Claims made on behalf of the agencies are that they have greatly increased efficiency, meeting around 75% of their targets. For example, the time it takes to process a passport has been reduced from an average of three and a half weeks to one week. The Benefits agency has consistently met tough targets set for it on clearance times and accuracy rates. The Conservative government also argued that the agency system made government more open by publicly setting out targets. The culture of the agencies has also been claimed to have transformed the attitude of civil servants, with individuals with whom they deal now seen as ‘customers’ with rights to an efficient and effective service. As with privatised industries and EGOs the Conservatives claimed that the Agencies provided a new concept of accountability as they are subject to a range of new regulating mechanisms, like the Citizens Charter.
In 1991 John Major introduced the Citizens Charter designed to raise the quality of service delivery and value for money in government departments, agencies, the NHS, nationalised industries, privatised utilities, and local government. In essence, the Charter initiative is about ‘empowerment’ of customers. Burch comments, ‘ ... organisations are encouraged to emphasise prompt service, openness, consumer research and a stronger voice for citizens. Service targets and methods of redress are published and organisations found at the leading edge of developments are rewarded with the charter mark of excellence’.
Rhodes suggests that the White Paper on The Citizen's Charter was Prime Minister John Major's 'Big Idea’. The Citizen's Charter contains six principles: published explicit standards; full and accurate information about running services; choice for the users of services; courteous and helpful service; effective remedies; and efficient and economical delivery of services. Theakston suggests that the Charter initiative was politically important to John Major because it was an attempt to make Conservative policies more popular and to give Major his own identity while showing continuity with the policies of Mrs Thatcher. Kenneth Clark coined the phrase ‘ Thatcherism with a human face’. By 1993, over 30 Charters had appeared in the public sector, including a Taxpayer’s Charter provided by the Inland Revenue. The Benefits Agency, Customs and Excise and the Employment Service also produced Charters.
One of the most controversial innovations has been market testing - an extension of privatisation by which services provided by central government organisations are assessed for cost and effectiveness by comparing the in-house provision with competitive bids from outside. It is a further development of Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT), previously applied to the NHS and local government. Burch says that the objective of market testing is to apply market pressure even to professional services (e.g. financial or statistical) within the civil service. The argument is that the very process of tendering will force activities to be costed and will shake out waste and restrictive practices. Hence, a slimmer, fitter and more efficient organisation will emerge. Burch notes that this highly controversial change followed from the 1992 White Paper, ‘Competing for Quality’ . The annual cost of running the Civil Service is £20 billion and it was decided that all government departments would be required to have their functions ‘market tested’ to discover if they could be carded out more cheaply and efficiently either within the public sector or by private firms.
Kevin Theakston has outlined the progress of this initiative, ‘..... 389 individual market tests with a total value of £1.1 billion had been completed by the end of 1993,
mostly covering support services (typing, payroll, libraries printing, and particularly IT and computing) but also including the MoD's atomic weapons establishment, the Police National Computer and the National Lottery. In-house civil service teams won 68 per cent of the work they were permitted to bid for. But in 113 test exercises in-house bids had not been allowed and the work had been contracted-out to a private firm; these cases accounted for £768 million of work. ... In November 1993 a new target to market test £800 million of work (covering 35,000 civil service jobs) over the next twelve months was announced. By January 1995, ministers were claiming savings of £400 million a year over the past two years from the market testing programme, representing average cost savings of 20 per cent. More than £2 billion of government work had been reviewed since April 1992, with more than £1 billion of it transferred to the private sector. A total of 54,000 civil service jobs had been reviewed and 26,000 posts lost ...... Half the work had been put out to the private sector without any competing in-house civil service bid; in-house teams had, however, won 73 per cent of the contracts they had been allowed to tender for.’ (‘The Civil Service since 1945’, p150-151). The White Paper, ‘The Civil Service : Continuity and Change’, in 1994, marked something of a retreat on market testing, dropping a centrally imposed programme and allowing each department and agency to draw up annual ‘efficiency plans’, and to decide for themselves the best means of achieving efficiency.
(iv) Changing the ‘culture’ of the civil service through promotion, recruitment and pay policy.
As part of their objective to transform the attitudes and priorities of civil servants, the Conservatives introduced a range changes in the methods of recruiting, paying and promoting civil servants at all levels. The civil service is no longer a unified service and major inroads have been made to the ‘career’ nature of the civil service.
Reforms between 1991-1996 gave managers in both government departments and agencies much greater freedom to recruit their own staff and decide on their pay and grading. From 1996 all pay and gradings have been the responsibility of individual agencies and departments and since as early as 1984 there has been a system of merit pay to reward individual performance. There has been a significant move to employ people on fixed-term contracts and to employ part-time staff to cut down on pay and pension costs . Deliberate attempts have been made to re-allocate personnel away from the South East, for example, the Benefits Agency Headquarters was moved from London to Leeds, with the intention of cutting costs. This is part of a system of reforms which aims to encourage individuals to see themselves not as part of the civil service as a whole, but as
part of a team working in a commercial environment, aiming to reach targets and showing enterprise and initiative.
These changes marked a clear departure from the traditional civil service where the assumption had been that the civil service needed to recruit people with broadly common qualities and that there was a common structure into which they would be recruited. Now there was a different approach, particularly in agencies, and a belief that each ‘business’ should recruit the kinds of people it needs and that senior managers should be directly involved in getting the right people into the right posts.
Following the Oughton Report, a new Senior Civil Service (SCS) was introduced in 1996, with each of the top civil servants (of around 3,500) having individual contracts and individually determined pay. Open competition’ (i.e. between members of the civil service and those in other fields, like business and commerce) now covers much of the senior civil service. Appointments to the post of chief executive of agencies are advertised and open to private sector applicants. Christopher Hood and Oliver James in their chapter, ‘The Central Executive’ in ‘Politics UK’, suggest that by the mid-1990s, one third of the top three grades in the civil service were subject to open competition with about 50% of posts going to ‘outsiders’. This has been particularly the case with agency chief executives.
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of attempts to change the culture of the civil service, was the alleged interventions of Mrs Thatcher to promote individuals in the senior civil servants who fitted in with her own political priorities. Campbell and Wilson underline why Mrs Thatcher was so determined to change the culture of the top civil servants, ‘Thatcher's temperament was at odds with most senior civil servants. As one who had a good working relationship with Thatcher said, 'You have to realise that for all her abilities, she was not at all intellectual. The dispassionate consideration of ideas that is prized in the civil service culture was the antithesis of her own style.' Yet Thatcher was reflecting wider, more enduring forces in her antipathy to the civil service than -merely her own beliefs or attitudes. The rise of the 'new right' had brought to power politicians such as Thatcher who viewed civil servants with as much antipathy as Labour left wingers and who had equally developed intellectual reasons for doing so. Civil servants were ..... necessarily enemies of the Thatcher revolution. Civil servants were imbued with attitudes that reflected the policy consensus that had prevailed since the Second World War. Civil servants were also imbued with 'departmental attitudes' that could conflict with Thatcherite beliefs ........ The Department of Education and Science (DES) had developed a tendency under both Labour and Conservative governments to share the
approaches and values of progressive educationalists ...... In brief, civil servants were suspect because they could be assumed to carry either the virus of the post-war consensus or because they carried the often equally dangerous virus of the 'departmental view’. Sir John Hoskyns, one of Thatcher's fervent supporters, argued that the traditional civil service was an inappropriate vehicle for the Thatcher revolution precisely because of its prized traditions of detachment and scepticism about policy proposals. The Thatcher revolution required commitment, not dispassionate analysis’.
