How to be a Civil Servant

Civil Service Reform from 2010

Overview

This is the fifth of five notes about the reform of the UK civil service.

• The first note in the series describes the traditional "Westminster Model" of government in the UK, as augmented by the characteristics of the UK civil service first laid down by Northcote & Trevelyan.
• The second explains why governing has become so difficult in recent years, and how successive Governments have responded in a number of ways, incuding by attempting to reform the civil service.
• The third looks at civil service reform from the 1960s through to the present day, and explains why very little has in fact changed.
• The fourth note goes into more detail, describing various attempts to "reform" the UK civil service after the election of the Labour government in 1997 through to the Putting the Frontline First: smarter government proposals of December 2009.
• This, the fifth note in the series, summarises developments from early 2010, just before that year's general election.

Early 2010: Pressure for Change

The 1997-2010 Labour Government made no attempt to drive through fundamental reforms of the structure, culture or way of operating of government, though some would argue that there was reform through stealth, in the way in which both Messrs Blair and Brown concentrated decision making in the hands of a small number of (mainly non-civil service) advisers. Instead, Labour Ministers concentrated on improving the efficiency and capability of the civil service. But there was growing pressure for change, marked in particular by the publication of four reports, in the run up to the 2010 general election, aimed at the incoming government and recommending certain fundamental changes in the way government policies were developed and debated, and in the relationship between Ministers and officials.

It is true, of course, that all governments face criticism of the way in which they reach decisions. Governments and Prime Ministers that are admired by some for being decisive are criticised by others for taking 'knee-jerk' decisions without adequate analysis and consultation. But governments and Prime Ministers who deliberate at length, and consult all shades of opinion, run the risk of being portrayed as weak and feeble, and lacking leadership skills. This tension became more obvious during the Blair/Brown years from 1997 to 2009 when both Prime Ministers felt that they needed to both speed-up and centralise decision-making in order to respond to public and media pressure to 'do something' about the issue of the day, and to overcome what they saw as the natural inertia of the Government machine. The inevitable reaction was increasing levels of concern about incompetent 'sofa government' in which wise and carefully considered civil service advice was said to be squeezed out by knee-jerk advice from political advisers and others.

The criticisms were led by a number of ex-civil servants (some of whom set up the Better Government Initiative) but supported by an interesting mixture of others, including ex-Minister Lord Sainsbury (who set up the Institute for Government) and senior figures from the regulated and banking sectors which were perhaps more aware of poor government decision making than others in the business community. But the movement also drew strong support from those who criticised decision-making in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, as well as scientists and other academics concerned that their advice - for instance on drugs policy - was being ignored for short term political advantage.

The four reports were as follows.

• 1. The Trust Report was originally prepared for the Regulatory Policy Institute in the summer of 2009 but the Institute was concerned that it strayed too far into political territory. It was accordingly published independently by its authors who argued that too much of the best Whitehall talent is directed towards keeping the Government in power. Their report had two key themes:
  • taking the politicking out of politics:- that is the need to draw a clearer distinction between the political game and policy making/management, and
  • improving trust by demonstrating that decisions have been made transparently and by those best placed to make them, and through more effective accountability and greater accessibility.

  The report was very wide-ranging but the key recommendations with the greatest impact on civil servants were:

  1. The government should publish protocols defining the roles and responsibilities of Ministers and officials: while decisions on policy would rest with Ministers, policy making should be recognised as an iterative process between Ministers and advisers, and policy management should be attributed between Ministers and Civil Service and other advisers.
  2. Every department should have a Trust Board which would set objectives, policy parameters and budgets, would be responsible for governance, and would be accountable and legally liable for all the activities of the department.
  3. Ministers and Permanent Secretaries should jointly have to attest that any decision has been fairly based on the available evidence.
  4. 5 to 10% of the worst-performing staff should be replaced every year.
  5. The National Audit Office should be given a duty to audit the decisions underpinning resource allocation, so as to constrain Ministers from making pork barrel decisions.
  6. there should be a pilot of online questioning of Ministers and senior officials by panels of experts, who would invite the public to submit questions. Similarly, all parliamentary investigative committees should adopt the innovation of the Treasury Select Committee, which invited the public to send in questions for a session with the Chancellor, Bank of England and the FSA.
  7. The essence of options presented to Ministers should be published so as to allow Parliament and public to assess whether Ministers have departed from advice and to seek explanations if they have not been given.

