The House of Lords & the Civil Service

Part 1 of 3

The House of Lords engaged in a debate about the Civil Service on 28 November 2024. It won't be of interest to everyone but it does provide an interesting snapshot of the Establishment's concerns about the current state of the Civil Service.

As the debate (in reality a polite discussion) lasted nearly three hours I have extracted what seem to me to be the most interesting parts of the most interesting contributions and divided them between three Substack posts. This is the first.

I have also added an occasional emphasis.

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Former Cabinet Secretary, Lord (Robin) Butler introduced the debate:

My contention is that wise Governments combine the political impetus given by spads with the objective advice and continuity that the Civil Service provides on the other side. I fear that at the highest level this balance has gone awry.

I welcomed the appointment of Sue Gray as Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, although many of my former colleagues did not. I thought that the experience and advice of Sue Gray, a former senior Cabinet Office civil servant, would help the Labour Party prepare for government. But, for whatever reason, that arrangement did not work out.

The balance now between political appointees and Civil Service staff in the Prime Minister’s office has completely changed. Following Sue Gray’s departure, the political staff in No. 10 have taken over almost completely. Morgan McSweeney is now chief of staff. Special advisers occupy the roles of deputy chief of staff, head of political strategy, director of policy, director of communications, press secretary, speech-writer and director of digital strategy. All of them have politically appointed staff supporting them. At the last count, there were said to be 41 spads in No. 10.

There is currently a mystery about the Civil Service post of principal private secretary. A month or so ago, it was reported that Nin Pandit had been appointed to the post. I do not know her, but she is said to be first class. However, her career was in the National Health Service and she has never worked in a Whitehall department outside No. 10. That would be the first time in 100 years that the principal private secretary in No. 10 has lacked such Whitehall experience. Her lack of experience of the Treasury or any other Whitehall department is bound to be a disadvantage in that linchpin role. More recently, however, a competition for the post has been advertised and applications will close in the next few days. I ask the Minister, when she replies to the debate, to tell the House what is going on. Is a fresh competition for the post of principal private secretary to the Prime Minister being conducted, and will Ms Pandit be free to apply?

More recently, Jonathan Powell has been appointed national security adviser as a spad, not a civil servant. I make no criticism of his suitability for this post. It seems that he is well fitted for it, both by ability and experience. But the occupation of this crucial post by a spad is bound to throw some doubt on the objectivity of the National Security Council’s advice to government. The dangers of that are illustrated by the experience of the Blair Government in the lead-up to the Iraq war, on which the commission I chaired reported.

This brings me to my second point, which is the number of appointments to senior positions in the Civil Service without any open competition.

Whatever the merits of such appointments, it seems to me that, overall, a clear pattern is emerging. We have moved to the American pattern of replacing senior civil servants with political appointees when the party of government changes. As one of my former colleagues said to me, civil servants in the centre of government have become an endangered species.

I make no criticism of the calibre of the current political appointees, of whom I know nothing. But it seems to me that we should not abandon, without noticing it, the balance of a permanent Civil Service providing continuity and experience, which has served this country well for the last 150 years, since the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms. I note that President-elect Trump has announced that, with the help of Elon Musk, he plans to purge the career civil servants in the United States and replace them with staff entirely loyal to him. Is this a direction that it would be sensible for our country to take?

This country has been well served by a permanent Civil Service, providing continuity and constructive advice to whatever Government our democratic arrangements produce, with the aim of helping them to implement their policies. I believe that that help on the part of the Civil Service should be unstinting. I ask the Minister, when replying to this debate, to confirm that this constitutional arrangement, which is embodied in legislation, is one which the Government support and will foster.

Former Cabinet Minister (and soon to be our Ambassador to the Court of Donald Trump), Lord (Peter) Mandelson:

When my grandfather left government in the 1950s and went to Nuffield College—a great college in a very great university—he wrote and published Government and Parliament: A survey from the inside. For him, good government boiled down to

“an intelligent Minister who knows what he or she wants, commanding the understanding, co-operation and support of his civil servants.” “Intelligent” and “commanding” are the operative words. We need lots of Ministers who are like that—people who can both direct and drive government with a real sense of purpose.

But good Ministers also need good, seasoned and sometimes more specialist advisers in order to do their jobs. When I was a Minister, my principal political advisers were actually my civil servants, not because I was politicising them in any way in a party sense, but because they were there to explain things and to warn and caution me about the policies I was developing and implementing. I want to stress that they welcomed the one or two additional advisers I recruited to my department. Indeed, they found them indispensable, as did I, because they often introduced an important external dimension to the work we were undertaking. So I do not share the view that a Minister, or even a Prime Minister, bringing in an appointee should be seen in any way as a sinister move—that they are incapable of serving the national interest. In that category I would firmly place Jonathan Powell, at the heart of whose work is his belief in and desire to serve the national interest.

So, while I understand the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Butler—and no doubt Labour may make, by the way, the occasional mistake—I think he is at best overstating them and at worst being slightly unfair to some of the individuals he has named, and to the processes that have brought them to their jobs. I feel very deeply that there will not be anything like the systematic undermining of the Civil Service that we have seen in recent years: when half a dozen Permanent Secretaries were fired at the whim of Prime Ministers Johnson and Truss; when ingratiation was being encouraged as the route to career advancement; when “Not one of us” was a bar to promotion; when individual public appointments were scrutinised for loyalty to Brexit; and when government policy was conducted by private What’s App, rather than on properly considered Civil Service advice.

