Interview: David Blunkett

“The civil service is a living, breathing, hurting animal,” says David Blunkett (pictured above). As he sees it, this vast, sprawling organisation shares a clear, well-embedded set of values, beliefs, traditions, behaviours – and defence mechanisms. “Tony Blair, who was both a friend of mine and very supportive, was constantly telling me not to rock the boat in relation to the civil service, because it would be seen and presented as a political attack,” Blunkett continues. “The civil service has good friends who can present this in the broadcast media, and pseudo-academics as well. And I can’t blame them: if you’re under attack, you cry foul. But it doesn’t help in terms of sorting things out.”

As the former Sheffield council leader’s comments suggest, Blunkett has always regarded the civil service with a certain degree of suspicion; erstwhile civil service colleagues recall that it could take a lengthy period to win the trust of their secretary of state. Yet Blunkett never thought the civil service biased: it was, he believes, scrupulously even-handed in resisting all reform. “I didn’t take the Tony Benn view that the civil service was party political; that they were somehow against us,” he says. “I took the view that all major organisations have defence mechanisms which resist substantial change.”

Indeed, when he became education and employment secretary on Labour’s victory in 1997, Blunkett found that the civil service was eager to help implement the new government’s policies. “There was a very clear commitment to carrying through what we wanted to do; an enthusiasm and commitment which was very refreshing,” he recalls. What’s more, having shadowed the post for two years, Blunkett had well-developed ideas about his objectives – ideas that the civil service had had time to consider and plan for.

Similarly, Michael Gove has now arrived at the Department for Education with a clear and longstanding set of flagship policies. Is there a parallel? “There’s a parallel in the sense that the civil service appears to be as committed as ever to implementing the policies of an incoming government, and that Michael Gove has had the chance to think through what he wants to do,” Blunkett replies. “Whether that detailed work had been undertaken as we did, there’s some doubt, given the way in which the Academies Bill has been dealt with, and the issues around Building Schools for the Future.”

Keen to help – but not to reform

Nevertheless, while Blunkett found the civil service obliging when it came to enacting policy, it was less helpful in instituting the feedback channels that he called for. Not all of his directives were bearing fruit, he realised, but he was struggling to identify the obstacles. So on arriving as a minister at each department, he attempted to set up “a unit working jointly to my office and that of the permanent secretary, whose job it was to monitor what had happened to the delivery of legislation… or policies, and what was happening on the ground.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, he found the civil service reluctant to establish such a unit. “At the Department for Work and Pensions [in 2005] I was told unequivocally by the permanent secretary that there was absolutely no need for this, as all the [senior] people he employed were regularly out with the frontline troops and knew exactly what was going on,” remembers Blunkett, with some irritation. “Well, if he believed that, he was into self-delusion in a big way.”

In part, says Blunkett, feedback is constrained within the civil service by senior officials who are keen to gather credit and avoid embarrassment in front of their ministers. “Middle-ranking civil servants weren’t uniformly invited to present to ministers material that they’d worked on for months,” he says. “People were positively discouraged from raising difficult issues on ministerial visits.” But it may also be the case that Blunkett’s occasional tempers or impatience deterred some officials from raising concerns: the famously hard-working politician has an intolerant streak and a penchant for speaking his mind that would, when his second tenure as a minister came under threat in late 2005, leave him without powerful allies even within the Labour cabinet. Meanwhile, while Blunkett was slow to trust officials – relying heavily on special advisers – he has sometimes put too much trust in the wrong people: his first stint as a minister, notoriously, ended after his private office appeared to intervene in Home Office procedures on behalf of his lover, who subsequently went back to her husband.

Flawed charm

If Blunkett can be self-regarding and intemperate, however, he also has a down-to-earth charm and a commitment to social justice that have won over many former colleagues. A passionate believer in public service and the positive potential of government, he’s spent much of his career attempting to tackle the structural and human problems that – he believes – weaken the impact of the public sector’s work.

One of these weaknesses, he argues, is the lack of delivery skills within many parts of government: on joining the recently-merged Department for Education and Employment, he worked hard to inject some of the employment specialists’ hands-on experience into the ranks of education policymakers. Blunkett also bemoans the lack of people-management skills among officials: “Historically, the civil service has been good at training people to prepare bills, or to make assessments of risk – but it hasn’t been good at training people to manage,” he says. Instead, he argues, it too often relies on the enforcement of “very tight procedures – almost to the point of lack of flexibility – and we do end up with the most enormous waste of money.”

