Ministers and Officials

Rory Stewart's Experience

Like most others, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Rory Stewart's Politics On the Edge. A couple of his themes are of particular interest to civil servants:-

He deplores the way in which responsibilities are allocated to ministers. Take Defence Secretary Philip Hammond, for instance, who had shown no previous interest in or knowledge of defence issues:

He had a quick, intelligent mind, a great capacity for work, toughness and clarity. But he was being made to live out the Edwardian fantasy that a first-class degree from Oxford was qualification enough for anything.

Rory Stewart was himself very interested in what became known as localism. So he pressed hard, as a back bench MP, to be appointed to the Localism Bill Committee:

I was not appointed. The whips had apparently been told to exclude anyone with an interest in a subject from a bill committee, for fear that they would ask awkward questions. They preferred non- specialist MPs, who spent the committees looking at their phones or catching up on their correspondence. For the same reason it seemed doctors were not allowed on the health legislation committee.

And he was no fan, when he became an FCDO minister, of his boss Boris Johnson. He organised one meeting with the Foreign Secretary who, somewhat to his surprise, approved his plan to reprioritise and open more Embassies in Africa.

'Well!' I said to the Permanent Secretary outside the room, 'it looks like we have finally done it'. ... The civil servant explained that Boris Johnson liked to agree with the last person he had spoken to - even if this contradicted the last instructions he had given - and therefore civil servants could not be expected to act on his apparent endorsement.

For me, though, the most fascinating bits of the book recount his interaction, as prisons minister, with the Prison Service. Mr Stewart thought that the service was insufficiently responsive to his views. The service (or at least some of its leaders) thought that he was interfering too much in operational matters. I am far from sure who was right but here are some extracts which might help you judge for yourself:

Against the advice of the department, who wanted me to stay in London for ministerial work, I took the train to see what had gone wrong in Liverpool. The expectation seemed to be that I should go alone. In every other department in which I had served, officials had accompanied ministers on visits. ... Ambassadors had sat with me in airport transit lounges at 4:00 in the morning ... But no one seemed interested in accompanying a prisons minister. No one came from the prison to meet me at the station. I was beginning to sense that no one in the system saw much point in prisons ministers.

...

When I shared my suggestions with the ministry drugs team, they were really dismissive. 'If you stop drugs coming in one way they will come in another', they said. You don't want to be like your predecessors fantasising about how to stop drugs coming in on drones. ... [I had to insist on the introduction of scanners] I was unsure why the civil servants were so determined to oppose me. Did they believe that the whole system was so porous and corrupt that technology was irrelevant? Did they resent a minister pushing an option which they had not proposed? Or was resistance just a habit?

...

Civil servants' advice was consistent, and concise: "Listen to Michael Spurr". He was the earnest, sombre chief executive of the prison service. ... He alone exercised, it was said, the ultimate control over which governor got which prison, who was promoted, who got resources, where numbers went up and down, which prisons were prioritised. ... But ... violent assaults in prisons had tripled during his time as chief executive ... He was considered to be doing his best with an impossible situation ... He felt - with some reason - that all the problems in his prisons had been caused by politicians. And he was determined to keep me as far away from his prisons as he could.

The ministry often talked as though filthy, violent, drug-ridden prisons were an inevitable result of austerity, and that nothing could be done to stop them getting worse. But my visit (to a private prison) had suggested to me that good governors could still make a difference. By insisting on basic minimum standards they could make prisons much safer, cleaner and less drug ridden, and restore the morale of their overwhelmed staff.

I sensed that the problem didn't lie with the uniformed officers. I hadn't seen any role in public service with responsibilities so raw or so immediate. ... I told Spurr that I wanted to do more to demonstrate we cared about protecting officers in an environment of soaring prison violence. Some prison officers had been stabbed. Many of them had asked me if they could be issued with stab vests. ...

This was not the way to approach Spurr. I had touched on issues to which he was sensitive and which seemed to challenge the values he had set for the service. ... He described how it had felt when he joined the service in the 1980s; when prisoners were required to look down and bow their heads whenever a prison officer went past; when corrupt unions had run prisons, while the governors cowered in their offices. He described his very difficult struggles in his early career to challenge bullying in prisons and to fire prison officers for abuse. He talked passionately about how important it was to help prisoners turn their lives around.

When he had finished, I tried to praise what he was trying to do, but also to ask whether there wasn't some way of preserving what he had achieved, while still restoring some basic standards. ... Could we not ask governors to set certain clear, properly enforced rules on how prisoners should dress and behave? Use regular cell inspections, cleaning parties and searching at the gate, to make prisons cleaner and reduce drugs? [But] every criticism I made of our prisons was a criticism of a system he had been managing for eight years.

...