David Richard’s meticulously researched study of the civil service under the Conservatives, provides an enormous range of evidence to show that one central aspect of Mrs Thatcher’s plans to transform the civil service was to intervene in the selection process for those officials at the very top of the service. He says that the notion that Mrs Thatcher appointed Conservative sympathisers is too simplistic but a more plausible assessment of the Thatcher approach to top appointments suggests that she appointed people with a 'can-do' reputation, like Peter Middleton, Robin Butler, Peter Levene, Peter Kemp and Clive Whitmore. Richards says that she aimed, ‘to induce a revolution from above, which would penetrate the lower tiers of Whitehall. She wanted her top lieutenants to engender into the lower ranks a whole new approach to going about their daily business. The emphasis was to be on efficiency, accountability and cost-cutting’ (p98). She was much more personally involved in appointments than previous Prime Ministers and felt a quick and effective method of change, was to re-style the type of individual at the top of the Whitehall pyramid and allow the effect of this to permeate through the remaining tiers of the organisation. She was in a hurry to make changes. Richards quotes former minister Ian Gilmour as saying that Thatcher, ‘ favoured people who provided her with solutions, even if they were not fully aware of the problems, over those whose knowledge pointed to difficulties .... The Prime Minister wanted civil servants to implement dogma, not to expose its errors’.
Campbell and Wilson suggest that the impact of this was that civil servants perceived that in order to succeed they had to change their understanding of their roles. The ambitious civil servant was well advised to play down policy advice particularly if it challenged the desirability of government policy. They say that the clearest public statement of how this process worked is given by Nigel Lawson in his memoirs, in which he describes the appointment of Peter Middleton as Permanent Secretary at the Treasury (Lawson, 1992). Lawson suggests that one candidate was passed over because of his unwillingness to make a total commitment to Thatcherite doctrines; another who was actually a Conservative lacked the ‘can do' style that Lawson and Thatcher favoured. Middleton was
promoted because of his willingness to take orders and follow the Government's line less critically than his rivals. Richards quotes from Lawson’s memoirs of 1992, ‘... the choice lay between two up and coming Deputy Secretaries, David Hancock and Peter Middleton. Hancock would almost certainly have won in a Treasury vote. I have no idea of what his politics were ... Discreet, civilised and knowledgeable in the ways of the Treasury and very Oxbridge, he was very much the mandarin's mandarin. He had been immensely sceptical of George Brown's Department of Economic Affairs and National Plan and was probably as sceptical of Tory radicalism. He was clearly not Margaret's type. In her view, the choice lay between Middleton and the Second Permanent Secretary in charge of Public Expenditure, Anthony Rawlinson. He was not only the best looking ... something that always cut ice with her. He was also the one undoubted Tory of the three. Middleton ... was not only an enthusiast for monetary policy. He strongly believed in supporting the government of the day - for instance in not thrusting an incomes policy down the throat of a Conservative government ... Moreover his interpretation of the constitution was essentially Prime Ministerial, believing that all other Ministers and officials should toe the line’.
(3) The Political and Constitutional Significance of Civil Service Reform
A number of significant issues have arisen because of the range of civil service reforms. There are concerns over:
* democratic accountability
* public service ethics ( one form of ‘politicisation’)
* the decline of the policy-advice role of top civil servants (also ‘politicisation’)
* the efficiency and effectiveness of the New Public Management techniques
(i) Democratic Accountabilty
Critics have been concerned about the fragmentation of elected institutions and their replacement by a complex hotch potch of arrangements with no clear focus of responsibility. The Conservative government claimed that reforms have made responsibilities for services clearer to the citizen as consumer and have established some effective mechanisms of redress which deal directly with the organisation responsible. However, they are related to protection of the individual in receipt of a service, not the decision about the level and quality of service appropriate for society as a whole. Accountability can become more obscure as
the responsibilities are devolved through executive agencies, their chief executives and on to private organisations which have contracted to undertake specific services. Traditional mechanisms by which government is called to account - such as the responsibility of ministers to parliament, House of Commons select committees and citizen representation to MPs - are straining under the new arrangements.
At the centre of the debate is the Conservative government’s claim to have separated policy making and policy delivery, especially in the formation of the Next Steps Agencies. William Waldegrave claimed that, ‘What we have done is to make a distinction between responsibility, which can be delegated, and accountability, which remains firmly with the minister. The minister is properly accountable for the policies he settles, and the service his department purchases or for which it contracts; those who have agreed to provide services are quite properly responsible for their provision. Thus, far from impairing accountability, I believe that the purchaser/provider separation, executive agencies and management by contract have helped to make a reality of it. Clear targets are set, performance is monitored and published, and success or failure is rewarded or penalised’ (‘Public Service and the Future : Reforming Britain’s Bureaucracies’, 1993, extract printed in ‘The Whitehall Reader’, ed. Barberis, 1996).
Critics suggest that a clear division between making policy and delivering policy cannot be made. This is because politicians will want to maintain control. Vernon Bogdanor says that those who deliver a service - the chief executive of an agency, the managers of a trust hospital, or the governors of a grant maintained school - work under constraints which have no counterpart in the business world. ‘They ..... remain under the authority of ministers whose political careers will depend upon the efficiency with which services are delivered. It is this political element which makes the separation of powers between policy-making and service delivery unworkable under our present constitutional arrangements. ...... What may seem a mere matter of administrative detail can have enormous political and electoral repercussions. if, for example .... small rural schools are being closed, the political standing of the government will be affected, and ministers will be pressed to intervene .... If no clear line can be drawn, then devolution to agencies will serve to blur accountability, not to clarify it. It will never be clear whether the failure to achieve a target is due to an ‘operational' factor - the inefficiency of an agency - or to a 'policy' factor - the interference of the minister. What is likely is that ministers will take the credit when targets are achieved, while officials will be given the blame when things go wrong’ ( 'Market must not sell democracy short', The Times, 7 June, 1993 and quoted in ‘The Whitehall Reader’, my emphasis).
Bogdanor further explores the constitutional issues that this blurring of responsibilities causes in his chapter on Ministers and Civil Servants in his collection, ‘Politics and the Constitution’. Ministerial responsibility to parliament means that it is he or she who is responsible for taking corrective action, for putting things right, and for ensuring that the department is run effectively. This is based on the assumption that the minister is able to scrutinise what is happening in the department, and can check on how civil servants in the department are conducting themselves. Bogdanor comments that it is this conception of ministerial responsibility which is under serious threat from the growth of executive agencies under the 'Next Steps' programme.
