As the election campaign started, former cabinet secretary Gus O’Donnell admitted publicly that some promises being made by party leaders filled him with dismay. “I’d have my head in my hands if I were back in my old job as head of the Treasury,” he told an audience at UCL. “The pledges not to put up taxes would take away all flexibility.”
The quotient of wacky and downright dodgy policy commitments from all combatants rose steadily. They included raising billions by clamping down on tax avoidance in a way that, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies put it, “all previous clampdowns had mysteriously missed”. There were promises on tax and spend that kept the voters in the dark on details. Oh – and the Tories ended up saying they would actually pass a law against putting up taxes. One Whitehall insider took comfort in the fact that “the Tory tax lock is vacuous rather than dangerous because they could always pass another law negating it”. Maybe – but you can see why Lord O’Donnell was unhappy.
Politics is no training for government. It is also true that some politicians in 2015 felt free to make rash promises because they expected that coalition partners would stop them from delivering their manifestos. Yet all too often, the standard of policy debate was a disgrace. The question now is how to raise the bar and whether the civil service could and should play a proactive role in doing so.
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Concern about policy development has been underlined by the fracas over so-called “short money” – the cash given to opposition parties to compensate them for not having access to the civil service. After the election, UKIP, with nearly four million votes but only one MP, was entitled to £650,000 worth of short money. The MP in question, Douglas Carswell, refused to accept the money, saying he didn’t need umpteen assistants. All very honourable, maybe – but surely four million voters are entitled to some expertise and support when it comes to policy development?
The issue is not new. Debate has centred on the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, with Labour keen for it to cost opposition manifesto promises. Yet the OBR is a small outfit with some 20 staff and it would need major expansion to cost all parties’ proposals. In the Netherlands, where all parties can ask for their plans to be scrutinised, it becomes a colossal exercise. Last time round it involved 2,500 policies from nine different parties. It also means that the parties have to submit election manifestos as much as a year in advance for the work to be done. It would hardly fit with a culture like ours, where policymaking on the hoof is so often the norm.
The OBR’s work on the budget is conducted with great rigour and draws on input from officials in various government departments. Asking them to spend their time doing work for other parties which they could not share with the government of the day would raise constitutional issues.
So why not set up a small, permanent unit of the civil service to help opposition parties formulate policy? While not a full-blown Department of the Opposition, its officials could remain in post throughout a parliament so there would be no question of them working for the PM one week and another party the next. Its remit would be to develop policy rather than just audit proposals, and part of its job would be to put essential facts and figures into the public domain. At present, policymaking can be too much of a secret garden, with data kept under wraps by officials until ministers produce some novel scheme like a rabbit out of a hat.
Yet the era of Whitehall secrecy is slowly coming to an end. It’s not just the publication of Prince Charles’ thoughts on the Patagonian toothfish. Last month, a High Court judge ordered the diaries of former health secretary Andrew Lansley to be published, despite strenuous objections from senior officials. This has to be to the good. The greater the transparency on policymaking, the more people will become involved and the better the outcome is likely to be.
Giving the civil service a permanent and formal role in the national conversation about policy would play to its unique strengths: impartiality, appointment on merit and a public service ethic. Some special advisers and think tank people are first rate but many are parti pris and owe their positions to political patronage. Besides, why should some degree of civil service advice not be a resource for all elected politicians – rather like the information already provided to MPs by the Commons library? Indeed, one could complement the other. This could also help develop a corporate civil service brand, based on the public service ethic, which would help Whitehall to distance itself from overweening and bullying ministers intent on appointing cronies to permanent secretary posts.
The civil service, like the rest of our democratic machinery, is entering a new era. It must adjust to major decentralisation, to changes in the traditional party system and to challenges within the Union and with Europe. Yet there is a great opportunity for the civil service to set a new gold standard in its core business of policymaking – a standard that the politicians, in particular, must respect.