When I called senior managers in to discuss ... problems they responded with jargon and acronyms: the Violence Reduction Tool, the Offender Manager in Custody Tool, the Gang Index, the Promoting Risk Intervention by Situational Management Tool, the Safer Custody Meeting, and the Assessment Care in Custody and Teamwork Process that was supposed to stop suicides (except it seemed in Nottingham where 50 people were on ACCT and seven had killed themselves). Too many managers seemed to want to talk about identity change, 'strong integrated, service delivery between partners' and rehabilitative leadership' while their prison officers lacked basic skills and their prisoners lacked blankets and toilet paper.

I was beginning to sense, over five roles across four departments, that civil servants often preferred ministers to be dignified mouthpieces, who defended the department competently and fluently, without challenging operational policy. They viewed us as child emperors, to be indulged, praised and manipulated like a five-year-old in dragon robes.

The deference to ministers in all departments was extravagant. Teams of private secretaries and diary secretaries worked night and day and through weekends to accommodate our travel requests, to move a red box hundreds of miles to our houses, and to get us a cappuccino or a plate of sushi. And we had constitutional power. We could introduce new laws in Parliament, cut budgets, lay off prison officers, and privatise. In short, ministers could make the lives of civil servants hell, and often did. But changing day-to-day practice, I was learning, was a very different matter. In the prison service, Michael Spurr or indeed any civil servant had to accept ministers changing the law, or cutting budgets, but they didn't want a minister involved in operations.

Some governors were more sympathetic to Rory's ideas than were others:

The Yorkshire prisons seemed to welcome the coaching teams - not least because they reinforced their traditional emphasis on cleanliness, regular cell inspections and consistent standards. ... Our second priority prison in London confused me. Its governor was three years younger than me. She had entered in an accelerated graduate trainee scheme and, unlike the Yorkshire governors, had not spent decades as a uniformed officer, walking the landings. While the governor of Leeds wore a waist coat and a lavender tie fixed with a Windsor knot and a glittering tie pin, she patrolled the prison in a T-shirt and called her prisoners 'my boys'. She was intelligent and idealistic but she continued to question my ideas on prison management.

A prison charity invited us both to speak ... I explained we were aiming to reduce violence partly through checklists and getting the basics right. When the London governor stood up to make her speech after me she began 'I disagree with the minister. Managing prisons isn't about processes. It's about love.' The room applauded.

After the event I suggested it might be better if we didn't contradict each other on the public stage. The argument went on that evening and then over three more visits to her prison. We seemed to be trapping each other into caricatures - she felt I was using too many analogies from the military, and I that she was talking a great deal about therapy.

But then ...

On my next visit to her prison, I began to sense that the governor and I agreed more in practice than we did in theory. ... She still refused to set targets on violence - 'I deliberately steer away from hard targets' - but she was determined to create a safer prison. ... She came to me at the end of three months to say our insistence on better searching had made a difference: drug-taking in her prison had reduced by 50% in that period. I sensed that the time we spent arguing and walking the landings had changed my perspective too. I was beginning to concede I needed to talk much more generously about things other than order and discipline: that soulless control in a prison was only slightly better than well-meaning chaos, and that I needed to put as much emphasis on deep empathy as on good process.

And then there were the results. ... something had changed. The violence rate had increased every quarter for five years until December 2018. ... In April 2019 it had reduced by 17% on average across all the 10 prisons

So that's Rory Stewart's side of the story. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Michael Spurr:

Spurr's time in office was marked by sharp deterioration in many prisons. Assaults and self-harm more than doubled. In 2017–18, 1 in 8 prisons were rated as causing serious concern. ... Against this background, in 2018 Spurr was told to step down by the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Justice, Richard Heaton, who said he felt a new direction was needed.

However most observers commented that these problems were the result of ministerial decisions, not his leadership - particularly, the decision to cut operational staff in prisons by almost a third while not reducing prisoner numbers, and to cut starting pay for officers thus making recruitment and retention more difficult. A former Lord Chancellor commented: "Michael Spurr is a terrific impressive decent public servant who has given his working life to prison and probation, and has been dealt as shitty a hand by the government as it is possible to deal".

Postscript

My own operational experience was in (what is now) HMRC whose Board was chaired by its Permanent Secretary equivalent. The only ministerial involvement (outside tax rate policy) was in budget setting etc. I was therefore very surprised and a bit concerned to hear that the HMRC Board is now (and for the first time) chaired by a Treasury minister - to “strengthen political accountability and delivery”. Michael Spurr would not be impressed!

Changing the subject, I am sorry that Amazon have again run out of copies of How to be a Civil Servant. But Speaking Truth to Power - still available from Amazon - is a quite short and very readable stocking filler.

Martin Stanley