Since becoming the PAC chair in 2010, Margaret Hodge has attempted to sharpen individual civil servants’ accountability for events that occur during their watch, summoning some back to give evidence on their actions in previous jobs – and even forcing one HMRC official to give evidence on the Bible. But Penman attacked “the atrocious way she’s dealt with civil servants at the PAC, effectively looking – for what I think is purely political purposes – to point the finger.”
“The idea of getting civil servants to swear on the Bible in an evidence session is just outrageous in terms of the treatment of individuals, and there is a lot of concern about how they’ve conducted that for what is, at the end of the day, political purposes,” he said, arguing that the motivation was “not about good government, not about good policy, but about people’s own political ambition and their own political ends. And I think that is what makes that relationship pretty difficult.”
When giving evidence before a select committee, Penman said, civil servants are acting on behalf of their minister; they aren’t permitted to reveal that, for example, they advised against a course of action that proved disastrous. So select committees can’t hear all sides of the story or, he argued, determine an individual civil servant’s culpability for failures. If they start doing so, “then civil servants are going to have to be able to say: ‘Well, this is what I did. That’s the advice I gave.’ And if you do that, you have a different role for the civil service.” In that case, he said, civil servants called to give evidence would “defend their own self-interest by pointing the finger, and I don’t think that would be a welcome constitutional development.”
Questions over civil servants’ competence, Penman said, should be addressed by their employers, not select committees. Hodge and her allies are “making political judgements because it suits them as politicians. But to treat civil servants in that way is just outrageous.” Asked whether the PAC chair has been grandstanding, he replied: “Absolutely – and for purely political purposes.”
CSW approached Hodge, but she declined to comment.
Read our interview with Dave Penman