Did your views of the civil service change during your time in office?
I remember at the start going to home secretary David Blunkett’s office and saying how difficult I found working with civil servants. In different careers I had worked with people who shared my passions – for racial justice, for children’s learning or for progressive politics – and I was surrounded by a team who had come to work at the Home Office because it was a reliable job with good pension prospects. They didn’t share my frustration when a strategy didn’t work. For months I felt as if I was pulling on rubber levers.
But when I was more able to influence the teams I worked with, I did work with people who had passion. And when you add passion to the undoubted intelligence of so many civil servants you can have fun at work, even if it remained impossible to get them to change habits (for example, I gave clear instructions that if I am to give a speech I only want three messages, five facts and two stories, with no script – this was ignored).
What challenges did you face in working with civil servants?
In the Home Office few civil servants who work directly with ministers had been in public facing roles. Those who had were often quicker to “get” what the public needs and expects from government than those who wrote things rather than talked to people. Politicians spend their weekends talking to constituents, often people whose lives are very different from the lives of most civil servants and ministers. It was sometimes hard to educate members of the team about how to respond to and imagine those different lives.
If you were Cabinet Office minister, how would you change the civil service?
I would allow new governments to pick the people they want in key roles. This would help solve the “passion” problem. I am not convinced that a “neutral” civil service protects the public interest: the kind of people who become civil servants are often drawn from relatively privileged groups. I vividly remember helping a young British Asian woman who I mentored to report her experience of Fast Stream recruitment, where she was teamed up with three candidates, all male, white and who had attended such an event previously and so they, unlike her, knew what kind of tasks they would face.
Can you tell us a story that reveals something about the civil service?
When I was a parliamentary private secretary (not even a minister) I told a permanent secretary to stop gossiping about his secretary of state. He was charming, but he didn’t stop.
More in the Official View series:
The official view: Norman Baker
The official view: Tim Loughton
The official view: former government whip Baroness Northover rates the civil service
The official view: Former children's minister Dawn Primarolo rates the civil service
'Some departments have been colonised by the sectors they sponsor' - former health secretary Andrew Lansley on working with the civil service