Bogdanor points out that the purpose of Next Steps Agencies is to devolve power away from Whitehall to the chief executives of agencies, who are given a substantial amount of autonomy through framework agreements, drawn up after consultation, between the minister, Whitehall officials and the chief executives themselves. The chief executive is the ‘accounting officer’ for operational matters within the agency, and, as such, directly accountable to Parliament. Those working in the agencies will be taking decisions far removed from ministerial scrutiny and oversight. That, indeed, is one of the main purposes of establishing them. So ministers will lose overall control and if the agencies are to enjoy genuine autonomy, it is hardly plausible to regard someone working in an agency in the traditional terms of constitutional theory as being merely the mouthpiece of his or her minister. Yet, Bogdanor comments, the introduction of the 'Next Steps' agencies has not been accompanied by any rethinking of the doctrine of ministerial responsibility. He quotes Mrs Thatcher’s statement to the House of Commons on 18 February 1988, when she declared, 'There will be no change in the arrangements for accountability. Ministers will continue to account to Parliament for all the work of their departments, including the work of the agencies.'
If ministers do intervene in the detailed work of the agencies, the purpose of setting them up - freeing civil servants from ministerial interference - will be defeated. Bogdanor says that it is inevitable that ministers will be tempted to intervene. There is therefore a danger that the 'Next Steps' programme will lead, not to clarification, but to a confusion of responsibility. Bogdanor says that this was certainly the case with the Prison Service (which is an agency) by Sir John Woodcock in his report on 'The Escape from Whitemoor Prison on Friday 9th September 1994'. Sir John found that 'There exists at all levels within the Service some confusion as to the respective roles of Ministers, the Agency Headquarters and individual Prison Governors. In particular, the Enquiry has identified the difficulty of determining what is an operational matter, and what is policy, leading to confusion as to where responsibility lies'. Although the Prison Service as an agency was meant to be free to manage its operations within a framework agreed with ministers every three years, the report revealed that over a random period of eighty-three days, the correspondence between the agency and ministers amounted to more than 1,000 documents (source: Andrew Gray and Bill Jenkin in their chapter on ‘Ministers, departments, and civil servants in ‘Politics UK).
On the other hand, if ministers are genuinely prepared to exercise self-restraint, then ministerial responsibility for the operational work of the agencies will come to have little meaning. ‘The danger is that the incoherent arrangements for constitutional responsibility for operational failures in the agencies will work in practice to prevent responsibility being pinned on anyone. It may become easier for ministers to pass the buck. It may also become easier for ministers to treat as an operational failure what is really a failure of government policy. There has been one constitutional reform (the written answers of chief executives to questions from MPs are now published in Hansard along with written answers from ministers) but Bogdanor says that the respective responsibilities of ministers and civil servants need to be reformulated. If there is to be genuine devolution, there must be a specific definition of the respective responsibilities of the minister and the chief executive. For example, the relationship between ministers and officials would need to be made explicitly contractual so that specific responsibilities were delegated to officials and put into statutory form. Thus the framework agreement would be converted into a legal document that would, in the last resort, be subject to judicial interpretation and might put the chief executive in a stronger position to resist ministerial interference.
(ii) Threats to Public Service Ethics of Party Political Neutrality
A number of incidents under the Conservative governments stretching from 1979-1997 raised doubts about the capacity of civil servants to resist government requests to fulfil party political, as opposed to government, functions. The essence of this view is that the civil service has increasingly been 'politicised' - for example, civil servants have been drawn into 'presenting' the facts in ways which suit the political party which happens to be the government of the day. Melanie Phillips (9.1.91) in the Guardian said that there is 'endemic corruption at the heart of government’, ' an intellectual corruption, the displacement of integrity in public service by routine deception and manipulation of the facts'.
Her central point is that the public service 'ethic' of serving the public interest regardless of the party in power has become blurred - for example, if Ministers appear on TV programmes like Question Time they receive briefings from all the government departments, even though they are appearing primarily as party representatives. Civil servants become deeply implicated in deception and evasion in the context of parliamentary questions. Phillips quotes Sir Patrick Nairne, 'Economy with the truth is the essence of a reply to a parliamentary question'. Civil servants are routinely embroiled in presenting figures in a way which favours the party political interests of the government. Government statisticians who are at the sharpest end of these dilemmas, told Phillips that they were no longer expected to produce information to further public and ministerial knowledge, only to support government policies. Hugo Young has given other examples of ministers asking civil servants to act inappropriately, for example Michael Heseltine pressing MI5 officers to produce anti-CND propaganda; civil servants in 1994 were allegedly asked to research speeches of ex-ministers then at odds with John Major and to research ministers party conference speeches.
The clearest evidence of the dilemmas faced by civil servants was revealed by the Scott Inquiry into the arms sales to Iraq, when several ministers were publicly re-stating the policy about not exporting arms or technical equipment capable of being used to manufacture arms, when export licences were being granted for machine tools clearly capable of weapons manufacture. Civil servants were involved in drafting parliamentary answers clearly designed to deceive parliament.
At the heart of the problem is the relationship between ministers and civil servants, when civil servants face a possibly illegal or controversial instruction from ministers. The Clive Ponting case - in 1985 - illustrated the dilemmas involved. Ponting - a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Defence - became increasingly unhappy about how ministers in his department were handling Parliament's attempt to get to the bottom of the sinking of the Argentine cruiser, the General Belgrano, during the Falklands War. He came to believe that two ministers were deliberately misleading a Commons Committee investigating the incident. Ponting decided to send a copy of a document which proved that his ministers were planning to deceive the select committee to Tam Dalyell, the committee chairman - who had been consistently misled in answers to a series of parliamentary questions. Ponting was charged under the Official Secrets Act in 1985, and although clearly guilty as charged - the judge directed the jury to find him guilty - he was found not guilty by a jury who clearly found the constitutional position unacceptable. Reform of the Official Secrets Act in 1989 did not improve the position of civil servants faced with a dilemma of serving his political bosses or the public interest. The 'trade union' of the senior civil servants, the 'First Division' campaigned vigorously for a code of ethics to protect civil servants faced with ethical dilemmas when asked to perform ‘party political’ functions with a right of
appeal to an independent tribunal in order to protect civil servants. In January 1995 - a White Paper proposing such a code was published and this came into effect in 1996. The code prohibited civil servants carrying out acts specified as illegal, improper or unethical and those breaching constitutional conventions.
(iii) The Alleged Demise of the Role of Policy Advice
This argument cannot be properly explained without some broader constitutional and political background. Campbell and Wilson have outlined the importance of the ‘Whitehall’ model of British politics and specifically of the importance of the top civil servants giving policy advice to ministers. What follows is effectively a summary of Campbell and Wilson’s outline of the ‘Whitehall model’ in order to provide a benchmark for analysing criticism of Conservative reforms and assessing their strength. Much of this discussion is rather general background, but necessary to appreciate the significance of the role of the senior civil service in providing independent advice to ministers.
