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CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT of ORAL EVIDENCE to Be Published As HC 644-I CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 644-i HOUSE OF COMMONS ORAL EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE THE PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION COMMITTEE THE FUTURE OF THE CIVIL SERVICE TUESDAY 8 JANUARY 2013 PATRICK DIAMOND, LORD HENNESSY OF NYMPSFIELD AND PROFESSOR CHRISTOPHER HOOD SEAN WORTH, RT HON. PETER RIDDELL AND ANDREW HALDENBY Evidence heard in Public Questions 1-82 USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT 1. This is a corrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others. 2. Any public use of, or reference to, the contents should make clear that neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to correct the record. The transcript is an approved formal record of these proceedings. 1 Oral Evidence Taken before the Public Administration Committee on Tuesday 8 January 2013 Members present: Mr Bernard Jenkin (Chair) Alun Cairns Charlie Elphicke Paul Flynn Kelvin Hopkins Greg Mulholland Priti Patel Mr Steve Reed Lindsay Roy ________________ Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Patrick Diamond, University of Manchester, Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield, Queen Mary, University of London, and Professor Christopher Hood, University of Oxford, gave evidence. Chair: May I welcome our three witnesses to this first session of evidence on the future of the Civil Service? Could I ask each of you to identify yourselves for the record? Professor Hood: I am Christopher Hood from the University of Oxford. Lord Hennessy: Peter Hennessy, Queen Mary, University of London, and the House of Lords. Patrick Diamond: Patrick Diamond from the University of Manchester. Chair: And a former special adviser in the Labour Government. Patrick Diamond: Yes, I was a special adviser in the previous administration between 2000 and 2005, and then between 2009 and 2010. Q1 Chair: Your perspective will be extremely interesting. Can I start by asking each of you just to say, in no more than three sentences, what is wrong with the Civil Service? What is going wrong with the Civil Service? What is your analysis of the issues that must be addressed by a Civil Service Reform Plan? Professor Hood: From my perspective, I have just done an analysis of 30 years of running cost control or the lack of it in the Civil Service, and what I found was that, over successive attempts to contain costs, running costs rose in real terms over that time. I think that is a major challenge for the Civil Service, but I do not think it is the only one. Q2 Chair: That would seem to be a symptom. What are the causes of that particular failing that represent the fundamental problem with the Civil Service? Professor Hood: It is something to do with the way that management works, as between the professionals and the politicians. Lord Hennessy: In the long sweep of the history of the Civil Service since Victorian times, when its modern shape was pretty well determined by Gladstone, it is 2 under-performance, because it is less than the sum of its parts. It has always attracted a remarkable array of gifted people but, somehow, it is always less than the sum of its parts. On top of that, the particular circumstance now that worries me is that the governing marriage, as one might call it, is in trouble. The governing marriage is essentially two groups of people, transient Ministers and career lifers, civil servants, but there is a half in it now—Patrick’s old trade, special advisers, who can sometimes make it even harder for the marriage to work. The marriage, to an outside observer like myself, at the moment seems to be in more trouble than usual. The relationships are particularly scratchy. The whole system depends on confident Secretaries of State and very confident senior civil servants if it is going to work. At the moment, there is a high degree of mutual antipathy, which is not completely widespread across Departments—of course it is not—but it is at a much higher level than usual. The Civil Service Reform Plan, particularly the section that I have no doubt we will come to, action 11 on ministerial choice in permanent secretaries and all that, reflects this lack of self-confidence on the part of the two governing professions and the particular scratchiness of the relationship since 2010. Q3 Chair: But what is the cause of that breakdown? Lord Hennessy: It has been long in the making because when you have a country that is in steep economic difficulty most of the time, there is a high level of disappointment and political life has its adversarial element at all times, there is a tremendous trouble when the country is in tremendous danger, or when a country is in some trouble, of mutual scapegoating. The easiest target for Ministers who are not up to it, who are exhausted, or who feel immensely got at by everybody, is to blame the servants. I used to say in the old days—in the Thatcher years actually, when we had a version of this although it was different from the version we are now looking at—that the First Division Association should put in a bid for extra pay, the national scapegoating premium, because they are always blamed by Ministers first. It usually happens halfway into a Parliament. It is almost on cue this time, two to two and a half years in. The first people you blame is the press office, because “The message is terrific; it’s just you tossers are no good at putting it out.” The second group of people you blame is the career Civil Service as a whole, so the coalition has been absolutely on cue, but it is scratchier than it has usually been in the past. Q4 Chair: You seem to be saying that this is a problem of leadership. Lord Hennessy: Yes, there is, in both senses, because the self-confidence point covers that. You have to have some very self-confident Ministers who want a group of self-confident civil servants, who really are going to speak truth unto power, to spare you nothing, to always and everywhere tell you what you need to know rather than what you wish to hear. That requires leadership on both sides of the governing marriage. I do not think the permanent secretaries are in particularly good nick either. Chair: We are using a lot of colons and semi-colons in our three sentences. Patrick Diamond: I will just add to what has been said and make two very brief comments. The first is that I think one would have to understand that the context in which Civil Service performance is being assessed has changed, in some ways quite radically, over the last 30 years. To give one more concrete example, I would say that the increasing focus on delivery in government and the capacity of the Civil Service to contribute towards the delivery of public services and state services as a whole is a relatively recent development. It did not start under the Labour administration; it began, in some respects, under John Major’s Government in the 1990s and has been developed and accelerated since then. That has changed quite significantly wider sets of political and public expectations about what the public service and the Civil Service are expected to deliver. 3 The only other point I would add briefly is that one has to make assessments of Civil Service performance in the context of the broader shape of the political system, and one would have to say the United Kingdom is a relatively centralised polity. The Civil Service is having to work within the context of a high degree of centralisation and central organisation of services, and that does affect the way in which it works. One has to have that broader context in making judgments about how the Civil Service performs. Q5 Chair: Peter Hennessy seemed to be saying that actually the politicians get the Civil Service they deserve. Patrick Diamond: Of course there is some truth in that, and Lord Hennessy is quite right to suggest that relationships between the Civil Service and politicians have become more contested and more contentious over the last 20 or 30 years for a wide variety of reasons, but with an important set of implications. Q6 Chair: Do we think the Government’s Reform Plan is going to address all these failings? Lord Hennessy: It would take a Second Coming to do that, Chairman. This Coalition has got virtues, but it ain’t in the business of the Second Coming is it? Professor Hood: To start with the problem that I adverted to, the cost issue, if you compare the reform document that we are speaking about with its equivalent 30 years ago, the “Efficiency in Government” reform paper that came from the Thatcher Government then, in that case the efficiency and reform plan put containing costs at centre stage. It did contain, in contrast to the 2011 document, some evidence about what was happening to costs and how they could be contained. It was, in that sense, a paper that contained more evidence and a clearer, more coherent argument; nevertheless, running costs rose under the Thatcher Government and did not fall. Q7 Chair: Does the Civil Service Reform Plan, in the view of each of our witnesses, set out a vision for the whole of the Civil Service about what the Civil Service is for, how it should be constructed, and how it should be led and governed? Professor Hood: May I comment on that? Chair: Lord Hennessy shook his head or indicated dissent, as they say in Hansard.
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