On the face of it, who could disagree? If the 24-hour media circus is going to clamour for the head of a minister for something that he or she blames on their department, it might seem reasonable that they have more of a say over who leads that department. But is this about “sharpening accountability”, or buck-passing? Is it really about competence, or belief-based appointments?
While “a stronger role” has yet to be defined, this proposal is one of the plan’s most controversial, and raises serious questions about a creeping politicisation of the civil service. At its heart is the question of accountability and responsibility.
“Ministers must take direct responsibility for central elements of a department’s business,” Roger Freeman, then Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, said in a 1996 speech on public service reform. For him, these elements included “the policies of the department; the framework through which these policies are delivered; the resources allocated,” and the “implementation decisions any agency framework document may require”.
“What they cannot sensibly be held responsible for is absolutely everything which goes on in the department,” he continued. That “would be a great inhibition on sensible modern management methods.”
Freeman’s views helped shape the current system of ministerial accountability: the first document with the ‘Ministerial Code’ title was published the following year. And it seems that little has changed since then: ministers still feel the pressure when things they don’t – and shouldn’t – have control over go awry. But the response from ministers and the government should be to resist this pressure, not to give in to it.
Clearly, the relationship between a minister and the permanent secretary is a vital one, but one of the intrinsic values of our permanent civil service is that civil servants do not serve a single party or minister. Ministers already have an input into the selection process, and can help determine the skill set and attributes required of candidates for the role. The head of the civil service will try to match up skills and personalities when moving permanent secretaries around. All of this is good management of the civil service and what the government would expect.
But if ministers had a far stronger role in appointing permanent secretaries, what would happen when the minister moved on? After all, their tenure is generally shorter than that of civil servants. We have seen in the past ministers who could barely be in the same room as one another, and they were in the same party! How would they react to a permanent secretary closely associated with a ministerial rival? Permanent secretaries need the skills to work with a range of ministers, not simply the incumbent at a particular point in time.
If ministers can hire, then at some point they will want to fire. Some of the concern arises from what some will see as the “creeping” nature of politicisation. If a minister is lucky enough to be in a department that’s recruiting a new permanent secretary, and so gets a stronger role in the appointment, why should a minister with a big challenge, or at the forefront of the government’s policy agenda, not also get the permanent secretary of their choice?
And if a minister has picked their own permanent secretary, what happens if they move departments? Does their appointee move with them, creating further disruption across both departments?
All this, together with the recent announcement of the first contestable policy contract (see news, p1), is intensifying concerns that the government’s agenda is to increase the number of top civil servants who are appointed on the basis of belief, rather than knowledge.
There will always be some paranoia that politicians – of all parties – only want to surround themselves with believers, and that much of the criticism of the civil service only comes when it “speaks truth to power” and the message isn’t what power wants to hear. The truth probably, as ever, lies somewhere in the middle. Any government wants its policies developed and delivered well, and the civil service is clearly not beyond criticism.
What we do need is a broader debate on these issues. The government has to work harder at building a consensus, but critics also have to recognise that simply defending the status quo is not tenable.
Dave Penman is general secretary of the FDA trade union