Recent policy U-turns seem to have got civil servants thinking about their duty to question poor decisions – even when that means challenging a minister. Matt Ross hears top officials exhort them to stick to their guns.
One topic that emerged repeatedly in discussions at CSL was the need for civil servants to be ready to challenge ministers over policies that appear flawed or poorly thought-out. Although there was no dedicated session, audience members kept raising the issue in questions to panellists – and in their responses, senior officials were quick to emphasise the need for civil servants to fulfil their duty to ‘speak truth to power’.
Perhaps minds were dwelling on the subject because there’s a feeling that civil servants have been a little too eager to please their new political masters: overly keen to demonstrate that, despite some incoming ministers’ prejudices, the civil service is neither the ‘Opposition in residence’ nor stuffed with New Labour sympathisers. This lack of internal challenge may have helped foster some of the coalition’s policy debacles, which bore the stamp of policymaking failures or a breakdown in relationships within departments. The axing of the education department’s Building Schools for the Future initiative, for example, seemed rushed through without sufficient data checks. Elsewhere, officials whose advice was spurned may have walked away from policies: the environment department’s disastrous attempt to sell forests looked like a plan that some departmental officials refused to touch.
Speaking at a question time session, businessman and former civil service commissioner Chris Stevens identified a reluctance among officials to challenge policies: “I do detect from time to time a slight super-deference to the political kingdom, and that people are cautious about speaking up to ministers,” he said. “But whenever I’ve been involved in having to speak up, it’s actually been welcomed and not jeopardised people’s employment rights or opportunities.” Civil servants, he added, simply have to ensure that their advice is built “on the basis of evidence and accurate facts”.
In a session on transparency, National Audit Office chief Amyas Morse suggested that if more information on policymaking processes and the evidence underlying decisions comes into the public domain, there will be greater pressure on civil servants to ensure that any concerns are raised and noted. “Being prepared to give ministers messages that they don’t want to hear is a crucial part of the way ahead, in my view,” he said. “And I don’t think it will be dispensable in a transparent environment, because people will have more and more information and they’ll be able to say: ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’.” The consequences of a more transparent world, he argued, would include “an inability to ignore evidence and a need to be more evidentially-based in decisions”.
Sharing a panel with Stevens, the cabinet secretary argued that civil servants do regularly challenge their political masters: “We go through every day saying ‘no’ to ministers on all sorts of things, because the evidence points in different directions, or what they want to do is illegal, for example – or daft!” As accounting officers, he added, top officials can exercise the “nuclear threat” of demanding a written direction from ministers.
“Last year there were a very large number of directions,” noted Sir Gus – though he added that he’s always found the mere threat of a request sufficient: “In those circumstances, ministers have backed off.” So this is a powerful tool, and civil servants should be aware that their own departmental chiefs have both an interest in blocking bad policies, and the means to do so.
“I’d like to say that ministers always accept good advice, and most of the time they do,” O’Donnell concluded. “But there are occasions when it’s our job to be absolutely clear that it’s not in any minister’s long-term interest – or our own – to do something. It’s very much in their interest that we say ‘no’ sometimes.”