Professional skills too have long needed sharpening within government, Blunkett believes; he was, he says, “instrumental in saying that we needed in strategic areas people who had appropriate experience.

“Finance was a classic. I spent a long time persuading my permanent secretary at the Home Office that we desperately needed to import someone who knew how to deal with substantial budgets.”

Even now, he argues, specialist professionals are not well-served by a system of promotion that relies on rapid movement between different types of role. “You need to be able to promote people within post,” he says, “so people know they’re coming into a career structure rather than having to fit into the musical chairs that constitute promotion within the civil service.” Specialised individuals who demonstrate leadership skills, he argues, should still be able to move between departments and roles – “but we should also reward a specialism, and allow people to expand their remit without having to compete for their own job or feeling they’ve got stuck in the mud if they’ve been in a job for three years.”

The Treasury wades in

Further problems within the civil service, Blunkett argues, emanate from the Treasury: an organisation so influential that even politicians rarely risk criticising the quality of its decision-making. “They employ some of the brightest people in Britain, but their experience of life outside the Treasury is extremely limited – and they believe that they’re the brightest people in Britain,” he says. The department’s lack of “humility, and willingness to listen”, Blunkett believes, means that “we end up with the Treasury second-guessing and over-controlling and making a mess of other people’s projects, and then the other department getting the blame.”

As an example, Blunkett cites the Individual Learning Accounts scheme – which, he stresses, “went wrong after I left the Department for Education and Employment, in 2002. The public accounts committee hauled the department over the coals, but it should have been the Treasury: they were the ones who completely reshaped the scheme, and created a monolith which was exploitable by fraudsters and lost us £50m. The more we can get the Treasury off day-to-day decision-making and on to the job they’re supposed to do, the better.”

Is it always the minister’s fault?

There’s a weakness in accountability here, Blunkett points out: the Treasury often makes the weather, while other departments are left dealing with the thunderstorms. But there are far bigger problems with accountability in government, he believes; for example, the loss of political influence over the appointment of permanent secretaries and quango chiefs.

Ultimately, Blunkett notes, it is ministers who are accountable for the work of all their departmental officials, executive agencies and public bodies. Yet their level of control over who’s in charge of these organisations has been “very substantially” reduced since the Nolan report, he complains; he argues that ministers should be able to appoint their own permanent secretary. “We went from secretaries of state having direct influence over the nomination of chairmen for outside organisations and other senior people, to the secretary of state scrambling to hold any influence whatsoever,” says Blunkett. “We should have found a happy medium.”

The result of this change, he adds, can be “suspicion” between ministers and top officials, and “a difficult relationship with managers who can’t manage.” There is always, he adds, the “nuclear option” of insisting on a permanent secretary’s removal – but “other people will observe that”, making a minister’s future relationships with officials still more fraught.

Meanwhile, says Blunkett, the growth over decades of arm’s length organisations and semi-autonomous public bodies has left secretaries of state nominally accountable for decisions over which they have almost no real influence. The Labour government, he says, ended up with “the worst of all worlds”, with ministers – for example – being held to account for the actions of health sector foundation trusts which enjoy functional independence.

The only solution, he believes, lies in “much greater definition of what is the policy-making function of ministers, and of which decisions – along with the responsibilities, structures and resources to go with them – have been devolved to other people, who must then be held to account for them.” So Blunkett backed the steadily-rising public profile of, for example, non-departmental public bodies’ chief executives: after all, they have the decision-making powers, and should accept along with them full responsibility for their agencies’ work. Indeed, he adds, “My view was always that civil servants should have answered [for their decisions] much more, not just in select committees but going on radio and television and explaining what had happened in their area.”

An assault on the public sector

So, does Blunkett welcome the current roll-back of agencies, bringing both powers and accountability back to ministers? No, he says: the coalition’s bonfire of the quangos is simply a way of whittling down the public sector and centralising powers. It’s a “scorched earth policy”, he argues (see news section), “which is not – as I would have wanted – reform, innovation and an emphasis on delivery for the civil service, but instead taking things outwith the normal structures. There’s an ideological belief that the state should shrink”.

This administration, Blunkett believes, plans “a big run-down of the central core of the civil service, and is indicating to outside interests that they can reshape, once the scorched earth policy has been put in place, the infrastructure of delivery.” He argues that the state of the public finances is providing cover for a “complete rewrite by stealth of the functions, the direction, the raison d’etre of the civil service”; and once the state has been hacked back, he says, the government will reveal that it has “an ideological predilection to starting again based, this time, on private, not public enterprise.”