They say that it is in the government buildings off Whitehall that British policy making is generally conducted; British policy making is executive branch policy making. The British executive branch consists of two very different elements; the first, dominant, element, is composed of the ministers selected from the ranks of the majority party in Parliament. Ministers in contemporary Britain are career politicians who have climbed from the back-benches into ministerial office, but who are unlikely to stay long in their posts. The second element in executive politics consists of the career bureaucrats who share in the formulation and implementation of public policy. Campbell and Wilson say that career bureaucrats who work with ministers are typically graduates of elite universities (in the past nearly always Oxford or Cambridge) who have entered the civil service on a 'fast track' to the most senior posts, expecting to spend their working lives in professions that are secure, prestigious and, if not as well paid as in the private sector, reasonably remunerative compared with professions such as university teaching or medicine.
Ministers are ‘reponsible’ in the sense of being publicly accountable for the work of the department and are assumed to be capable of establishing guidelines for their departments, ensuring that the departments followed their policies and ensuring that their officials did not commit abuses or errors in their work. The principle of collective ministerial responsibility is of great significance, reflecting the belief that the work of government can be carried out effectively only if the policies and perspectives of different departments are brought together effectively.
Ministers have acquired knowledge and experience of government, progressing from the backbenches to the cabinet room, acquiring knowledge of Parliament, the workings of government and experience of public policy. Government is in the hands of people who have served a lengthy apprenticeship in Parliament, government and public life. If political leaders are equipped primarily with parliamentary experience, are short of executive experience and knowledge of the subjects for which they are responsible, important responsibilities must fall on the permanent bureaucracy.
British bureaucrats at the most senior level constitute a prestigious profession expected to work with equal enthusiasm for any government who traditionally enjoy a virtual monopoly on advice to government. Traditionally the senior civil service has recruited from the best undergraduates from the most prestigious universities, and in the past, recruitment and promotion were determined largely by the civil service itself. Ministers rely on civil servants for assistance in a variety of ways that are quite clearly political. Civil servants not only are expected to help governments develop policies that are in line with its values but are also expected to help the government of the day explain and justify its policies to Parliament; they draft parliamentary speeches and replies to parliamentary questions that will show their ministers in the best possible light. The British government minister faces constant pressures to explain and defend policy choices. These pressures in turn mean that ministers, relatively inexperienced in their departments' policy areas, need to generate politically defensible answers to the policy problems they confront.
Senior civil servants are managers as well as advisers. They run existing, often non-controversial policies, of which ministers may be almost totally unaware. Civil servants are inevitably decision makers. Margaret Thatcher, renowned for her ability to work through massive quantities of memoranda, emphasised to the Scott Inquiry the sheer impossibility of ministers' reading every document put in front of them, of their working through the 'snowstorm' of paper. One of the tasks of the civil servant is to make decisions that ministers would make if they had the time to do so. It is in this context that civil servants have been expected to fulfil a different role, to be managers, running prisons or organising the smooth delivery of pensions, drivers' licenses and passports in the most efficient way. Although a few ministers take a temporary interest in such administrative work, it is generally only when something goes wrong and a political storm threatens that most ministers can be persuaded to take an interest in such continuing and dull, if important work.
Discussion now turns to the key points in the discussion of civil service reform. Civil servants provide policy analysis and advice. Some years ago The Times stated that the ‘relations between bureaucrats and politicians in Britain was entirely clear and satisfactory. 'Civil servants propose. Ministers decide. Civil servants execute.' (The Times, 15 February 1977.) Many ministers do not come into office with specific policy proposals in mind. One of the jobs of the civil servants is to provide them. When ministers have policy proposals of their own, the role of the civil service in the traditional Whitehall model is not merely to plan how to implement them but also to analyse their strengths and weaknesses. Ministers often think they favour a policy; once they realise its consequences, they do not. A major task for the civil service is to make sure that ministers realise the disadvantages of policies before they are heavily committed to them. Civil servants pull together a variety of material in providing policy options and evaluating any policy ideas that ministers suggest. Economic analyses, estimates of administrative feasibility advice, cost estimates, a host of technical considerations, scientific assessments and estimates of political consequences are combined in recommendations and options for ministers. The genius of the good senior civil servant lies in being able to consolidate not only a vast amount of information but also a vast variety of information. The argument for generalist administrators is that they are able to combine a wide variety of analyses and expert advice, any one of which alone is inadequate for reaching a full decision.
Campbell and Wilson say that the traditional model provided answers to some crucial questions, in particular, it provided an answer to the problem of how to find people who could 'speak truth to power'. British civil servants, with their security of tenure, are better able to 'speak truth to power' than political appointees with no security of tenure, who may fear losing status, proximity to power or even their jobs if they are too critical.
A major criticism of the Conservative reforms of the civil service is that a concern for pushing through radical policies and appointing and promoting a breed of individuals more concerned with managing and delivering policy than providing advice which may at times have been critical, has greatly reduced the value provided by the traditional civil service.
The balance between the two roles of policy advice and management has, according to critics, broken down.. Hugo Young has argued that 'we have lost institutionalised scepticism' that the civil service has traditionally supplied. One result, argues William Plowden (IPPR study 1993) is that 'New programmes are launched in unconsidered form, and piled on the wreckage of the previous
programme before there has been time to reflect on the lessons learned'. The political disasters of the poll tax, the CSA, the unit fines system, the national curriculum and testing - all testify to this. Michael Howard at the Home Office became notorious for his tendency to make policy on the hoof, without consultation - for example the proposal to extend neighbourhood watches into a supplementary police force ('walking with a purpose').
Campbell and Wilson say that these concerns did not end when Major replaced Thatcher, ‘... .... civil servants continued to feel that their advice was taken seriously only if fitted with ministers' preconceptions ........ In late 1993, a series of events showed how bad relations between ministers and civil servants had become. The Permanent Secretary of the Department of Education, Sir Geoffrey Holland, resigned because ministers would not take his advice seriously, while Home Office officials complained that years of careful policy development had been tossed aside without serious discussion by ministers seeking a few minutes' applause at the party conference’.
The most recent, and detailed, research into this element of the politicisation debate is David Richard’s study, ‘The Civil service under the Conservatives, 1979-1997 : Whitehall’s Political Poodles ?’. His conclusions are instructive. He says that, ‘First, perhaps officials were becoming simply 'yes' men, unquestionably accepting Government policy. Second, if civil servants were employed for their skill as good managers, 'positive, can-doers', always searching for practical means to implement policy, then this downgrades their role as informed and sometimes sceptical questioners of government policy. In either case, one of the traditional, core roles of the Civil Service - the ability to criticise would appear to have been eroded.’
