress that the Government have made in that area. The Fulton report sought to move the civil service on from what it called"““the nineteenth century philosophy of the Northcote Trevelyan Report””." It said that it"““concentrated on the graduates who thereafter came to form the top of each service and took much less notice of the rest.””" As we have all acknowledged today, times have moved on. Today's civil service reflects changed values. For example, we have, thankfully, made great strides in recruiting women, ethnic minorities and those with disabilities. For example, the proportion of women in the senior civil service has almost doubled since 1996. The percentage of civil servants from ethnic minority backgrounds has risen by almost half since 1997, and the proportion of civil servants declaring a disability has more than doubled in the past seven years. However, the civil service is still recognisably a product of Northcote, Trevelyan and Gladstone, and the many other initiatives and reforms over the years. Here I want to return to the notion of efficiency that was raised by many hon. Members. It was the key driver for reform both 150 years ago and now. In its report, the Committee pointed out that the civil service is expected to give continuity when Administrations change and stand up to the Government; it used the term ““constitutional effectiveness””. As the Committee notes,"““despite the regular accusations of politicisation, Britain clearly remains singularly unpoliticised.””" Although the hon. Member for Chichester attempted to build up a formidable argument, there is general consensus that that is the position. An area with which we should concern ourselves is how to formulate and deliver policy, or what the Committee called ““operational effectiveness””. In 1854, Northcote and Trevelyan noted that admission into the unreformed civil service was"““for the unambitious, the indolent or the incapable””." They claimed that success depended not on civil servants' performance but"““upon their simply avoiding any flagrant misconduct, and attending with moderate regularity to routine duties””." Of course fair and open competition has been the mainstay of civil service recruitment for years now, but we want to go further. We must get the best people, but we must also make sure that they continue to perform. I was pleased to see that the Committee was"““encouraged by the development of the Capability Reviews, which offer greater transparency about civil service performance.””" Capability reviews aim to strengthen the civil service to enable it to meet the Government's objectives today and be ready for the challenges of tomorrow. Reviews are carried out by the capability reviews team with a team of external reviewers assembled specially for the Department under review. The reviews are then published to ensure that the process is open to scrutiny and comment. That leads me to the big questions posed by the Committee report. What are and what should be the respective roles of Ministers and civil servants in the performance exposed so clearly by the capability reviews and so well documented by my colleagues, particularly from the Labour party? The Committee says at the opening of its report:"““We are fortunate to have a civil service which has been held in high regard, both at home and internationally…We are also fortunate to have a robust system of political accountability.””" It goes on to suggest, however, that the notions of ministerial and civil service accountability are far from clear. My hon. Friend the Member for Newport, West (Paul Flynn) mentioned the unimportance of being right—perhaps in contrast with the speech of the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr. Walker), which might be described as the unimportance of being wrong when it comes to his criticisms of some of my colleagues—but I disagree. I think that we have a clear and proper democratic line of accountability. It runs from the electorate through Members of Parliament to the Government. The duly constituted Government—that is, Ministers—are assisted by the permanent and politically impartial civil service. Ministers are accountable to Parliament and civil servants are accountable to Ministers. That is proper, because what matters most is to ensure the ultimate accountability of the Government to the electorate. The Committee is right, though, to assert that"““the civil service's relationship with government has long been recognised as more complex than simply being the enthusiastic instrument of government policies. Politics is separated from the administration in this country, but the two must, can and do work together””," whether on the location of desks in Downing street or on major procurement projects in the IT sector. I agree with the Committee that"““The task is to get ministers and civil servants working together effectively, not to lock them into potentially antagonistic bunkers.””" I can perhaps see why the Committee was tempted to recommend a new governance code in order to be explicit about the legitimate expectations and duties of both parties, rather like Einstein searching for a unifying theory. The Home Office compact was a good idea. It has worked, and people tell me that it has worked well. I said that I do not think that the case has necessarily been made for a unifying code, but I do not think that there is anything wrong with Departments supplementing existing codes as the Home Office did. If we can build a body of evidence to show that that has helped to create efficiency, that might be something we should consider in future.