On Tuesday, I gave evidence to the Public Administration Select Committee as part of its inquiry into the future of the civil service. I was appearing alongside Professors Anthony King (Essex) and Matthew Flinders (Sheffield). Anyone wishing to watch the session can do so here, though to make sense of some of my comments you also need to read my written evidence (available in the list of written submissions here).
Civil servants have been generalists. The problem is that so too have been ministers. Civil servants need to be better grounded in the subject matter of their Departments (something recommended by the Haldane report in 1918). However, when it comes to improving the quality of governance in the UK, the civil service cannot be seen as a discrete entity. There is a constitutional dimension, not least in terms of parliamentary accountability. Civil servants need to have a better understanding of the role of Parliament. Ministers also need to have a better understanding of their role as ministers. Too often senior ministers are left to reinvent the wheel when it comes to running Departments. There needs, in short, to be training of both civil servants and ministers. Enhancing the managerial efficiency of the civil service – which is the thrust of the Government’s proposals for reform – may be necessary, but it is not sufficient.
V sad to hear Baroness Trumpington has had a fall. I do hope she is back on her feet v soon.
Tory boy: She is back in action.
It’s an irrelevance.
The incompetents in Westminster and Whitehall have run up debts that can’t be paid.
They know that, so they have hidden the debts.
The plan is to loot as much money as possible until it goes tits up, leaving people destitute.
For example between 2005 and 2010, the state pensions debt went up by 736 billion a year. That’s not the 5 year figure, its the per year figure.
And the Lords don’t do anything. To busy claiming for days they don’t turn up, and then getting it made a state secret.
Ministers also need to have a better understanding of their role as ministers.
In 1997 junior ministers at first had NO understanding of their role, and some only a few weeks understanding of parliament itself, as members. There was a similarly large turnover in 2010.
Civil servants need to be better grounded in the subject matter of their Departments Would that make them any less empire builders than they are now, viz DSS 1970s onwards? I think the civil servants know the subject matter thoroughly but the ministers are not capable of knowing whether they are or not! I shall read the debate link later.
Thinking about Vince Cable’s career in the DTI, such progression through department to
HofC membership, is a thoroughly desirable one, a la mode Francaise, which others would do well to emulate, and NOT become ministers in the HoL as a substitute. Unfortunately the kudos of the HofL is one that impresses the Civil service like nothing else, being London Times Readers, who have a certain undesirable jargon which they are keen to imitate; clergy and civil service! Thus they are themselves confused by the false values of the HofL, and do no parliamentary work at all, of any value.
But the constitution is suspended because there is no one to interpret it. Lord Tyler blocks a post advising of irregularities in SSM committee proceedings. His party presents the SSM bill to Parliament knowing it is deeply divisive. Why?! Because voters’ NOT knowing the sexual inclination of the candidates being voted for will see them desert the polling booths by the thousands thereby keeping the Liberal Democrats in perpetual coalition as part of government.
A big civilisationally-pragmatic problem with all professional career-ladders is that lack of ongoing real-life-striving
together with privilieged privacy and protectionism
disconnects career-ladder-climbers from the needs and sustainworthily-affordable hows of both the Materials-&-Enablements Supplying- Workplace and the Consumer Lifeplace.
This a mite worse than just “habitual complacency”; it becomes outright and ‘class’ “blindness”**.
[ ** the first of the ‘eight deadlier sins’ listed in the Christian Anglican Book of Common Prayer Litany is “blindness of heart” ]
– and that is the disability that befalls practically all multiple-human-living professions especially, I would suggest, in this present limited, and limiting context, a propos “Reforming the Civil Service”.
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Australia for instance has spent hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money upon having their Public Service ( = UK Civil Service) middle-management extra-trained in “Cooperative Conflict Resolution” ( a step more difficult than the first-resort Friendly Method III of win-win-win Cooperative Problem Solving)
only to thereafter still require full use of the traditional mainstream Directive Skills, which being one-way ‘top-down’ outright prevent the use of those additional “Participative” skills.
Come up-to-date 20 years later now 2013, and we are being even further suppressed vis a vis our Individual Human Development, not only vis a vis narrow-focused Workplaces
but by ostensibly ‘all-round-aware’ Social, Education, and Local-Community centres and religions.
We are left in a ‘total-ignorance’, suppressed in individual-human-development including in such somatopsychic education advances and ‘new remediations’ as “The Busy Person’s Guide to Easier Movement”. Even minimal help is not made affordably available, for the individual to pursue these advances alone or, where the neighbourhood, community and local-civil-service authorities are unsupportyive or ‘ignorant’, as a ‘minority of one’ possibly ‘approved’ by some other Authority such as Westminster, the Eu or the UN.
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In a very real sense the Civil Service needs primarily to be an emulable-living-example to the many ‘levels’ of the Public they both serve and work-with-in-practise.
The other and ostensibly primary duty, that Civil Servants be completely subservient ’upwards’ to the Parliaments, Ministries and Judiciary, is not such a difficult nor big-ask: in any workplace sense, either you can do ‘the job’ or you can’t.
