Interview: John Armitt

Peter Riddell (pictured above) makes slow progress around the parliamentary estate. This is not because he is old – at 61, he is younger than many MPs and journalists – but because every few minutes, he’s buttonholed by Westminster villagers who want the veteran Times journalist’s time, advice or support. The most well-known to do so during our interview is former Liberal Democrat leader Ming Campbell, who swings by our table in the atrium of Portcullis House to ask for Riddell’s new contact details. “Enjoy the rarified heights of academia,” says Campbell, referring to Riddell’s expanding role at think-tank the Institute for Government. “You’ll still see me around, Ming,” he replies.

This is undoubtedly true. A Westminster and Whitehall fixture since 1976, when he became the Financial Times’ economics correspondent, Riddell has just joined the latest wave of redundancies at the Times. But his IfG role is, if anything, carrying him deeper than ever into government – an environment in which he is met with less suspicion than many journalists. Over nearly 40 years, Riddell has developed excellent contacts among both politicians and civil servants, who appreciate his discretion and his thoughtful, restrained reporting style.

He needed all these qualities when, working for the FT during the tumultuous Callaghan government, Riddell first started to build links with the Treasury. “The post-war self-confidence had been dented by the crisis of the ’70s – high inflation, high unemployment – and that made civil servants pretty defensive,” he remembers. In those days the civil service was “a very closed institution, admitting people on their own terms; suspicious of the press; apprehensive about dealing with outsiders. It was a very hairy time in terms of exchange rates and all the rest of it, and I arguably had one of the most influential press jobs – but there was a slight sense of a pat on the head.”

Opening up

Over the last 35 years, says Riddell, the civil service has changed dramatically. In part, this is a response to the ‘open government’ agenda and the growth of the internet; the simultaneous arrival of the two phenomena is, says Riddell, a coincidence – but they have clearly reinforced one another. The growth of think-tanks, and their strengthening connections with the political parties, has also increased the flow of information:

“The civil service no longer has a monopoly on advice,” he says. “Sometimes that’s gone too far, and the civil service has felt – rightly – that a minister isn’t listening to them, but to some outside think-tank. Still, all these changes have made the civil service far more open, far more willing to engage in dialogue.”

In part, he continues, the change also reflects the culture of new generations and the broadening-out of civil service recruitment beyond the traditional pools. “For the last 10 or 15 years, I’ve been giving a talk on the National School of Government’s Parliament and Government course,” he says. “In the past it was almost all men. But nowadays it’s likely that more than half will be women, and you’ll have two or three ethnic minorities. Obviously there’s further to go, but these days the civil service is much more diverse”.

A third key reason for the civil service’s changing culture, Riddell says, is the shift in career paths. “The Treasury I knew in the 1970s was one of lifers,” he smiles. “But people are no longer lifelong civil servants. In every department, people come in their late 20s, go in their late 30s, come back again.” People with broader experiences, he believes, are not only more open to dialogue than career civil servants; they are also more open to new ideas. Among the permanent secretaries, “those who are the most open-minded are those who’ve come in from outside; who’ve been the chief executives of local authorities or international organisations. They’re much more willing to say: ‘Why on earth should we do it this way? Let’s do something different.’ And that’s an enormous change from the past.”

Getting out

However, this exchange of personnel has not always been to the civil service’s advantage, says Riddell: during the 1980s and early ’90s, there was a brain drain of talented staff out to the private sector. Under Thatcher, he says, “the civil service was tolerated but not encouraged”; under Major, it was losing influence to special advisers. Meanwhile, privatisation was making former civil servants increasingly valuable in the world of business: “You’d see people, particularly those in their 30s, saying: ‘Why would I want to work for this salary, when I could treble it in the City?’ A lot of very talented people left, and that was a problem,” recalls Riddell.

The impact of that exodus persists today, Riddell believes. “Sometimes at the director general level, the quality of people is mixed,” he says. “At that level, a lot of good people left. So my feeling is that nowadays some of the best talent is actually at the director level: people in their late 30s and 40s. And I’ve been very impressed by how bright, innovative and open-minded these people are; there’s a lot of talent there.”

