Interview: Lord Turnbull

“In politics, you have to believe in certainties,” Lord Turnbull (pictured above) says. Asked whether he’s ever held political ambitions, he replies that he would have been unsuited for party politics because he doesn’t see issues in black and white. “There are too many variables; a lot of it’s about probability,” he says, “but parties always have to say: ‘It’s great’, right up until the point where they admit that it isn’t and change course.”

Turnbull’s less opinionated approach has certainly served him well in serving the politicians: he was cabinet secretary from 2002-05, and before that permanent secretary at the Treasury. Yet one wonders whether he’s as undecided on the issues as he pretends – or perhaps he’s just become bolder now that he is unconstrained by impartiality. Throughout the interview, strong opinions emerge. These aren’t knee-jerk reactions – but nor are they those of the politician, who gives an opinion and then builds a case around it. Turnbull instead embarks on a long and frequently garrulous explanation of the politics and policy around an issue, and peppers it with opinion along the way.

Indeed, if he hadn’t become a civil servant, Turnbull would have been well-suited to a career in education: he shows a real desire to explain things, barely stopping for breath as he sketches out the world around him. And his desire to explain isn’t his only qualification for a career in education: it’s a field where he does hold strong opinions, with his views on the Academies Bill being the closest he gets to certainties.
Academy angst

Actually, Turnbull is now involved in education, and has some experience of the academies programme through his work as chairman of the board of governors of Dulwich College – an independent school that has sponsored an academy on the Isle of Sheppey. Originally, he says the idea for academies “saw to it that schools that were given academy status were those that really needed it. They were bad schools and you needed to do something; you needed new ideas and new premises.”

The current Academies Bill doesn’t focus on poor performers and is taking “a rather more atomistic view”, he thinks; it will be decisions by individual governing bodies that decides the location of new academies, not a plan to tackle bad inner-city schools. The provisions in the bill mean that schools can apply to become academies if they are of a certain standard, and local communities can also apply to set up their own schools.

Turnbull questions the likely results. “What happens if all the new schools are in the leafy end of the borough, and the provision in the rough end of the borough, which needs it most, isn’t improved? Can you simply allow these completely competitive forces to make the choice about the network?”

Turnbull believes that government has to step in and guide this process; communities cannot be left to their own devices: “Someone has got to be, in a sense, the network controller, the shaper of the network.” Reflecting his own status as a peer, Turnbull notes that as the Academies Bill developed in the House of Lords, “some very important assurances were extracted about local consultation, and in particular that the priority to meeting special needs was not diluted. The one thing a school could not do is become an independent, state-funded school, take the government’s money, but then not take its fair share of the difficult children.” However, he still appears unsatisfied by the focus of the Academies Bill and its provisions for ‘free schools’.

The localism consensus

The problems in the bill are inherent in the idea of varied provision in the public sector, Turnbull argues. “The discussion of ‘choice’ is often a bit free and easy, and doesn’t really take account of where the idea runs – and where it runs out,” he says.

As a rule, choice only works well when “the community has equal access, equal financial resources, equal clout.” Yet choice and variety of provision are the two dominant ideas of the moment, and fit with a general trend towards moving power away from central government.

Giving me a potted history of the ideas, Turnbull says that the first stage of this drive was devolution, which he favoured “because the old system assumed that all the parties had some support all the way around the country”. When Tory support declined outside England, he notes, the government ended up with Englishmen representing Scotland and Wales in cabinet. “There were no eligible Welsh secretaries of state, so you had to start putting carpet-baggers in: John Redwood, William Hague,” comments Turnbull.

Here, the former cabinet secretary is clearly enjoying the freedoms of retirement; you can see how he got into trouble in 2007 for describing Gordon Brown’s style of management as “Stalinist” (he used the phrase in a Financial Times interview, and it was used to embarrass Brown just as he had taken over as prime minister). Indeed, his style of speaking is less grandiloquent than I’d expected; Turnbull is rather waffly, and gesticulates frantically as he attempts to simplify complex ideas.

Continuing with his history, he plots the trend away from government structures and towards the ideas of choice and variety of provision in public services: “One of the expectations was that localism would mean returning to local democratic control, ie. a revival of the local government agenda. It turned out that actually we are now looking at a different definition, which comes from ideas about choice and consumers.”

