Public Sector Appointments - Labour Must Behave Better

I commented a few days ago that "some of the first ministerial appointments suggest that the Prime Minister indeed values merit over politics. Civil servants overseeing appointments to arm's length bodies should follow this lead as far as they can."  This was an oblique reference to previous ministers' excessive involvement in public appointments.  This blog describes the problems that resulted from this behaviour.

Government ministers, advised by civil servants, are responsible for ensuring that the best possible candidates are appointed as Chairs, Board members and Chief Executives of the BBC, Ofcom, the Environment Agency, Ofsted, the Competition and Markets Authority (the CMA) and many other powerful and influential organisations.

Until the 1980s, the appointment process was anything but transparent, controlled by ministers and their officials who organised 'competitions' amongst candidates with whom they were personally familiar.  (A brief history is in a note, below, including an interesting reference to the Crimean War.)

There was then a significant change when various major privatisations required the establishment of independent regulators to control the behaviour of (and in particular the prices charged by) the new private sector and monopolistic energy, telecoms etc. suppliers.  It was vital that these regulators took decisions without regard to short term political considerations (whether pro-company or pro-consumer).  And it was equally important that ministers could not be blamed for those decisions.  The value of this approach is being demonstrated today in the draft water industry decisions.

The appointment processes therefore became much more rigorous.  Head hunters were appointed to identify and carry out preliminary interviews with candidates, and long-listing, short-listing and panel interviews became the norm.  Mrs Thatcher and her ministers remained the final decision makers but it soon became clear that they had allowed the first generation of regulators to be truly independent minded and to take genuinely apolitical decisions - and that this had resulted in high quality regulation.

The strength of this new system was amongst the factors that caused the government of the day to review the process under which non-regulatory public appointment were made.  The result of this review was that public appointments in the UK have since 1995 been subject to the Nolan Principles drawn up by the Committee on Standards in Public Life chaired by Lord Nolan.  Nolan concluded that Ministers should remain accountable for public appointments, but recommended a set of checks and balances, including:

• All public appointments should be governed by the overriding principle of appointment on merit;

• Selection on merit should take account of the need to appoint boards which include a balance of skills and backgrounds;  

• The basis on which members are appointed and how they are expected to fulfil their role should be explicit; and

• The range of skills and background which are sought should be clearly specified.

• There should be an independent Public Appointments Commissioner in order to monitor, regulate and approve departmental appointments procedures.  

The first Commissioner for Public Appointments was duly appointed  in late 1995.

One unintended and unwelcome consequence of Nolan was that the appointment process began to take rather longer.  Commissioner for Public Appointments David Normington made some changes in 2012 aimed at improving the system but they had less immediate impact than he had hoped.  

David Cameron and his ministers then concluded that they should re-insert themselves, or at least insert themselves more than before, in the appointment process.  They asked (businessman and future Conservative minister) Gerry Grimstone to suggest changes.  His 2016 review recommended that ministers should have greater influence in the appointment process, so reversing the previous decades' trend towards reduced political influence.

In its response to the Grimstone Review, the Government said that it agreed with Sir Gerry that:

• as well as keeping the minister updated on progress at every stage,

• the appointment panel should be made familiar with the minister’s requirements and views at every stage, including after the long and short lists are determined.

• The official on the panel should represent the minister’s views.

• Before interviews are conducted ministers should feel free to put names forward to the panel for interview. The presumption should be that these candidates are interviewed.

Subsequent Developments

Grimstone had in effect given ministers permission to ignore Nolan without announcing that they would do so.  So it was perhaps inevitable that a number of anecdotal and other reports, including an NAO report in February this year, suggested that this increased ministerial involvement in the appointment process had introduced unnecessary delay. 

"In 2022-23, on average 203 days elapsed between campaigns closing and a public appointment being made and announced.  This is well beyond the 90 days that the Governance Code for Public Appointments states that officials should aim to meet."

The problem was that ministers, assisted by Special Advisers, appeared to be scrutinising the politics of all long-lists and short-lists before they were announced, even for routine appointments.  The sheer number of these built in long delays.  Head hunters and civil servants were in the meantime not allowed to tell candidates what was going on, and this made applying for public appointments rather less attractive, especially for the better qualified candidates.

It became obvious, too, that politics was playing too large a part in the process, most obviously in the case of higher profile appointments. Here are a few of the most controversial post-Grimstone appointments:-

• Ex-Conservative politician Lord (Andrew) Tyrie was appointed Chair of the Competition and Markets Authority in 2018.  The CMA is very powerful but acts only after careful deliberation.  Lord Tyrie, however, wanted the CMA to become much more active.   He announced his resignation in June 2020 saying that he was frustrated by the legal limits on the CMA's powers and by the Government's unenthusiastic response to his request that he be given new powers, for instance to intervene on behalf of consumers without first carrying out a detailed investigation. The resignation of the Chair of such a prominent and important regulator was undoubtedly unusual and striking, and became all the more so when it transpired that he had in fact been forced out by 'a rebellion' by the CMA's senior executives - presumably supported by the non-execs on the CMA's Board. The 'rebellion' included an approach to the Business Department who sided with the executives.  