His interviews with senior civil servants led him to conclude that, ‘during the 1980s, a 'Thatcher effect' did occur and this had a tangible impact on the highest grades of the Civil Service. One can reject the notion that any form of overt politicisation occurred. Mrs Thatcher had no interest in appointing top officials who could be identified as sympathetic to the Conservative Party. Her interest in the top appointments procedure was in order to introduce a set of officials, who I have labelled 'managerially oriented, can-doers'.... [This] .. did .. affect the culture of Whitehall. It introduced a set of officials who were much more reticent to point out potential pitfalls in policy proposals. Thus, the 1980s witnessed a new generation of mandarins who could be characterised by a willingness to offer positive advice. This clearly contrasted with the previous generation of top administrators ..... Permanent Secretaries are becoming policy managers rather than policy advisers’
Richards says that some, like the former Labour Prime minister Lord Callaghan, went much further. In December 1992 Lord Callaghan, on the BBC2 programme Behind the Headlines, argued, ‘ The Civil Service has now reached the stage where it is simply a fiefdom of the Conservative Party, the Conservatives having been in power for so long. Traditionally, the Civil Service has acted as a buffer between politicians and the public. A conscientious civil servant was capable of saying 'no minister'. This is no longer the case. The Civil Service has been 'socialised' into becoming simply a further branch of the Conservative Party’.
Richards reports a MORI survey in April 1996 for The Observer, based on the responses from 1,911 civil servants which revealed widespread concern that the need to tell long-term Ministers what they wanted to hear has politicised the service beyond recognition. Of those responding to the Survey, 73 per cent say Conservative ideology has 'now become part of the Civil Service culture', while one in 10 say they have been asked by a Minister or superior to act in a political manner which breaches civil services rules of impartiality. (T'he Observer, 14 April 1996).
So, the evidence that the policy role of senior civil servants was downgraded under the Conservatives is overwhelming but to go as far as to see the senior civil service as politicised in the sense of becoming Conservative sympathisers is much more debatable. Studies of Labour’s first year in power will be necessary to throw light on this.
(iv) Questions of efficiency and effectiveness
The driving force of Conservative reforms has been the three Es, efficiency, effectiveness and economy. Critics suggest that, judged by their own objectives, the range of Conservative reforms can be criticised. For example a very fragmented system of government has resulted. Rhodes suggests that services are now delivered through a combination of local government, special purpose bodies, the voluntary sector and the private sector. Policy-making and implementation becomes difficult because policy has to be negotiated with more and more organisations. Governments must ‘steer’ policy and this often leads to crisis management, because of confusion of roles, for example between the Next Steps Agencies and central government departments. So disasters have been common - the controversy over the Child Support Agency - now to be abandoned - and the prison service referred to earlier. Some reforms seemed to contradict other reforms, for example, Theakston suggests that with the Next Steps programme the government had seemed to concede that civil servants could manage efficiently,
given the right structures. Then - in the middle of the drive to create agencies - it began market testing, seeming to declare that the exposure to market forces, competition and, ultimately, privatisation was the only way to make public services more efficient. Agency heads were reported to be resentful and disillusioned by this destabilising political interference.
Other critics suggest that the civil service culture has been seriously eroded - for example the concern for honesty, personal disinterestedness, a respect for intelligence, an enormous capacity for hard and often rapid work, loyalty to colleagues. Pilkington says that reforms have undermined these values. Civil service morale appears to have been damaged by the revolution in government. Pilkington quotes research in 1996 which indicated that 92 per cent of civil servants believed that morale was much lower in 1996 than it had been in 1992; 91 per cent believed the government had gone too far in its privatisation of civil service functions; 77 per cent said they would welcome a change of government; 73 per cent claimed that they would not recommend the civil service as a career to young people today; only 28 per cent of respondents believed that their jobs were secure. Members of the civil service are no longer part of a unified service.
Theakston argues that market testing brings significant problems, for example, among the dangers were safeguards for confidentiality (e.g. private contractors having access to information about individuals' and companies' tax affairs). Theakston argues that ‘ The potential for corruption was increased. Would companies that made political donations be allowed to bid for civil service work? There was the problem of conflicts of interest: private sector consultants inevitably have other clients who might be interested in securing contracts for government work; politicians might sit on the boards of companies tendering for contracts. Would commercialisation weaken the traditional public service ethos as private contractors brought a different culture and a different style of behaviour into government? The Comptroller and Auditor General, Sir John Bourn, complained that market testing made the job of telling whether public money was being spent properly or efficiently more difficult because the National Audit Office had no right to examine the books of private companies that had won contracts to deliver public services, The underlying question was: were private sector business practices really better ?’ (Theakston, ‘The Civil service since 1945’, p152)
‘Charterism’ has also been criticised as a tool to make government more responsive and effective. Theakston argues that, ‘The government's concept of 'citizenship' appeared very narrow and limited - it had confused consumerism with
citizenship argued its critics. The Charter(s) had not, for the most part, given citizens any more legal rights than they had already and nor were they enforceable in the courts ..... Ministers were adamant that there was no extra money available to fund the Charter and that it was, in the jargon, 'resource neutral'. Services had to be (and could be) improved within existing resources. For those who did not accept this argument, the Charter was about 'dressing up the front-line official, a "have a nice day McPublic Servant"' as a sop and to deflect criticism away from underfunding and the failures of government’. (p147).
(v) Tradition and Change
At the beginning of this booklet, the traditional features of the civil service were outlined. ‘An interventionist, role for government had consequences for the nature of the civil service. Key features were that it was numerically large; the culture (i.e. the attitudes, values and expectations) of the civil service was dominated by the 'mandarin' elite of top (administrative grade) civil servants - a highly paid intellectual elite - whose role was to advise Ministers on policy; Ministers had a clear responsibility (or accountability) to answer to parliament for the work of their departments; civil service advice was ‘anonymous’; the organisation of the civil service was in turn generally seen as a political no-go area; the civil service elite were experts on government, neutral between political parties, and the culture of the civil service was isolated from business (there was little recruitment from outside the service); the civil service was a unified, career, profession, with common grades and conditions throughout. Individuals were recruited centrally and learned a common set of values - like integrity, uncorruptibility and a concern for the public interest ‘above’ party political concerns - ‘on the job’. It was simple to transfer from one part of the service to another.
Each one of these features has changed to some extent. The size of the civil service is much smaller, around 200,000 less than in 1979. The role of policy advice has been down-graded and many reforms have stressed the importance of management skills. Ministerial responsibility has been clouded. Civil servants are expected to be committed to implement reforms and to deliver policy. The Conservative governments, and especially Mrs Thatcher, intervened in promotions and civil service organisation. The civil service has been infiltrated in many ways by business methods and is no longer a unified service nor entirely a career service. There have been accusations that the civil service neutrality has been eroded.
(4) Conclusion
Martin Burch in an article entitled, ‘The Next Steps for the British Civil Service’, in Talking Politics, Summer 1993, suggests that a different type of state has emerged. Government is less a provider of services direct to the public and more a facilitator for the provision of these services by others. British government is an enabling state which encourages beneficial action but leaves the tasks increasingly to other agencies. It is also a regulatory state whose top personnel provide rules and guidelines within which public and private sector organisations are expected to work. A further important aspect of the regulatory function is the establishment and monitoring of agreements with service providers. So the new state is a contracting state which sets, monitors and evaluates contracts made with independent agencies.