  All these recommendations raise some tricky issues to do with Ministers sharing power and accountability with civil servants. Would Ministers be happy for the world to know that their principal advisers did not agree with some of their decisions? Would there be pressure on civil servants to hide their differences with their political masters?

• 2. The Institute for Government published Shaping Up: A Whitehall for the Future in January 2010. Its principal recommendations were that:
  • "The Centre" - that is the Cabinet Office and the Treasury - needed to refocus on its traditional roles of coordinating strategy across government. (This would require decentralisation from the sofas of No. 10 Downing Street, the strengthening of the Cabinet Office, and the refocusing of the Treasury's efforts on the macro-economic picture picture and big budget setting, and ceasing micro-management of other departments.)
  • Improved governance of government departments, mainly through the strengthening and increased accountability of departmental strategy and management boards. (This again raises some tricky issues to do with Ministers sharing power and accountability with non-executive board members and with civil servants - see the paras re Departmental Boards, below.)
  • Improved joint-working across government (which requires Ministers to be willing to compromise and share credit with political rivals running other departments.)

• 3. Later the same month, the Better Government Institute published Good Government: Reforming Parliament and the Executive. Sue Cameron, writing in the Financial Times noted that the report, written mainly by retired Permanent Secretaries, was implicitly very critical of the Blair/Brown way of governing, arguing that collective cabinet responsibility is essential "to prevent a PM - or any other minister - from taking significant decisions, even to go to war, effectively unchecked by their colleagues". The authors also condemned so-called 'sofa government' particularly at the Treasury, where officials were sidelined. Pretty much the only way to Chancellor Gordon Brown was through his special advisers, which meant that much sensible advice from other government departments was simply never heard. But, to be fair to Ministers, the first chapter of the report does contain an interesting summary of the political and media pressures that encouraged these behaviours and the report, although again wide-ranging, in fact recommended rather less substantive change than the two reports summarised above. This was perhaps unsurprising, given its authorship. In particular, there was no suggestion from the ex-mandarins that their successors should share accountability with Ministers, nor that 5-10% of them should be sacked each year! Instead, the report's authors drew particular attention to the need to, amongst other things:
  • base policy on evidence and front-line experience
  • reduce the involvement of the centre of government in departments' operations to the necessary minimum
  • minimise and justify changes in machinery of government, delivery structures and appointments
  • require checks by the relevant Cabinet Committees that proposals for legislation meet required standards
  • have a legislative programme no bigger than Parliament can scrutinise
  • set explicit standards for preparation of Bills and other major proposals
  • ensure parliamentary oversight of compliance with such standards
  • provide better opportunities for Select Committees to present reports and propose substantive motions
  • reinforce civil service skills for the commissioning and performance management of services
  • strengthen departmental governance (see the paras re Departmental Boards, below)
  • ensure that impartial civil servants have an opportunity to provide advice which receives fair consideration by Ministers

  There is some interesting data in the report and its annexes, including the fact that most Ministers only last three years before returning to the back benches - during which time they often have two ministerial posts. Many have never actually run anything in their lives. Sue Cameron noted that Sir Richard Mottram, a former top official at the Ministry of Defence and a signatory to the report, once recalled seeing a new Cabinet Minister turn green when told he was responsible for 400,000 people and a budget of £30bn. The largest number of people the man had managed before was three!