• Boris Johnson favourite, Paul Dacre, applied in 2021 to become Chair of Ofcom but the appointment panel ruled that he was not appointable.  Rather than appoint one of the other applicants, ministers decided to re-run the competition, expecting Mr Dacre to reapply.  This prospect was heavily criticised and, in the event, Mr Dacre decided not to apply.

• Another Boris Johnson favourite, Richard Sharp, was appointed Chair of the BBC in 2021, but resigned two years later when it transpired that he had not revealed, during the appointment process, that he had helped the Prime Minister secure an £800,000 loan from Sam Blyth.  It also transpired that, once Mr Sharp had indicated his interest in the appointment:

  • officials had strongly argued that an executive search agency should be used to identify other candidates, but ministers declined to do so,

  • ministers refused to allow officials to approach potential candidates, even though an executive search agency was not being used, and

  • the Senior Independent Panel Member chosen by ministers was not on the list suggested by officials.

• It was reported in August 2023 that Mr Blyth (see above) had been shortlisted to be Chief Executive of the British Council even though he had not applied. He declined to be interviewed.

• There was considerable criticism of the appointment of Lord Wharton (Boris Johnson's successful 2019 campaign manager) to chair the Office for Students in 2021. He had no previous experience of the sector and subsequently showed little interest in it, visiting only 5 universities in his first year in post, four of which were Russell Group.  He resigned on 9 July this year, five days after the general election.

At a slightly less exalted level it was reported that the Government had in 2020 vetoed the classicist Mary Beard as a trustee of the British Museum.   She had been through an appointment process but was rejected by Downing Street because of her pro-European views.  However, because five of the 25 seats on the museum's board may be appointed without any reference to the government, the trustees went ahead and appointed her themselves!

Discussion

Ministers can hardly be expected to appoint Chairs etc. who are unsympathetic to their broad politics and policy objectives.  Ministers can also not be expected to appoint those who are likely to assert great independence from government when taking key decisions in areas such as health and education. 

But it is nevertheless vital that arm's length bodies take high quality decisions bearing in mind their statutory duties and the facts and arguments that are brought to their attention.  They cannot do this if their Chairs and Chief Executives are concerned about how their decisions might be received by politicians and the media, and/or if they arrive in post with strong biases, prejudices or predispositions.  Ministers should certainly stand well clear from pricing and merger decisions taken by economic regulators. 

So there is a balance to be struck, but it should not be too difficult for the new government to find that balance somewhere near where it used to be 10 years ago - if they want to do so.

Postscript

The Public Appointments Commissioner reported in January 2025 that only 13% of public appointments recruitment campaigns were completed in line with a longstanding three-month target in 2023-24 – representing a new low. He told members of parliament's Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee he believed delays in appointments processes were causing public bodies to lose "a lot of good people". He said that one department had suggested that consultation with the Office of the Prime Minister could extend the appointment process by two weeks at each of five stages, potentially adding 10 weeks of delay.

Notes

1.  I am grateful to Douglas Board (Founder - Maslow's Attic  &  Author "Elites') and Charlie Dawson  (Founder & Partner - The Foundation) who encouraged my interest in this subject and contributed to this blog.  The substance is, of course, purely my responsibility.

2.  Here is a brief history of the subject through to the 1980s.

Up until the mid-1800s all significant military, civil service and other public appointments were made by the Crown or by ministers who generally preferred friends, relatives and/or others that they already knew well.  There was no selection process, nor any form of competition to find those most qualified for the post.  The resultant poor performance of many senior public figures generated pressure for reform.  

The 1853-56 Crimean War, in which the British fought alongside French and Italian troops, contributed to this pressure.  Western journalists were embedded with their armies and were for the first time able to report via the recently invented electric telegraph.  Reports by the Times' William Howard Russell were highly critical of British performance when compared with the French etc. As a result, and as the memory of the "Charge of the Light Brigade" demonstrates, the war became an iconic symbol of logistical, medical and tactical failures and mismanagement.  Prime Minister Aberdeen resigned and was succeeded by Lord Palmerston, whilst Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole demonstrated the urgent need to improve the care of wounded soldiers.  It had become abundantly clear that the power of patronage should be sharply reduced.

At around the same time, 'the great and increasing accumulation of public business, and the consequent pressure on the Government' caused the Treasury's Charles Trevelyan to become interested in civil service reform.  His 1854 report, with Stafford Northcote, established the rule that civil servants were to be appointed on merit and through open competition, rather than patronage.  This did not happen overnight - there was considerable resistance - but the principle eventually became firmly established, and slowly spread to other public appointments. The public appointment process nevertheless remained controlled by ministers and their officials who organised 'competitions' amongst candidates with whom they were personally familiar. 

This approach endured until the privatisations from the 1980s onwards.

Martin Stanley