The range of issues discussed in this booklet are so far-ranging as to defy simple analysis and conclusions. The role of the state has been transformed and the great majority of the Conservative reforms are irreversible. They took place without any serious considerations of the constitutional implications of the revolution in the concept of government which occurred. This revolution was ideological but it was also driven by underlying concerns about the costs of government which have often risen from the successes of the past. For example, a century of welfarism, together with medical advances has produced a population which survives into ever-increasing old age. The percentage of each age group going to university has increased enormously too. New Labour have emphasised the ‘hard choices’ to be faced. What is already occurring is the addressing of those constitutional questions which were neglected under the Conservatives and Freedom of Information legislation, incorporation of the ECHR into British law and devolution will all directly impinge on issues discussed here.
Summary of Key Themes and Concepts
Central Themes
(i) The structure, roles and culture of the traditional civil service and the early moves towards reform
The way government is organised in any state, at any time, reflects a web of assumptions about what the proper functions of government should be; about the appropriate roles and relationships between the elected political members of the government and the unelected officials or bureaucrats and about the qualities desired in these officials. The Conservative governments after 1979 set out to radically reform the organisation of the state as part of an agenda to revolutionise the nature and priorities of British government.
Between 1945-79 a broad consensus existed on the proper role of government. This revolved around Keynesian economic management (to maintain full employment) and the welfare state. This meant a large ‘interventionist’ role for the state, including responsibility for nationalised industries and the delivery of a range of public services, including education, social services, housing and pensions. Underpinning interventionism was the belief that government, and only government (and primarily central government), could resolve major economic, social and political issues. The first two aspects of change discussed later - the process of privatisation and the development of the quango state - reflect an undermining of these assumptions.
An interventionist, role for government had consequences for the nature of the civil service. Key features were that it was numerically large; the culture (i.e. the attitudes, values and expectations) of the civil service was dominated by the 'mandarin' elite of top (administrative grade) civil servants - a highly paid intellectual elite - whose role was to advise Ministers on policy; Ministers had a clear responsibility (or accountability) to answer to parliament for the work of their departments; civil service advice was ‘anonymous’; the organisation of the civil service was in turn generally seen as a political no-go area; the civil service elite were experts on government, neutral between political parties, and the culture of the civil service was isolated from business (there was little recruitment from outside the service); the civil service was a unified, career, profession, with common grades and conditions throughout. Individuals were recruited centrally and learned a common set of values - like integrity, uncorruptibility and a concern for the public interest ‘above’ party political concerns - ‘on the job’. It was simple to transfer from one part of the service to another.
In many ways these characteristics have been transformed or modified by reforms since 1979 and the reforms have given rise to a whole range of important questions.
The reforms of the civil of the civil service after 1979 were revolutionary (see below) but they also evolved from concerns about the civil service which had been expressed for over twenty years, especially in the Fulton Report, whose proposals foreshadowed later reforms.
(ii) The Thatcherite revolution
Thatcherism was no less than a revolution in the understanding of the state, i.e. what it was proper for governments to do. Mrs Thatcher came to power in 1979 with the conviction that certain policies, and certain reforms in the structure of government were necessary if Britain’s economic and social decline was to be halted. Part of Thatcher's approach was a scepticism toward the civil service itself. She saw civil servants wedded to the consensus policies of the post-1945 period and likely to attempt to water down her radical economic policies because of their 'world-weary pessimism'.
The central elements of the ideological approach provide an important background to understanding civil service reform and other related aspects of reform, like the growth of the ‘quango’ state, A key belief was that market mechanisms (like competition) should be extended; Thatcherism believed that free enterprise benefits every section of society; there should be a minimum state and the state should not try to direct production (for example, of coal) or provide services (for example, run the railway system) because state provision is inherently inefficient; no one worries too much about costs, waste and efficiency because funding comes from what is commonly perceived to be a bottom-less public purse.
Public spending under the post-war consensus was constantly rising and had to be paid for in high taxes which reduced individual incentives to work. The commitment to full employment gave trade unions, too much power. The Conservatives therefore came to power in 1979 with clear values and priorities but they had no ‘blueprint’ for reform and the reforms which were introduced in the next 18 years of government were developed piecemeal. Nevertheless, two objectives underpinned all the reforms - the desire to reduce the role of government as a provider of services (to roll back the state) and to ensure ‘value for money’ in the operation of government (which translated, in the main, to cutting the costs of government). The aims of Conservative governments in this period have sometimes been concisely summarised as the 3Es, ‘Efficiency, Effectiveness and Economy’.
Reform of the Civil Service
(i) An overview of reforms and their significance
The reforms of the civil service introduced after 1979 all directly relate to the objectives of the three Es - efficiency, effectiveness and economy. There were three broad types of reform. First, management initiatives aimed at cutting waste and increasing efficiency. Second, separating policy-making from policy delivery by establishing Next Steps Agencies. Third, changing recruitment and promotion patterns to improve the three Es.
(ii) Management Initiatives : The Efficiency Unit and the FMI
In May 1979, Mrs Thatcher appointed Lord Rayner, managing director of Marks and Spencer, to lead a drive for greater government efficiency by reducing waste. Rayner headed an Efficiency Unit. ‘Rayner’s Raiders’ examined aspects of government administration with a view to savings or increased effectiveness. One early product was the setting up of a Management Information System for Ministers (MINIS) established in 1980. In 1982 Rayners work led to the Financial Management Initiative (FMI) which had the objective of altering management procedures throughout the civil service, giving each departments clear objectives, providing information on costs, establishing well-defined responsibilities for individual civil servants and providing personal rewards for success.
Both these innovations continue to operate. Peter Hennessy suggests that by December 1982 when Rayner returned to Marks & Spencer, 130 scrutinies had saved £170 million and 16,000 jobs a year and by 1988, some 300 scrutinies had saved over £1 billion. Perhaps the main effect was symbolic in that the experience of reviews changes attitudes. Nevertheless, there is evidence to suggest that these management initiatives have limitations. In January 1998 Parliament's financial watchdog criticised the Ministry of Defence for ‘a fundamental breakdown in financial management and control’ in handling £50 billion to pay soldiers over the last eight years.
(iii) The ‘Next Steps’ Agencies and Market Testing
The Efficiency Unit's (1988) report on the achievements of FMI, known as 'Improving Management in Government : The Next Steps' (sometimes known as the Ibbs Report) , concluded that more radical reforms were necessary if the objectives of transforming the civil service were to be achieved. The most important feature of the 'Next Steps' programme was the division between policy making and policy delivery. The former was to remain with slimmed down central government departments while delivery was to be in the hands of independent executive agencies. Each Executive Agency is headed by a Chief Executive with considerable flexibility to determine the structure and operation of the Agency and the pay, grading and recruitment of personnel. Policy and resourcing remain the responsibility of Departments. The Chief Executives are accountable to the Minister and, through the Minister, to Parliament. The pay of the Chief Executive is linked to the performance of the agency.
Next steps agencies are based on the view that the civil service should be treated as a collection of separate businesses. The advantages claimed for this scheme were the reduction of overload at ministerial level and greater freedom for the heads of the new agencies to manage within clear departmentally-determined policy frameworks. The key notion is ‘distance’ from the central department so that there is freedom to manage. Managers in pursuit of financial/efficiency targets are free to pursue value-for-money initiatives. There are four main types of target: quality, financial, efficiency and throughput. Examples of targets are given in the main booklet.
