Sir Brian Bender’s Whitehall career ended last year after a stint leading the business department, but he watches government closely still – and has strong views on civil service reform and austerity. Matthew O’Toole hears them
After a long and varied career in Whitehall, what does one do to make sure that retirement isn’t too drab? Sir Brian Bender (pictured above), who’s managed both the environment and business departments, is currently in the process of finding out, as he builds a post-government “portfolio” of interests. Though he chairs an advisory committee for Honda’s European arm and has a brace of other pro bono consultative roles, Sir Brian stresses that he’s taking his time. “The advice that two or three people have given me is that when you’re building a portfolio, think of it as a two-year project not a three or sixth month one,” he explains. “If you get anxious and grab the first things that come along, you’ll often find later that you’ve made a mistake.”
One thing Sir Brian is sure of, though, is that he’d like to focus his time on the private sector – perhaps unsurprisingly, given the amount of his civil service career he spent dealing with industry. “I’m not particularly looking in the public sector; I feel I did that for 35 years,” he says. Yet while he’s left government behind for the time being, Bender has much to say about how the civil service has changed – and how it will have to change again to cope with the austerity expected in the years to come.
Like many mandarins of his vintage, Sir Brian can offer plenty of examples to illustrate the different world officials occupied in decades gone by. “I joined in 1973,” he says. “I was issued on day one with a towel and a piece of soap, and it’s hard to believe now but when you went to the gents you took them with you. I remember getting a firm but constructive talking-to from my boss’s boss after I referred to someone in writing by their full name, and not Mr Whatever. It was a rather different world.”
These anecdotes illustrate the cultural shift inside Whitehall. More importantly, though, Bender says that during his time the entire context in which the British government operates has changed dramatically. When the UK joined the European Union (in the same year as Bender joined the civil service), this “fundamentally” affected the way policy decisions are made; later, he adds, the ‘Next Steps’ programme of the late 1980s – which ushered in the first executive agencies – marked a big shift in the control over frontline delivery. But the most significant change, Bender suggests, has been the technological revolution. With the arrival of a virtually limitless information source on the internet, plus an intense, 24-hour news cycle, the individual’s relationship with the state has shifted significantly. “Expectations have risen,” says Bender. “We can find out more about our medical condition by looking it up online than our GP might know, and the government has to recognise that as a public service provider.”
There have also been instances – too numerous to list – of government reorganising itself to better deliver the priorities of the party in power. In the past ten years, Bender has been in the thick of several of the most high-profile of these changes. He was permanent secretary at the old Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Maff) when it was swollen with responsibility for environment to become the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) – a change announced without warning on the day after the 2001 general election. A few years later, when he was boss of the Department for Trade and Industry, it was split upon Gordon Brown’s entry into Number 10, with Bender left to lead a smaller Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR).
Bender had barely cleared his desk last year when the deckchairs were reorganised again, and the department regained several of the policy areas it had lost – plus higher education. Though Bender stresses that the civil service coped manfully with the logistics of these machinery of government changes, he admits he’s “not a great fan” of the practice – a view shared by bodies such as the Commons public administration committee and think tank the Institute for Government. “There can be positives,” he says. “But it happens too often. If a PM were to ask my advice I’d say: ‘Only do it where there’s a real case for it’.”
If structural changes have become something of a specialist subject for Bender, so have crises. He oversaw the much-criticised response of Maff (and then Defra) to the foot and mouth crisis of 2001 and, in the final months of his tenure at the business department, much of the work done to tackle the effects of the financial downturn. What did he learn from foot and mouth? “How long have you got?” he responds with a wry smile. One of the positive results, he says, was the creation of the civil contingencies secretariat in the Cabinet Office to deal with crises on that scale – a team of officials that, when I met Bender, was busy tackling the heavy snow blanketing the country. Another positive development, he says, was the establishment of a “corporate memory” among serving staff of how to respond to challenges of that magnitude.
On the financial chaos of late 2008, Bender points out that the problems helped reinforce the raison d’être of the department. “Back in 2006-07, there was a fair amount of speculation over whether the DTI/BERR needed to exist, and it was quite tough on staff,” he says. “In the middle of a recession, nobody asks that question any more”. Though there have been criticisms that the myriad of policy announcements at the time risked creating confusion, Bender says that “coherence” was a major priority for his department and praises the “resilience and creativity” of his former staff.
What Bender calls “corporate memory” will also be important in implementing the deep spending cuts that everyone now accepts are inevitable. Many of Bender’s younger permanent secretary colleagues have just a hazy recollection – or no recollection – of a time when cuts were routine. “In the last two or three spending reviews, the discussions have been: ‘Will my budget be increased by one, two, three per cent?’,” Bender recalls – but it hasn’t always been like this. “Back in the 1980s, it was: ‘Will it be reduced by three, five, 10 per cent?’ People will need to dig out, so to speak, the corporate memories and the files of anyone who’s [still] around, because that’s the climate most departments are going to have to get back to.”
Having implemented big staff reductions at the business department himself in the past decade, this former Whitehall boss is convinced that cuts will have to be realised by stopping programmes altogether; the corporate efficiency savings that both parties dwell on will only account for a fraction of what needs to be saved. “Whatever government is elected, they can’t just say: ‘Take these staff numbers out’,” he concludes. “They will have to actually decide on stopping programmes.”
Sir Brian Bender: CV highlights
1973: Awarded PhD in physics from Imperial College London, and joins the Department of Trade (later the Department of Trade and Industry)
1976: Becomes private secretary to Edmund Dell, trade secretary
1977: Joins UK permanent representation to the European Community as first secretary for trade policy
1985: Appointed counsellor, energy and industry policy, DTI
1990: Moves to Cabinet Office, becoming deputy head, European secretariat
1994: Promoted to head of European Secretariat
1999: Moves up to becomes second permanent secretary, Cabinet Office
2000: Takes over as permanent secretary, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs from 2001)
2005: Returns to DTI as permanent secretary. The department is restructured as the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform in 2007
2009: Retires from government