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Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

As a former senior civil servant myself, I find this clause to be very unusual. I cannot imagine any occasion on which the chief executive of an agency that is entirely within the Civil Service structure would need directions from a Secretary of State of the kind just described by the Minister. Every senior civil servant knows that they must keep within Treasury rules in terms of finance, so it seems odd to say that the Secretary of State would tell him, because it would be assumed that she or he would do so. As for giving directions, the Secretary of State gives directions to all his or her civil servants because they are there to serve their Ministers. Whether or not they have moved one step away into an agency does not in any sense remove them from the obligation to perform within the rules of the Civil Service, including the Treasury rules, and according to the will and wishes of the Secretary of State. I find it strange that this has been put into the Bill. I understand the motivation, a noble one, to wish to make the agency as freestanding as possible, but in terms of the Secretary of State directing it on the kind of thing the Minister has described, that is simply unnecessary and, I think, a genuine precedent in legislation.