By June 1994 , 96 independent agencies had been created ranging from the National Weights and Measures Laboratory employing 50 staff, to the Social Security Benefits Agency which employs nearly 70,000. By 1997 80% of civil servants, in approximately 170 agencies, were employed in agencies, leaving only 50,000 in central government departments. Examples of agencies are given in the main body of the booklet. In 1992 it was announced that the work of government departments and agencies would be reviewed every five years under a ‘Prior Options’ scheme whereby fundamental questions are asked, including whether the government needs to perform the particular task at all or whether it can be privatised.
Claims made on behalf of the agencies are that they have greatly increased efficiency, meeting around 75% of their targets. For example, the time it takes to process a passport has been reduced from an average of three and a half weeks to one week. The Benefits agency has consistently met tough targets set for it on clearance times and accuracy rates. The Conservative government also argued that the agency system made government more open by publicly setting out targets. The culture of the agencies has also been claimed to have transformed the attitude of civil servants, with individuals with whom they deal now seen as ‘customers’ with rights to an efficient and effective service. As with privatised industries and EGOs the Conservatives claimed that the Agencies provided a new concept of accountability as they are subject to a range of new regulating mechanisms, like the Citizens Charter.
In 1991 John Major introduced the Citizens Charter designed to raise the quality of service delivery and value for money in government departments, agencies, the NHS, nationalised industries, privatised utilities, and local government. In essence, the Charter initiative is about ‘empowerment’ of customers. The Citizen's Charter contains six principles: published explicit standards; full and accurate information about running services; choice for the users of services; courteous and helpful service; effective remedies; and efficient and economical delivery of services. By 1993, over 30 Charters had appeared in the public sector, including a Taxpayer’s Charter provided by the Inland Revenue. The Benefits Agency, Customs and Excise and the Employment Service also produced Charters.
One of the most controversial innovations has been market testing - an extension of privatisation by which services provided by central government organisations are being assessed for cost and effectiveness by comparing the in-house provision with competitive bids from outside. The objective of market testing is to apply market pressure even to professional services (e.g. financial or statistical) within the civil service. The argument is that the very process of tendering will force activities to be costed and will shake out waste and restrictive practices.
By January 1995, ministers were claiming savings of £400 million a year over the previous two years from the market testing programme, representing average cost savings of 20 per cent. More than £2 billion of government work had been reviewed since April 1992, with more than £1 billion of it transferred to the private sector. The White Paper, ‘The Civil Service : Continuity and Change’, in 1994, marked something of a retreat on market testing, dropping a centrally imposed programme and allowing each department and agency to draw up annual ‘efficiency plans’, and to decide for themselves the best means of achieving efficiency.
(iv) Changing the ‘culture’ of the civil service through promotion, recruitment and pay policy.
As part of their objective to transform the attitudes and priorities of civil servants, the Conservatives introduced a range changes in the methods of recruiting, paying and promoting civil servants at all levels. The civil service is no longer a unified service and major inroads have been made to the ‘career’ nature of the civil service. For example, reforms between 1991-1996 gave managers in both government departments and agencies much greater freedom to recruit their own staff and decide on their pay and grading. Deliberate attempts have been made to re-allocate personnel away from the South East. Reforms encourage individuals to see themselves not as part of the civil service as a whole, but as part of a team working in a commercial environment, aiming to reach targets and showing enterprise and initiative. A new Senior Civil Service (SCS) was introduced in 1996, with each of the top civil servants (of around 3,500) having individual contracts and individually determined pay. Open competition’ now covers much of the senior civil service. Appointments to the post of chief executive of agencies are advertised and open to private sector applicants.
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of attempts to change the culture of the civil service, was the alleged interventions of Mrs Thatcher to promote individuals in the senior civil servants who fitted in with her own political priorities. One of Mrs Thatcher’s plans to transform the civil service was to intervene in the selection process for those officials at the very top of the service. The notion that Mrs Thatcher appointed Conservative sympathisers is too simplistic but a more plausible assessment of the Thatcher approach to top appointments suggests that she appointed people with a 'can-do'
reputation. She aimed to induce a revolution from above, which would penetrate the lower tiers of Whitehall. She wanted her top lieutenants to engender into the lower ranks a whole new approach to going about their daily business. The emphasis was to be on efficiency, accountability and cost-cutting. The ambitious civil servant was well advised to play down policy advice particularly if it challenged the desirability of government policy.
The Political and Constitutional Significance of Civil Service Reform
A number of significant issues have arisen because of the range of civil service reforms. There are concerns over: * democratic accountability; * public service ethics ( one form of ‘politicisation’); * the decline of the policy-advice role of top civil servants (also ‘politicisation’) * the efficiency and effectiveness of the New Public Management techniques
(i) Democratic Accountabilty
The Conservative government claimed that reforms have made responsibilities for services clearer to the citizen as consumer and have established some effective mechanisms of redress which deal directly with the organisation responsible. Critics say that accountability can become more obscure as the responsibilities are devolved through executive agencies, their chief executives and on to private organisations which have contracted to undertake specific services. Traditional mechanisms by which government is called to account - such as the responsibility of ministers to parliament are straining under the new arrangements.
At the centre of the debate is the Conservative government’s claim to have separated policy making and policy delivery, especially in the formation of the Next Steps Agencies. Critics suggest that a clear division between making policy and delivering policy cannot be made. This is because politicians will want to maintain control. What is likely is that ministers will take the credit when targets are achieved, while officials will be given the blame when things go wrong. Ministerial responsibility to parliament means that it is he or she who is responsible for taking corrective action, for putting things right, and for ensuring that the department is run effectively. This is based on the assumption that the minister is able to scrutinise what is happening in the department, and can check on how civil servants in the department are conducting themselves. It is this conception of ministerial responsibility which is under serious threat from the growth of executive agencies under the 'Next Steps' programme.
Chief Executives of agencies are given substantial autonomy through framework agreements. Those working in the agencies will be taking decisions far removed from ministerial scrutiny and oversight - that is one of the main purposes of establishing them. Yet the introduction of the 'Next Steps' agencies was not accompanied by any rethinking of the doctrine of ministerial responsibility.
If ministers do intervene in the detailed work of the agencies, the purpose of setting them up will be defeated. This is inevitable. The 'Next Steps' programme has led to a confusion of responsibility. This was the case with the prison service over break-outs in 1994.
On the other hand, if ministers are genuinely prepared to exercise self-restraint, then ministerial responsibility for the operational work of the agencies will come to have little meaning. ‘The danger is that the incoherent arrangements for constitutional responsibility for operational failures in the agencies will work in practice to prevent responsibility being pinned on anyone. It may become easier for ministers to pass the buck. It may also become easier for ministers to treat as an operational failure what is really a failure of government policy. If there is to be genuine devolution, there must be a specific definition of the respective responsibilities of the minister and the chief executive and put into statutory form. Thus the framework agreement would be converted into a legal document.