What really must happen in the very near future is a return to non professional politicians. That means locals who have become a candidate for office as a result of their work and time in their local community. Not what we have now, professional politicians who are pushed into a seat by their parties in Westminster.
We need people who understand their community and are willing to work on behalf of their constituents and know what it is those people want. He/she also must have a full knowledge and understanding of what his part of the world would benifit from and requires.
What we presently have is none of those things. We have people who are simply taken on as party members to follow the party line. They are out of touch with their own people and they are out of touch with life on the ground. Which is obvious when you track their fetish with same sex marriage and other issues the nation in general sees as an enigma. And what I read this morning is the Commonwealth forced our government to remove this expectation of the Human Rights Act in respect of their repugnance of it.
We have to return to the original notion of democracy. And this has to be right across Europe.
Get rid of the present House full of Richard Rich boys and make way for those who will genuinely serve the people they are their to represent in a democratic system.
What really must happen in the very near future is a return to non professional politicians.
And yet the party which campaigned in the mid 19thC to be paid for their political work as MPs was precisely the party which got most done for claiming too much in the way of expenses.
I am not sure that my own refusal to accept expenses in the 1990s had anything to do with an understanding that was what people do/did. It is a grim irony though that Gar who did so much and claimed nothing, is penniless, while those who do little and claim vast sums for going twice month get rich, and then get chucked out for corruption.
I fear, on a slightly different note, that the Hon Lady Maude Elwes’ definition of democracy a sused here has something to do with “freedom and democracy”£ (and Independence)
so called in the EP. I fear also that my opinion of that party has changed for the worse, with regard to National socialist parties in the EP since doing some research, as a consequence of her well intended abuse of my previous remarks.
“”Vince Cable’s career in the DTI, such progression through department to
HofC membership, is a thoroughly desirable one, a la mode Francaise, which others would do well to emulate, and NOT become ministers in the HoL as a substitute””
Vince’s recognition that the “elevation to the peerage” nonsense is a waste of civil service talent much needed in the other place(House of commons), is very valuable.
Most civil servants are “loyal” to the crown.
they want to go to a garden party across the
park, or be knighted for services, and the
career path is then to go to the house of lords, whereas they should really be going to the house of commons.
Lord Douglas Hurd may also be a useful example of somebody who made the transition from the civil service to Commons membership without difficulty, though I may be mistaken; he may merely have taken a desk in the FO, after joining the lords, in the same way as George Osborne’s father-in-law, Lord David Howell, did for a while. He may still be doing “minister in the house of Lords”. I have not looked recently. That is not the same however as starting one’s career in the civil service and ending it as an accomplished MP (ie not a peer).
A political family finds these things easier to do and understand than others, which is unfortunate since it produces elite families.
Dear Lord Norton,
I totally do agree with your point of view that civil servants do need training and I think that this measure will not only enhance the prospect of having self satisfactory levels in the public sector but also to ensure that promotion is given accordingly to all those who have followed a training. So this will be a win win case for both employers and employees. Congratulations.
God bless the United Kingdom. God save the Queen and the Lords.
Nazma FOURRE
The Civil Service is a staid bureaucracy. It dislikes disruptive step change and prefers instead incremental change. The difficulty for the service is that successive governments have lacked a consistent vision of where the country should be heading.
With vision you can plan ahead make the investments required. So how does the Civil Service plan ahead – it doesn’t. Training takes time, a long time, it cost money and requires a continuity of ministerial funded support. People are likely; the NHS is an example to leave the service very soon after the investment has been made.
MPs and Ministers are bureaucrats. The blind lead the blind.
New stuff on SSM: it seems that granting legal immunity from adultery imparts legal immunity to the perpetrator of rape within a male same sex marriage?
An incoming government should be able to appoint its own department heads, answerable to the minister and so to Parliament, on the understanding that it’s on a contract that expires a month or two after a general election to allow for a handover period to a new head should that be the choice of the new government. Having the top person selected that way would mean that there’s someone in the department who can devote full attention to furthering the government’s aims, and who has ideally been chosen as someone with good management experience in the field of interest. Give Parliament oversight of the appointment process, in a similar way to how the US appoints its management team every four years.
An incoming government should be able to appoint its own department heads, answerable to the minister and so to Parliament, on the understanding that
Interesting comment from Dave. My base line is 1997, when I found the “mass” change over fascinating, even if in doing so, I allowed that perfect labour seat in Gymro to slip through my hands!
There was a vast turnover of senior civil servants at the same time. A general election especially after one party has been in power for so long, is the sign to make a change of job, a big,big reshuffle of everyone, from the Civil Service managers upwards! If your head of dept is keen to join the peers or take a job as a director of ICI, unconnected with parliament, then there is a space to be filled, and so it goes on.
It can not be easy for senior civil servants suddenly to change “attitude” from accepting one public policy to an entirely different one. Time to make a move, or retire, or get the hell out, and that is what they do, at General election time.
We all have to make judgements about the outcome of a General election, senior civil servants as much as, if not more than, anybody.