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OFFICIAL REPORT (Hansard) Public Accounts Committee OFFICIAL REPORT (Hansard) Inquiry into Capacity and Capability in the Northern Ireland Civil Service: Mr Ian Watmore, First Civil Service Commissioner (GB) 4 March 2021 NORTHERN IRELAND ASSEMBLY Public Accounts Committee Inquiry into Capacity and Capability in the Northern Ireland Civil Service: Mr Ian Watmore, First Civil Service Commissioner (GB) 4 March 2021 Members present for all or part of the proceedings: Mr William Humphrey (Chairperson) Mr Roy Beggs (Deputy Chairperson) Mr Cathal Boylan Ms Órlaithí Flynn Mr Harry Harvey Mr David Hilditch Mr Maolíosa McHugh Mr Andrew Muir Mr Matthew O'Toole Witnesses: Mr Ian Watmore Civil Service Commission Mr Stuart Stevenson Department of Finance Mr Kieran Donnelly Northern Ireland Audit Office The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): Good afternoon, Mr Watmore. We can hear you loud and clear. You are very welcome to the Northern Ireland Assembly Public Accounts Committee (PAC). In a moment, I will ask you to make a short presentation, and then, if you would be so kind, you can answer questions. Mr Watmore, so that you know, in attendance from the Northern Ireland Audit Office (NIAO) are Mr Kieran Donnelly, the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG); Mr Rodney Allen, a director of that office; and Mr Stuart Stevenson, the Treasury Officer of Accounts (TOA), who joins the meeting remotely. The floor is yours, Mr Watmore. Mr Ian Watmore (Civil Service Commission): Very good. Thank you very much, everybody. I hope that you are well this afternoon. I will not keep you long with opening remarks. The job of First Civil Service Commissioner was established back in 1855. In that period, the Civil Service of the day was judged to be a mixture of incompetence and nepotism. The so-called Northcote-Trevelyan principles were established for open, fair, meritocratic recruitment and professionalisation of the Civil Service etc. In order to make that happen, the Civil Service Commission was established. I have 24 predecessors, the first of whom, I think, started in 1855. I think that I am the twenty-fifth person to hold the job. I have held it for nearly five years. These days, we have a five-year fixed term. My term is up in September, so I am four and a half years through my five years. For over a century — for 150 years, really — the principles of the Civil Service Commission were done by custom and practice. They were finally put in statute in 2010 under the Constitutional Reform and 1 Governance Act 2010 — "CRAG" as it is known — which was almost the last cross-party Act of the Gordon Brown Government before the 2010 election. That is the basis on which we operate today. The commission, as established by that Act of Parliament, has a variety of roles, responsibilities, methods of recruitment and all the rest of it. Principally, however, when it comes down to it, it exists to oversee two things: first, recruitment in the Civil Service; and secondly, the code of behaviour that civil servants operate to once they are inside the system. Far and away, the volume of work is associated with recruitment, but it is equally important that we address the code. When it comes to recruitment, the Civil Service that we cover, and I heard the question towards the end of the previous session that you asked of Deirdre, is the whole of the Civil Service in England, Scotland and Wales. That is all the big Whitehall Departments, such as the Home Office and the Treasury, plus the Scottish and Welsh Government's Civil Service teams. That is what we cover. The figure varies, but it is around 420,000 people. In a given year, average recruitment into the Civil Service is about 10%, so around 40,000. In a peak year, it has been nearer 60,000, but let us assume that it is 40,000 for the purposes of this conversation. That is what we are governing. We need to assure ourselves that those 40,000 people are recruited into the Civil Service openly, fairly and on merit. We do that by laying down recruitment principles, which are published documents that you can read at your leisure. Those recruitment principles are then devolved for the vast majority of that 40,000 recruitment to Departments. Departments then do their own recruitment against the principles. We audit them on an annual basis and mark them in our annual report as to whether they have been compliant, noting breaches and that sort of thing. When we talk about the very senior end of the spectrum, we are talking about people at the Civil Service grade of permanent secretary at the top; of director general, which is the old deputy secretary job next down; and of director, which is the third tier of the Civil Service. We are talking about all permanent secretaries, all director generals, and the director cadre recruited from the outside, as opposed to those already in the system. It probably ranges from about 150 to 200 appointments a year in that group. The Civil Service Commission directly chairs the panels for those 200 people. I will call it 200 in round figures. I personally chair nearly all the panels relating to permanent secretary grade and another 100, which is 10 to 15 a year. The rest are spread amongst my team of commissioners. All panels operate to the same recruitment principles. When it gets to the most senior end of the spectrum, however, we directly chair the panels. Below that level, or in the case of directors within the system, Departments do the recruitment and make the appointments themselves. We audit them on a select sample basis. The Civil Service code has some elements that have to be there under the terms of the Act, such as impartiality and objectivity. The code is written by the Cabinet Office, but it has to have those elements in it. We operate as, if you like, a court of last resort on people's adherence to the code. If somebody in the Civil Service is deemed to have broken the code and is challenged on it, there is an initial investigation in the Department. Whatever the Department finds can be challenged to us as, if you like, a court of appeal. Very occasionally, we uncover something quite nasty. We have one or two examples of that, but, the vast majority of the time, we find that the code has either not been broken or, if it has been broken, it was done inadvertently and not maliciously. Generally, we feel good at the end of the year that recruitment is adhering to our recruitment principles and that the code is being upheld. That is incredibly important for the integrity and impartiality of the Civil Service going forward and for its professionalisation and ability to serve the public. When I came into post four and a half years ago — these will be my last opening remarks — I took all of that as read and took the advice of my predecessor. I had already been in the system and in the private sector, so I had experience of both sides of the coin. With my fellow commissioners, I judged that we should have some specific priorities for our five years in office, and we chose the following four, three of which I think are timeless. The first priority was that, whatever the big projects of the day are in the Civil Service, you sometimes have to take a slightly different approach. At the time when we came in, the whole Brexit thing was under negotiation. We had just had the referendum, so there were a lot of moving parts around the system to deal with then. More recently, there has been COVID. There is nearly always a big issue of the day around which you have to be flexible. The first area that I think is timeless is diversity. By diversity, I mean all aspects of diversity, such as gender, ethnicity, social mobility etc. The second area is what we call 21st-century skills, which are the sorts of things that the Civil Service usually buys in — I heard a little bit about that at the end of the previous session — from the marketplace at quite a high rate, when it could instead recruit and develop it for itself. By that, I mean 2 IT, digital and commercial skills: that sort of thing. It is about how we can enable more good people to come into the system with those skills. The third area, which is one that I am particularly proud of, is what we call our "Life Chances" programme. It was designed primarily to make the Civil Service truly representative of the society that it serves but also to give a chance to people from a difficult background, usually supported by government policy. We picked three cohorts to start with. The first was people who were in prison. As we all know, offending rates are massively impacted on by the chances of getting a job, and getting a job is hard when you are an ex-offender. We started to recruit people directly from prison into the Civil Service. The second group is military veterans. By that, I do not mean four-star military generals, but people coming back from Iraq and places like that. As we all know, those people often struggle to assimilate back into society and end up homeless and having difficult life experiences. The third group is care leavers: people who were brought up largely in care and from difficult backgrounds who are struggling to get work.
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