(ii) Threats to Public Service Ethics of Party Political Neutrality
A number of incidents under the Conservative governments stretching from 1979-1997 raised doubts about the capacity of civil servants to resist government requests to fulfil party political, as opposed to government, functions. The civil service has increasingly been 'politicised' - for example, civil servants have been drawn into 'presenting'
the facts in ways which suit the political party which happens to be the government of the day. The public service 'ethic' of serving the public interest regardless of the party in power has become blurred. The clearest evidence of the dilemmas faced by civil servants was revealed by the Scott Inquiry into the arms sales to Iraq, when civil servants were involved in drafting parliamentary answers clearly designed to deceive parliament.
At the heart of the problem is the relationship between ministers and civil servants, when civil servants face a possibly illegal or simply controversial instruction from ministers. The Clive Ponting case is significant. The 'trade union' of the senior civil servants, the 'First Division' campaigned vigorously for a code of ethics to protect civil servants faced with ethical dilemmas when asked to perform ‘party political’ functions with a right of appeal to an independent tribunal in order to protect civil servants. In January 1995 - a White Paper proposing such a code was published and this came into effect in 1996. The code prohibited civil servants carrying out acts specified as illegal, improper or unethical and those breaching constitutional conventions.
(iii) The Alleged Demise of the Role of Policy Advice
BACKGROUND
British policy making is executive branch policy making. The British executive branch consists of two very different elements; the first, dominant, element, is composed of the ministers selected from the ranks of the majority party in Parliament. The second element in executive politics consists of the career bureaucrats who share in the formulation and implementation of public policy. Career bureaucrats who work with ministers are typically graduates of elite universities (in the past nearly always Oxford or Cambridge) who have entered the civil service on a 'fast track' to the most senior posts. A crucial aspect of civil service culture is the expectation that civil servants will work with equal enthusiasm in the same posts for successive governments of competing parties.. Senior civil servants have always had a managerial role; they run existing, often non-controversial policies, of which ministers may be almost totally unaware. Civil servants are inevitably decision makers. One of the tasks of the civil servant is to make decisions that ministers would make if they had the time to do so.
KEY POINTS
Civil servants provide policy analysis and advice. The Times stated that the ‘relations between bureaucrats and politicians in Britain was entirely clear and satisfactory. 'Civil servants propose. Ministers decide. Civil servants execute.' (The Times, 15 February 1977.) Many ministers do not come into office with specific policy proposals in mind. One of the jobs of the civil servants is to provide them. When ministers have policy proposals of their own the role of the civil service in the traditional Whitehall model is not merely to plan how to implement them but also to analyse their strengths and weaknesses. Ministers often think they favour a policy; once they realise its consequences, they do not. A major task for the civil service is to make sure that ministers realise the disadvantages of policies before they are heavily committed to them.
Traditionally, senior civil servants have been able to 'speak truth to power'. A major criticism of the Conservative reforms of the civil service is that a concern for pushing through radical policies and appointing and promoting a breed of individuals more concerned with managing and delivering policy than providing advice which may at times have been critical, has greatly reduced the value provided by the traditional civil service.
The balance between the two roles of policy advice and management has, according to critics, broken down. Hugo Young has argued that 'we have lost institutionalised scepticism' that the civil service has traditionally supplied. This has led to inefficient policy-making. The political disasters of the poll tax, the CSA, the unit fines system, the national curriculum and testing - all testify to this. Michael Howard at the Home Office became notorious for his tendency to make policy on the hoof. In late 1993 the Permanent Secretary of the Department of Education, Sir Geoffrey Holland, resigned because ministers would not take his advice seriously.
David Richard’s study, ‘The Civil service under the Conservatives, 1979-1997 : Whitehall’s Political Poodles’ concluded that ‘one of the traditional, core roles of the Civil Service - the
ability to criticise would appear to have been eroded.’. There was a Thatcher ‘effect’ on the top civil service, Her interest in the top appointments procedure was in order to introduce a set of officials, who I have labelled 'managerially oriented, can-doers'.... [This] .. did .. affect the culture of Whitehall. It introduced a set of officials who were much more reticent to point out potential pitfalls in policy proposals. Others, like, Lord Callaghan go further in their criticism.
So, the evidence that the policy role of senior civil servants was downgraded under Conservatives is overwhelming but to go as far as to see the senior civil service as politicised in the sense of becoming Conservative sympathisers is much more debatable. Studies of Labour’s first year in power will be necessary to throw light on this.
(iv) Questions of efficiency, effectiveness and economy
The driving force of Conservative reforms has been the three Es, efficiency, effectiveness and economy. critics suggest that, judged by their own objectives, the range of Conservative reforms can be criticised. For example a very fragmented system of government has resulted. Policy-making and implementation becomes difficult because policy has to be negotiated with more and more organisations. Governments must ‘steer’ policy and this often leads to crisis management, because of confusion of roles, for example between the Next Steps Agencies and central government departments. So disasters have been common - the controversy over the Child Support Agency - now to be abandoned - and the prison service. Some reforms seemed to contradict other reforms, for example, market testing contracted Next Steps reforms.
Critics suggest that civil service culture has been seriously eroded - for example the concern for honesty, personal disinterestedness, a respect for intelligence, an enormous capacity for hard and often rapid work, loyalty to colleagues. Civil service morale appears to have been damaged by the revolution in government. Market testing brings significant problems, for example, the potential for corruption was increased. Would companies that made political donations be allowed to bid for civil service work? Would commercialisation weaken the traditional public service ethos as private contractors brought a different culture and a different style of behaviour into government?
‘Charterism’ has also been criticised as a tool to make government more responsive and effective. The Charter(s) had not, for the most part, given citizens any more legal rights than they had already and nor were they enforceable in the courts and Ministers were adamant that there was no extra money available to fund the Charter.
(v) Tradition and change
Each one of the traditional features of the civil service (see central themes section) has been subject to change. Each one of these features has changed to some extent. The size of the civil service is much smaller, around 200,000 less than in 1979. The role of policy advice has been down-graded and many reforms have stressed the importance of management skills. Ministerial responsibility has been clouded. Civil servants are expected to be committed to implement reforms and to deliver policy. The Conservative governments, and especially Mrs Thatcher, intervened in promotions and civil service organisation. The civil service has been infiltrated in many ways by business methods and is no longer a unified service nor entirely a career service. There have been accusations that the civil service neutrality has been eroded.
Conclusion
A different type of state has emerged. Government is less a provider of services direct to the public and more a facilitator for the provision of these services by others. British government is an enabling state which encourages beneficial action but leaves the tasks increasingly to other agencies. It is also a regulatory state whose top personnel provide rules and guidelines within which public and private sector organisations are expected to work. A further important aspect of the regulatory function is the establishment and monitoring of agreements with service providers. So the new state is a contracting state which sets, monitors and evaluates contracts made with independent agencies.
This revolution was ideological but it was also driven by underlying concerns about the costs of government which have often risen from the successes of the past. New Labour have emphasised the ‘hard choices’ to be faced. What is already occurring is the addressing of
those constitutional questions which were neglected under the Conservatives and Freedom of Information legislation, incorporation of the ECHR into British law and devolution will all directly impinge on issues discussed here.