The idea that “consumers should shape their services,” Turnbull points out, started to develop under Tony Blair in 2001. Given that he took over as cabinet secretary in 2002, he was at the forefront of pushing these ideas out into the public sector. However, he clearly regrets that “local government has come to be seen as another form of bureaucracy – wrongly, in my view”. Councils should play a key role in services, he believes: “I’m rather a fan of local government.”

However, Turnbull says that even the Labour party is now more interested in enabling individuals and communities to control public services than in backing council provision. The Liberal Democrats, he adds, are fully on-board with the language of choice and consumers: “They would be much less ambitious on commercialisation than the Conservatives, but the truth is that all three parties have been moving in the same direction for 20 years, and none of them really want to go back to a localism defined as local authority-dominated provision of services.”

These are ideological divisions, but Turnbull highlights a practical problem with making public services more consumerist – one that is particularly relevant when the government is seeking to cut costs. “You have to have spare capacity, and the Treasury doesn’t like spare capacity,” he says. “It thinks it’s a waste, and in some ways it is. But if you’re going to let people say: ‘I want my children to go to this school,’ the school has got to have the places, or the willingness to expand and allow surplus places to develop.

“Traditionally, we always run public services at maximum output. Hospitals do not have spare beds lying around, and we’re always trying to close surplus school places,” he notes.

Constitutional change

As the interview continues, Turnbull becomes still more happy to express strong opinions. He believes, for example, that a change to the voting system from first-past-the-post to the Alternative Vote (AV) won’t have a large impact on each party’s Parliamentary representation. “The AV system is not transformative,” he says. “You’re shifting 25 seats here, 25 seats there – and it can in certain circumstances be almost as biased as the first-past-the-post system. The only thing that can be said for certain is that every MP has got some degree of support from at least half the electorate.”

Controversially, the coalition coupled its plans to reform the voting system with the redrawing of electoral boundaries to equalise constituency populations. Turnbull believes that the Conservatives’ motive is to negate the likelihood that, under the current boundaries, AV would reduce their number of seats.

“I think the Conservatives’ belief is that roughly what they lose on AV they would get back [on boundary changes],” he says. “This isn’t going to be a huge loss to them, and eventually the transfer is between Labour and the Liberals: the Liberals gain from the AV, and Labour is losing from the equalisation.”

Asked specifically whether the redrawing of boundaries is politically motivated, he replies: “Well, it has a logic to it. In the 2005 election, the Conservatives had to win 44,000 votes to get a seat and Labour were getting a seat for every 27,000. In the last election those figures came much closer together. But there needs to be some [correlation] between the number of votes you get and the number of seats, and it is currently very, very poor. So just on a priori grounds, it would be a good thing to have more equally sized seats.”

Cut the Commons and more

As well as backing the redrawing of constituency boundaries, Turnbull is in favour of reducing the number of MPs in the Commons – another Conservative proposal. “We’ve got a large number of MPs – the same number of MPs as when we [in Westminster] were running the whole country,” he says. “We have not reduced the number despite the fact that we now have 17 million people under devolved administrations.”

He also believes that cutting the number of MPs alone isn’t enough: the executive must shrink. “Why should ministerial numbers be kept the same?” he says. “One of the great unrealised facts is that the number of ministerial posts is dictated by the Ministerial Salaries Act – very, very roughly, it says that you can employ 110 people on ministerial salaries. It’s been there for years.”

This idea should fit in with the coalition’s desire to shrink the state, Turnbull suggests. “If you’re saying government should be 25 per cent smaller, well maybe charity begins at home and the number of ministers should be 25 per cent smaller,” he says. “It all fits; smaller government ought to require fewer ministers.” However, he points out that reform would require the prime minister to give up one of his tools of patronage: the ability to create new ministers.

The House of Lords should also shrink, in Turnbull’s opinion – but currently the reverse is happening. “It is expanding at a massive rate,” he says. “We [the Lords] have taken on another 100 people. There’s no provision for people to leave; there’s no requirement that people leave. I personally think that there should be term-limitation, and if we don’t have a term limitation there should be a process that would encourage people to leave – yet neither is the case.”