More recently, the professionalisation agenda has reversed that brain drain, drawing in people with technical and professional skills in fields such as IT, finance and HR. Riddell welcomes this form of external recruitment, but warns that such incomers are still not wholly accepted. “The finance people are still slightly ‘below the table’,” he says. “They’re not treated like some of the other director generals, and that will have to change with the spending review. Similarly, some of the HR people are regarded as a little bit different.”

There is, Riddell adds, a gap between the rhetoric that encourages external recruitment of professionals, and exhorts civil servants to get delivery experience to boost their careers – “To get on, get out”, as cabinet secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell puts it – and the reality of what actually accelerates promotion within the civil service. “Cabinet secretaries have had a mantra that you’ve got to do a delivery job, an operational job and a policy job – and that is valuable,” says Riddell. “But I’ve heard it in turn from Richard Wilson, Andrew Turnbull and Gus O’Donnell, and if you look at their own careers, it’s all been policy jobs.” The truth is, he adds, that “If you say to people in their 30s and 40s: ‘The way to prosper is to do this,’ they say: ‘Hold on, you can’t be too far from power. You get forgotten about’.”

Perhaps, Riddell concludes, it would be better to accept that policy people will end up heading government departments, while professional managers and technical experts lead delivery bodies and specialist agencies. “Different qualities are involved in dealing with ministers and the policy environment, and in running a large agency,” he says. “The key is parity of esteem.”

The rise of the career politician

Another continuing weakness within the civil service, Riddell argues, is “suspicion of the political process. The idea is still very ingrained that: ‘We do our jobs, and the politicians get on with their rather vulgar, rather unpleasant jobs over in Westminster’. In the minds of too many civil servants, there’s a separation of powers – but in fact government is part of Parliament.”

In part, the hostility sometimes discernible in Whitehall towards the machinations of Westminster is rooted in the fact that political calculations and knee-jerk reactions to media furores often cause sudden and disruptive policy U-turns. The rise of the career politician – a phenomenon on which Riddell wrote a book nearly 20 years ago – is partly to blame for political “short-termism; an obsession with winning the media battle day to day”, says Riddell. “The most important thing in a minister is judgement and detachment: the ability to realise what you should worry about and to get everything else in perspective. And sometimes if you’ve been a special adviser you become so obsessed with the short-term – because that’s your job – that you can’t get things into perspective.”

Since Riddell first charted the rise of the career politician, he says, “virtually everything in there has been accentuated. Young MPs come up to me and say: ‘We enjoyed your book. We found it a very useful manual’. It was meant to be a warning, not a manual!” But nowadays he doesn’t think the change is all bad: “In many respects, career politicians make good ministers because they know how the system works. And there are many new Tory MPs who don’t fall into that category; many have a real breadth of expertise.”

Despite these frustrations with politics, says Riddell, it’s important that civil servants become more engaged with Westminster; and it would be helpful if politicians changed their attitudes. “So many times, I’ve heard civil servants complaining about appearing before select committees, because the MPs are trivial and point-scoring,” he says. “The trouble is that MPs are often bloody useless; they’re partisan, negative. They’ll have to up their game.”

When civil servants “regard Parliament as a nuisance”, though, the result is often failed legislation and doomed policy. “Particularly in a coalition, civil servants need to genuinely understand the parliamentary process,” says Riddell. “We need to get a dialogue, not confrontation. But too many civil servants are actually plain ignorant about Parliament.”

Here come the ‘neds’

The most senior civil servants are also going to have to get used to closer scrutiny by non-executive directors: the coalition has announced plans to appoint more private sector ‘neds’, and to give them the power to recommend that permanent secretaries be sacked. Riddell is unconvinced. For one thing, he says, “some of the best non-execs I’ve met have been people with public sector skills”: they tend to have a better understanding of the environment within which the civil service operates, he suggests.

