Martin
Donnelly, Permanent Secretary at the UK’s Department for Business (= Economics
Ministry), speaking to the Institute for Government on 30 June, set out in a characteristically
thoughtful and elegant way a defence of the traditional framework. Deliberately
or not, it read as pre-emptive retaliation to Cabinet Office Minister Francis
Maude, who it transpired, had already denounced
to the Cabinet a memo purporting to set out the
roles of permanent secretaries and the permanent civil service. There has been a round of broader comment
from people like Janan Ganesh in the FT (£), Dominic Cummings on his blog, and Giles Wilkes,
an ex-SpAd colleague at BIS.
What
is a reasonable person interested in government meant to make of all this?
I
think all sides overstate their case.
But, putting my cards on the table, I am more with Ganesh and Cummings
than with the proponents of the perfection of the current system, though for
slightly different reasons. I left
government unconvinced by the current system and have come to think it in need
of reform.
I’ll
explain why, but let Martin Donnelly put the traditional view first. His defence of the system rests on three premises. First,
that officials need to be professionally committed to Ministers, but within
mutually understood boundaries, based on independence but an appropriate degree
of mutual trust. Second, that this collaborative relationship can deliver the best
possible outcomes within a given political space, provided that officials
understand their limited advisory role and that Ministers can give room to their
different perspective. Third, that wider society gets a good
deal, provided the civil service can accept limits on its monopoly of advice
and communicate with the wider world without usurping Ministers’ ultimate
democratic legitimacy and profile.
What
could be wrong with this? Capable people
serving Ministers professionally and helping them reach the best possible
decisions?
Nothing
– if it were really like that.
The
fundamental problem is not that this is a poor system. It is that it requires super-paragons of the
virtues to operate it in the way it’s meant to.
In a way the Maude document illustrates that. Who could possibly incarnate all the
requirements set out in it to be a good permanent secretary? Anyone who could would be wasting their time
on a permanent secretary’s salary. In
reality of course people are not like that, either at permanent secretary level
or at any other. That is simply human
nature.
So
what’s the problem? There are lots of
issues: the infinite demand for civil servants’ work, the overload this causes
for dedicated officials, and the readiness to accept second best in too many
areas. But here I want to highlight just
three aspects.
First,
the very size and opacity of the system encourages everyone to find informal
ways round the formalities.
Nowadays
every Minister is responsible for the work of hundreds if not thousands of
officials and therefore unable to exercise any day to day oversight or even
know most of the people who work for them. Moreover, analysis and advice on
major questions from such large teams takes time to assemble and to put to
Ministers. Yet Ministers are exposed to
the 24/7 media calendar and frequently have to take decisions rapidly. In doing so they look for people to advise
them whom they can trust and whose judgement they respect.
In
these circumstances it is absolutely inevitable that Ministers will reach out
for sympathisers and that ambitious officials will seek to make themselves stand
out to Ministers. I’m oversimplifying
obviously, but by and large simple cleverness or administrative excellence is
not on its own enough for recognition or progress, because, as Martin Donnelly points
out, the administrative timetable is longer-term than the political one. Try to prove to a Minister that you can
deliver good administrative results, and the odds are they will have been
reshuffled long before the results become visible. Signal to a Minister that “I get it, I share
your goals, I will make the system work for you”, and be effective in managing
the system in their interests, and a Minister will spot it. In other words, the system selects for people
who don’t work the system as it should work, not those who do.
It is
when Ministers invest such officials with particular authority that the system
deforms and officials playing by the rules find themselves outflanked and
unable to make an impact. An alert
Permanent Secretary can stop Ministers promoting officials unreasonably, but
cannot stop them investing sympathetic officials with informal authority or
listening to them disproportionately.
Damian McBride’s picture of the
Treasury under Gordon Brown describes exactly this situation in its most
extreme form.
Second, the current system selects
against those who are sceptical about government’s role.
The
civil service is not party political and indeed officials within it are usually
discreet about their own political opinions.
But massive modern government is bound to draw to it individuals who
believe in a role for government and get satisfaction from operating the levers
it gives them. Officials are less
likely than the average to believe that government action is worthless, prone
to error, or just less good than alternatives. They are more likely to believe
evidence that government is effective and to downplay or discount evidence that
goes in the other direction. So the
reflex of the system is – “here’s a problem – and here’s what we can do to help
you fix it.” That didn’t matter a
hundred years ago when the Government only spent 5% of GDP anyway. Now it spends half the country’s wealth and
no area is ring-fenced off. Anyone who
says “the solution is for you to stop doing things and let others act” is going
against the grain.
For
that reason it’s wrong to think that Departments have “departmental” policy
that that they pursue regardless of what Ministers want. But officials in them have a real interest in
their Department’s continued existence and, where possible, in expanding their
own influence. That’s because the value of an official’s work can’t easily be
determined by outputs, so people resort to other measures to determine status.
Closeness to Ministers (above) is one of those measures, but so is the breadth
of your policy areas and the number of people working for you. Where policy
choices go with that latter grain, they are more easily pursued. I suspect that if Michael Gove’s reform plans
had involved a powerful central bureaucracy implementing his vision, he’d have
found it bureaucratically much easier to get things done than by shrinking the
DfE and letting schools make their own decisions (though of course the reform
would have been much less effective).
Equally, is it coincidence, for example,
that the – misplaced - enthusiasm for “industrial policy” comes from the
Department (BIS) that has the biggest role in implementing it in practice?
Incidentally,
that’s why “reforms” to the machinery of government tend to make things worse
rather than better, because existing interests make it hard to implement simple
reforms in a simple way. I’ll save the
example I know best in this area, trade, for another day.
Third, the system is not compatible
with modern needs for transparency and openness.
It is
getting harder and harder to manage the contradiction between retaining a ring-fenced
policy-making space and keeping broader confidence in the system through
transparency. Ministers already lack
confidence in policy made solely “in house”, and encourage reaching out to
outside experts. Moreover, social media
has become more important in communicating government, and successful
communication in this area requires “personality”, the sense of an individual
behind it, not wooden signed-off tweets and no interactivity. Indeed the system is already adjusting and
many senior officials – Permanent Secretaries, Chief Scientists, Chief Vets,
ambassadors, chief economists, and so on - are semi-visible media figures
nowadays, asked to communicate policy in an engaging and convincing way. That is already usurping the role
traditionally that of Ministers. In the
modern world, there is no going back.
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