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There is no such thing as a neutral Whitehall Samuel Brittan Financial Times 25/08/06 There have been numerous reports on the British civil service. Nearly all of them have been marred by two basic faults. The first is that they have had very little to say about the politicians who are meant to give the policy lead. Second, they have spoken in a vacuum about the formation of policies, without specifying examples of what these policies are and whether they could be different. In other words, they fail to investigate what Keynes called the agenda and non-agenda of government. A report just published by the Institute of Public Policy Research (Whitehall’s Black Box by Guy Lodge and Ben Rogers) marks an improvement in one respect. It does at least deal with the interaction of politicians and civil servants. But it stands clear of the arguments about political advisers, remarking that their proliferation is "a response, perhaps short-sighted, to the fundamental shortcoming in the way Whitehall is governed". The remarkable thing is that, after all these inquiries and many attempted reforms, very much the same criticisms are still levelled. There is still a lack of accountability – apart from the theoretical and confidential responsibility to ministers. No individual is praised or blamed for any achievement or failure and new entrants are still admonished never to give the slightest indication that they disapprove of a minister’s policies. Officials stay for far too short a time in any one job to get to know it properly – rather like some journalists. And they are too easily captured by the interest groups they are supposed to regulate. In recent years there has indeed been a drive to switch senior officials’ attention from whispering into ministers’ ears to "delivering". This has been called the new public management role, which has tried rather clumsily to ape the private sector, substituting targets for profit and loss. It has been only a partial success. Who is more likely to enter the higher civil service? Someone with a knack for supervising the running of an unwieldy hospital or bringing round a failing school, or the "Yes, Minister" type who can make politicians appear slightly more sensible than they would otherwise be? The IPPR study concentrates on the top echelon of 3,900 civil servants, or less than 1 per cent of the total, who make up the "Whitehall village" that deals with policy. This is clearly more fun than discussing the supervision of the Newcastle Social Security headquarters. But it is legitimate fun. Most of the IPPR evidence is gained from non-attributable interviews with senior civil servants. As in previous inquiries, the interviewees have been adept at coining brilliant aperçus but with few examples of their work. The study lays out two alternative directions of reform. One is to accept the idea of a politically appointed higher civil service but to reintroduce the concept of “due process” which Tony Blair is incapable of understanding. The other is to go back to the idea of a truly neutral civil service that will, as the saying goes, “speak truth to power”. It comes out in favour of the second option, with a few suggestions in the other direction, such as making it a little easier for ministers other than the prime minister or chancellor to veto civil service choices for new permanent secretaries, as the chancellor did not very long ago. But the main weight of the recommendations is on the formation of no less than two high-level, non-political boards, one a governing body which would be responsible for the integrity of the civil service and the other a centralised executive for managing officials. It would be difficult to devise a better recipe for stagnation. Such boards would be bound to consist of the Great and the Good, hidebound by the fashionable ideas of their own time. Twenty or 30 years ago they would have regarded anyone who queried incomes policy as the answer to inflation as an oddball. They would have been written off in the same way as someone who believed in European union in the 1950s or who was sceptical of it more recently. There is a further fallacy, which the late Harry Johnson called the Fabian-Benthamite idea of government as disinterested individuals intent only on the public good without the mixture of motives that operates in other spheres. This model leads to federal departments such as the Ministry of Defence, as distinct from the old competing War Ministry, Admiralty and Air Force. An alternative model is to accept that officials, like businessmen, compete for power, influence, reward and prestige and hope that slightly better results might emerge from that competition. The most important bastion of the unreformed civil service is the doctrine that advice given by officials is on a par with the secrets of the confessional and must on no account be revealed, thus giving the advisers that power without responsibility which has been the privilege of a certain type of lady throughout the ages. Until this citadel is breached most other reform is in vain.
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