The assault on quangos, says Blunkett, is simply one element of this roll-back of the state – and it contains a notable paradox: “It was Margaret Thatcher who really started the ‘Next Steps’ programme in both the outside agencies and the non-departmental public bodies – and it’s a son of Thatcher who’s now seeking to ditch them.” But he doesn’t believe that the reduction in arm’s length bodies will clear up the accountability problem. Instead, he says, the new administration has – irreconcilably – both a stated commitment to local decision-making, and a set of ideas that it clearly wants to see implemented nationally: “The present government wants a particular form of phonics taught in schools, a particular structure of history taught, but at the same time is saying that it’s devolving power to head teachers to determine the curriculum,” he notes. “Well, you can have one of those, but you can’t have both.”

So overwhelming is the assault on the public sector, Blunkett believes, that “two years ago, I wouldn’t have believed that they could have done this”. And it is the financial crisis, he argues, that has enabled the government to mount this assault: “They’re saying that we have a budget deficit, therefore we’ve got to pare back expenditure and investment in public services to the absolute bone, and the restructuring is a corollary of that,” opines Blunkett. “But actually the opportunity has been grasped by David Cameron and George Osborne and their colleagues, and they’ve been able to take the Liberal Democrats along with them.”

The battler, embattled

In some ways, David Blunkett is as iconoclastic as he believes the new government to be. Our structures of government, he argues, do need profound reform; the systems founded in 1854 are no longer appropriate. “Northcote-Trevelyan was dealing with a different era completely, with a different range of responsibilities,” he comments. “Without 24-hour, seven-day-a-week news; without a European Union; without a devolved government in Scotland and an assembly in Wales. We’ve not really taken a look at the consequences of such major constitutional and communications change.”

Yet the Labour government was restrained in its reforms to civil service structures – Blair was too cautious, Blunkett believes, during the period when the previous administration had the most time and political capital – and now he fears that a new and very different government is set to dismantle much of the public sector, building a new structure based around private business rather than public service.

“We should value people who are prepared to give their lives to public service rather than making money,” he argues. “We should be very wary of believing that the private sector has all the answers: just look how the failure of regulation allowed the banks to bring us to our knees. We should have a vigour and enthusiasm for social entrepreneurship, innovation and enterprise within public service.”

The future, though, looks bleak to David Blunkett. The Conservatives may present themselves as mainstream, pragmatic moderates who are simply trying to dig us out of a financial hole, but he senses a hidden agenda; one that, he believes, could devastate the public sector to which he’s given 40 years of his life.

As we snap a few photos before leaving Blunkett’s Portcullis House office, his guide dog Sadie pads around excitedly. “It’s your dinner time, isn’t it?” he remarks, stroking the dog’s head as she stares adoringly up at him. Her biscuits rattle into a bowl as we exit, while Blunkett grins broadly and makes a fuss of his loyal assistant. The affection on both sides is obvious – and there’s something else. For this is a minister always wary of trusting his officials; a man whose colleagues ultimately dumped him on the back benches; a lover whose partner fought him in the courts; a politician deeply suspicious of his opponents’ motives and ambitions. So it’s nice to see something utterly heartfelt and open in David Blunkett as he feeds his dog: for a precious moment all too rare in Westminster, I witness a moment of complete, uncalculated mutual trust.

CV highlights
1951 Aged four, sent to a boarding school for the blind
1967 Begins work as a typist
1970 Becomes a councillor in Sheffield
1972 After studying while working for the gas board, graduates from Sheffield University with a degree in Political Theory and Institutions
1973 Awarded a PGCE, and begins work as a lecturer in industrial relations and politics
1980 Made leader of Sheffield City Council
1987 Elected MP for Sheffield Brightside – now Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough
1988 Becomes opposition spokesman for local government
1993 Elected chair of the Labour Party National Executive Committee
1995 Begins shadowing the Department of Education and Employment
1997 Appointed Secretary of State for Education and Employment
2001 Made home secretary
2004 Resigns after his office pushes for officials to fast-track a visa application by his lover’s nanny
2005 Becomes work and pensions secretary; resigns in November over investments he made while on the back benches
2006 Publishes his diaries, The Blunkett Tapes: My life in the bear pit