Riddell is also concerned that, unlike private or voluntary sector neds, departmental non-execs “don’t have clear-cut legal responsibilities”. The power to effectively sack permanent secretaries is, he says, “very curious constitutionally” and “doesn’t necessarily provide an easy basis for a relationship with the permanent secretary”. Involving neds in permanent secretaries’ appraisals could be valuable, he says – “but I’m sceptical about this ‘red card’ power”.

What’s more, Riddell adds, the line between organisational and policy matters is blurred within government – and neds won’t be able to help avoid political problems. “One current non-exec said to me: ‘Actually, the person who should be sacked is the secretary of state, not the permanent secretary’,” he recalls. “If you’d had a non-exec in the Treasury a few years ago looking at what went wrong with tax credits, they’d have found that the person who should have been sacked was the minister, Dawn Primarolo – and, arguably, Gordon Brown. It was their policy decisions that landed HMRC with all the problems.”

Finding the savings

Still, Riddell does believe that private sector neds may be able to help control costs in the civil service – and that agenda, of course, is currently dominating the government’s attention. There are big savings to be found, he believes; many of them have already been identified. “At the top level of the civil service, people have been giving this a lot of thought,” he says. “And there’s a willingness within the coalition to think radically. Whether it’s radical enough, we’ll see!”

This radicalism, Riddell believes, should be applied to reaping the potential savings identified in the Total Place project; a concept set for expansion, most likely under a new name. “I think there’s real scope to do things more imaginatively,” he says. “Total Place shows that services could be delivered in a different way, while saving money – though that would involve central government taking its hands off and not only not ring-fencing funds, but creating joint budgets as well.”

Radical action demands strong leadership – and Riddell is heartened by the appointment of Ian Watmore as chief operating office of the Efficiency & Reform Group (see analysis, p6-7). “He’s a very interesting man,” he says. “He’s original, and he’s got experience outside government, at the centre of government, and in a department. Having been scarred by the awful experience of [his time as permanent secretary of the now defunct] Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, I think he’s got a good perspective: one thing he’ll recommend is that they don’t mess with the machinery of government!”

Watmore, Riddell believes, “has the right balance of insider knowledge and outside perspective”. The task facing Watmore, though, is vast – and made tougher still by the compressed timetable. The civil service and cabinet know where many of the inefficiencies lie, Riddell argues: “The problem is that they’re doing it very fast. We know that the spending review will be published on 20 October. You can knock out most of August, plus a week or two for the party conferences. That’s not very long!”

Weathering the storm

Asked how civil servants can weather the coming financial storm, Riddell replies that they should seize the initiative. “It is a storm, and it does have to be weathered,” he says. “So be creative, and try to make the best of it. If you’re doing a project, think how you could do it better. That’s very difficult, if doing it better means losing the people sitting next to you – but take a positive approach, and come up with ideas that can help.”

For many months, it has been clear that this storm would break one day – and that day is now imminent, says Riddell: “I’ve had conversations with senior civil servants who’ve said: ‘Peter, is this for real?’ Morale is pretty low, because they’re realising that this is big stuff.” No matter how much people prepare themselves for change, he adds, it’s still a surprise when it arrives. “It’s all very well knowing you’re going to have a tooth out in three months, and I can say to you: ‘It’s going to hurt’,” Riddell concludes. “Well, now you’re in the dentist’s chair. And that feels quite different.”

CV highlights
1948 Born in Torquay, Devon
1970 Awarded an MA in economics from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and joins the FT as a financial and property writer
1976 Promoted to become the FT’s economics correspondent
1981 Made the FT’s political editor
1983 Publishes his first book: The Thatcher Government
1991 Joins the Times as chief political commentator
2000 Begins a three-year stretch as a visiting professor of political history at Queen Mary and Westfield College, London
2006 Publishes his ninth and latest book: The Unfulfilled Prime Minister: Tony Blair’s Quest for a Legacy
2007 Becomes chairman of the Hansard Society
2008 Made a senior fellow at the Institute for Government
2010 Made redundant by the Times; appointed to torture inquiry