• 4. The House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution published its report on The Cabinet Office and the Centre of Government on 29 January 2010. It did not make any particularly surprising or far-reaching recommendations, but simply encouraged more 'transparency and accountability'. The report nevertheless provided a huge amount of interesting information about the way 'The Centre' [of Government] operates in the UK. The report includes the evidence of a number of eminent witnesses, many of whom made coded (or sometimes not so coded) criticisms of 'sofa government' and dysfunctional relations between the post-1997 Cabinet Office, the Prime Minister's Office, the Treasury and other departments, whilst other witnesses (noticeably Cabinet Secretary Gus O'Donnell and Prime Minster's Permanent Secretary Jeremy Heywood) made a spirited defence of the system, and noted that many of the critics seemed to have a rather over-rosey view of the the effectiveness of previous governments' Cabinets and supporting staff.

Departmental Boards

It is interesting to note that both the Institute for Government and the Better Government Initiative followed the Trust Report in recommending improving departmental governance and the strengthening of departmental boards. But there are some differences. The Trust Report had focussed on what would be needed to improve trust in government and government processes. The two later reports concentrated instead on effective public administration. The Trust report therefore offered a vision of strong departmental boards with collective responsibility - and public accountability - for policy development and delivery, whereas the two later reports see the boards more as internal management bodies. Either way, however, the creation of strong boards has serious implications for both Ministers and senior officials. The following extract from the Better Government Institute report summarises the arguments particularly well, even if some would go further, and some would go less far, than is recommended:

"Much effort has gone into trying to clarify the boundaries of ministerial accountability and the division of responsibilities between ministers and officials. The Public Administration Select Committee's report in 200724 showed the difficulties in seeking to do so. It is not practicable to make absolute distinctions between ministerial and official roles in terms of developing strategy and formulating policy; but there could be benefits in delineating more clearly the roles of ministers and civil servants in departmental management, and clarifying and strengthening the advisory role of non-executive directors.

The guidance document 'Corporate governance in central government departments: Code of good practice', issued by HM Treasury in 2005, provides a helpful starting point. The minister in charge of the department is responsible to Parliament for the exercise of the powers of that department; and the permanent secretary/head of the department, as its Accounting Officer, is also responsible to Parliament for the use of public money. Departmental boards and their non-executive directors have advisory roles rather than the accountabilities of a company's board.

The dual personal responsibilities of the minister and the head of the department are we believe valuable for governance in central government, including for propriety and value for money in the use of resources. In terms of the management dimension of the work of a department, the division could be seen as akin to that of the chair of the board and the chief executive in a company. Non-executives were often originally brought in to departments to supply expertise not available in the civil service and tended (though not in every case) to sit on boards chaired by the head of department. The role has since evolved into a stronger challenge function and the company analogy would suggest the minister rather than the head of the department should chair the board.

We see potential merit in this change. Its success is likely to depend upon a shared understanding of their respective roles by the minister and the head of department. The minister's role would be to act as non-executive chair of a board concerned with strategy, business planning, and performance management, not as executive chair of a body micro managing the department. The head of department would be expected to fulfil all the responsibilities of a chief executive, not to act as company secretary. The board should not become involved in the detail of day-to-day policy issues, on which the non-executives, particularly if drawn principally from the private sector, are likely to have little to offer. It would address significant delivery issues on existing operations and performance against budget. Looking to the future, it would concentrate on the portfolio of major programmes and projects, ensuring that programme planning, project management, and delivery models are effective; costs, benefits, timescales and risks are realistically assessed; and that proposed delivery models are appropriate. Below the board the head of department would chair an executive committee responsible for the management of the department.

Departments operate in a political environment. Hard and fast rules are unlikely to survive all circumstances or the skills and inclinations on ways of working of individual ministers. While there is a case for adopting a two-tier model with a strategy board chaired by the secretary of state, and an executive committee chaired by the head of department, other models should not be ruled out. For example, the board might be chaired by a senior non-executive director, with access to the minister, as already happens for the boards of trading funds and some other executive agencies. Whatever the precise structure, the non-executive directors should have periodic access to the minister in charge of the department on the performance of the management team and on the management of risk by the department."

Martin Stanley

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