Former Cabinet Minister, Lord (Francis) Maude:

I start by repeating a strong commitment to our current system of a permanent, politically impartial Civil Service. Answering the question of whether we should continue this system is sometimes interpreted as a statement that everything in the current arrangements is fine, and I am afraid I do not believe that everything is fine with these arrangements. There is a simple proposition: that Ministers are responsible and accountable for everything their departments do, yet they have very truncated authority to influence the appointment and management of the officials who do it. It is not a bad principle that authority and accountability should be aligned, but this is not the case. The authority of Ministers over these important resources, for whose actions they are accountable, is severely truncated.

Your Lordships may be aware that, 12 months or so ago, the report of a review I undertook on the accountability and governance of the Civil Service was published.

I made some recommendations for how the arrangements could be changed. There is no time to go through them, but the key point I made was that any addition to Ministers’ ability to influence or make appointments must be balanced by enhanced oversight by a genuinely independent regulator—in my view, the Civil Service Commission. Any new arrangements should include, but not be limited to, allowing an incoming Government to make some appointments, but the key is transparency and oversight. They should not be appointments made as some kind of indulgence, or a kind of turn-a-blind-eye, hole-in-the-corner dodge at the discretion of the Civil Service leadership. I do not blame the Government for the controversy that ensued when they came into office and made some appointments; I blame the consistent failure, including my own, to put in place sustainable and transparent arrangements that will regularise such appointments and make them routine.

Finally, it is time that we should follow the other countries that have similar systems to ours and make the head of the Civil Service, ideally, a dedicated, full-time head of the Civil Service, accountable for the health of the Civil Service to an external monitor or regulator—again, in my view, the Civil Service Commission. That would include responsibility for ensuring that the sort of changes I advocate do not imperil the political impartiality that is so important.

Former Permanent Secretary, Lord (Michael) Bichard

The really great organisations are self-critical, and I think that it—I almost said “we”—needs to be self-critical at this moment, too. For example, on several occasions I have recently drawn attention to the failures of integrity and trust evident in the infected blood scandal, the Post Office Horizon scandal, Grenfell, Windrush, Hillsborough—I could go on. These can no longer be treated as isolated incidents, [nor?] were—I say with some shame—they the result of honest mistakes honestly made. Taken together, they suggest that there is an issue around the integrity and trust on which the reputation and credibility of the Civil Service has been built, and it needs to be addressed.

A particular failing in all those cases was a complete lack of transparency and openness, in spite of that being one of Nolan’s Seven Principles of Public Life and a requirement of the Civil Service Code. Whitehall has long struggled with the concept of openness, and I welcome the new Government’s proposal to introduce a duty of candour. It remains to be seen whether it will be wide enough or sufficiently enforceable to restore confidence.

There is frustration, too, at what is seen as a lack of political nous. That is not about politicising officials—it is asking officials to be shrewd politically, and politically astute, to be able to engage in a conversation about the political realities of life. We do not put that highly enough in the development of the Civil Service.

Finally, to retain confidence the Civil Service needs to be genuinely creative in the advice that it gives. I do not think that the evidence suggests that we are now up there with the very best nation states in that function; that is another thing that we need to address.

I do not support politicisation—I really do not—but I can see why some people argue for it. What people and Ministers want is a Civil Service which, at the very least, anticipates and solves problems, delivers decent services, can be trusted, and has political nous. That is how we will resist the arguments for further politicisation, by delivering that.

Former Cabinet Secretary, Lord (Andrew) Turnbull

The issue is a different one, but equally troubling. It is that, over time, more of the work of civil servants, particularly policy advice, is being done by special advisers. So the correct diagnosis is that the Civil Service is being marginalised and not being used to best advantage.

In the Civil Service, my predecessor, the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Dinton, initiated a reform programme, one of whose components was a working group called Bringing In and Bringing On, which recommended that many more vacancies in the senior Civil Service should be filled by competitions and more of those should be open to people outside the Civil Service. Under this initiative, many talented people have been brought in and have made a significant impact—we have the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, here as an example. The top of the Civil Service is no longer a closed freemasonry.

Taken together, these changes have greatly widened the insights available to Ministers. But is the right balance being struck? I doubt it. The pushing out of civil servants is seen most clearly in the new arrangements at the top of the Prime Minister’s office, where there is a chief of staff, then two deputy chiefs of staff and a director of communications, all filled by special advisers. We still do not know the position of the principal private secretary. The Code of Conduct for Special Advisers makes clear that their role is to provide an additional source of advice for Ministers, so that political considerations can be brought to bear on official advice. However, the code also states that, while spads can offer their own advice, they should not “suppress or supplant” the advice of civil servants. Thus, it was clear that these two streams are to be complementary to each other and not in competition.

Some of the problems derive from the concept of chief of staff. In my view, this is like chewing gum and Halloween: an unwelcome import from the United States. The title of chief of staff, in the UK context, is a nonsense. The special adviser code makes it clear that the chief of staff cannot manage Civil Service staff. When Jonathan Powell was appointed with that title, the rules were changed to allow him to do so, but he found that it was not necessary for him to fulfil his role and the power was allowed to lapse.

How then should departments be organised? There should be a special adviser cadre with its own leader, and an official cadre led by of the head of the Civil Service or the Permanent Secretary. Neither should attempt to outrank the other. They should collaborate to make the best use of the different skills and experience that each side can bring.

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Martin Stanley