Turnbull may want to cut the number of peers, but he does see the utility of having some people appointed to the Upper House: it’s a good way to bring more experience into government, he says, and to recycle former ministers (or, indeed, cabinet secretaries) who still have more to give. He cites Lord Mandelson as an example of an appointment that worked, but dismisses Gordon Brown’s efforts to build a ‘Government Of All the Talents’ as a clear failure; most appointees didn’t stay in their roles for long enough to learn their way around government and make a significant impact, he complains.
Turnbull’s mention of Lord Mandelson raises a constitutional problem. As a member of the House of Lords, the business secretary couldn’t be held to account in the Commons by his opposite number – Kenneth Clarke – or be compelled to appear in front of Commons select committees. Turnbull would therefore like to see ministers from both houses freed to appear in the other chamber.

“In the long term, I would like to see a situation where you can become a member of the House of Lords – either appointed or elected – and you have accountability to the house that you’re not a member of,” he says. “So you could be asked to make the secondary speech on a bill on one house and again in the other house. If you are the minister in the Upper House, you could be required to address a select committee in the Commons.”

The role of the civil service

With a new government eager to tidy up some elements of the constitution, we may see progress on these issues in the years to come – but only if the coalition endures. The civil service was important in ensuring a smooth transition to coalition government; what should it do if the alliance starts to fragment?

Turnbull is clear: civil servants should support the government, but shouldn’t try to keep the coalition together. “It’s for the politicians to decide whether they want to be in an alliance or not, and the civil service would have supported the Conservatives in a minority administration with the same degree of commitment as they’re supporting the coalition,” he says.

Other senior civil servants have not always held the same view. I put to him the opinion of Sir John Elvidge – the former permanent secretary of the Scottish government, who had active experience of serving a coalition – that in a coalition, civil servants should be prepared to play a more interventionist role. Turnbull responds: “You’re always smoothing relationships; what you shouldn’t be doing is telling people that the coalition has to continue, that a particular form of government relationship is better than another. That is for the politicians to decide. When they’ve decided that, you have to make it work.”

Given the need to tackle the difficult financial position with painful cuts, Turnbull does think that the current coalition is preferable to minority rule. “It is easier to have nearly 60 per cent of the population having voted for the parties putting forward these ideas,” he says.

Turnbull also thinks it’s easier for David Cameron to get controversial, deficit-cutting or reforming legislation through the Commons with another party onside. “Although he’s had to accommodate [Liberal Democrat] views and he’s had to accommodate their people in the cabinet,” Turnbull says, “for the moment he is much better off in carrying out this task than if he were doing it as a minority government, because [in that case] the Liberals wouldn’t be behaving as they are now.”

Meanwhile, Turnbull thinks, the Liberal Democrats benefit from the coalition because they can show themselves to be a “mature party” that can be a “worthwhile part of government”. As for the civil service, he believes, it is currently rather enjoying working for the coalition.

“I think there are various aspects of the coalition they quite like: a lot more business has to be done openly, and you can’t really run a coalition on a ‘sofa government’ basis,” he comments. “You’ve got to do a lot more bridge-building and building up relationships in cabinet, which becomes more important than it was.”

And what of Lord Turnbull: does he miss the civil service? If others are enjoying working for the coalition, would he? “I think it would be quite interesting,” he says, answering my second question somewhat ruefully. He is more nuanced in answering the first – and as revelations emerge about the working relationship between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, it is becoming clear why he has mixed feelings about his years leading the civil service.

Turnbull had to deal with the rift between Blair and Brown on a day-to-day basis, as he struggled to prevent infighting from derailing the wider work of government. So his answer contains a caveat: Turnbull would have enjoyed still being a civil servant right now, “when the civil service’s standing is rising; [when] it is generally getting applauded for what it’s doing – rather than having to work through five more years of GB-TB,” he concludes.

“When [Andrew] Rawnsley’s book came out, people said: ‘Oh, this an exaggeration, all based on tittle-tattle’. Then Mandelson releases his book, and it turns out it was all true – and more.”

CV Highlights
1970 Joins HM Treasury
1983 Becomes private secretary (economics) to Margaret Thatcher 
1988 Promoted to principal private secretary to Margaret Thatcher 
1994 Appointed as permanent secretary, Department of the Environment
1998 Made permanent secretary, HM Treasury
2002 Becomes cabinet secretary and head of the home civil service
2005 Leaves the civil service; becomes a senior adviser to consultancy Booz & Company