MR JONATHAN BAUME, MR PAUL NOON AND MR CHARLES COCHRANE

12 MARCH 2009

  Q60 Mr Prentice: My final question is this: whatever happened to Christopher Galley?

  Mr Baume: You will need to ask Sir David Normington that. As Sir David said, and as I think Sir Gus O'Donnell said to the Committee before Christmas, there will be a disciplinary process. I do not know the details of where that has got to.

  Q61  Mr Walker: You expressed frustration, I think shared by the Committee, about the tenure of ministers in departments. Has anybody sat down and explained how political parties appoint ministers? I think it is on the basis that it is a party management issue: "It's Buggins' turn. We need to manage this ego, manage these expectations, so they don't cause us difficulties." That does not lead to good government because the focus is not on placing the right person in the right job to do that job for any period of time. That is a secondary consideration in most ministerial appointments. Indeed, it has often been said that outside the top cabinet appointments, the top ten, the Prime Minister or the leader of the Opposition is not really interested and it is really done by the Whips to manage, as I have said, egos and expectations.

  Mr Noon: I think that might be right but the perception in the Civil Service is that there is not a high degree of importance put on the management of the Civil Service at a ministerial level. I have met Cabinet Office ministers who have made it perfectly plain that they are more interested in writing the manifesto for the next election rather than on the management issues concerning the Civil Service. It has not always been treated seriously.

  Mr Baume: In a sense, it is not for Cabinet ministers to manage the Civil Service per se. That is the job of the permanent secretary.

  Mr Noon: Thank you for re-defining it!

  Mr Baume: I think the point is a valid one. Every government seems to be the same whatever political colour it is. You only have to read through the political memoirs to see the endless problems that arose there. I think there is a bigger issue which is the number of junior ministers—and that is a point that was raised in the context of Sir Digby Jones's unfortunate comment. The more junior ministers you have—and we have more junior ministers than ever—the more work you have to find for them. There is enough criticism of individual ministers each looking at their own political career and one of the biggest single frustrations about the political process within the Civil Service is just the number of junior ministers you have and the work projects that have to be then designed and engineered to satisfy their particular interests. Good government would be smaller government at a political level, as well as the issues about continuity. To be fair to this Government, a number of very senior ministers held office for several years, perhaps three or four years, and that helped. It is an experience that has been of benefit. If you look at the Scottish Government you will find that one of the benefits that came after the change of administration in Scotland was that the Scottish Government shrank the size of the Cabinet. I think that was partly a realism about who they had available, but it has led to more streamlined and focused government because you have fewer Cabinet ministers in the Scottish Government. I think there are experiences that can be shared from that, regardless of the party politics at stake in a lot of this, about what is the optimum size of government.

  Q62  Chairman: Are you telling us that civil servants are spending their time thinking up things for junior ministers to do?

  Mr Baume: To an extent, yes. Just as ministers are thinking up things for them to do and then expecting the Civil Service to do it. Yes.

  Mr Cochrane: On the subject of junior ministers, I can do this party piece which Paul alluded to about naming all the ministers we have had dealing with the Civil Service since 1997, but I will not subject you to that this morning. It has been particularly helpful that over the last 12 months we have had some consistency in who the minister is. Tom Watson has been doing the job for that period of time and I think we have all found that really helpful. It allows at least someone to be there long enough to understand some of the issues and to have seen them through from start to finish. Also, the particular problem that we see is a lack of clarity or consistency about what the Cabinet Office is and what it is there for, and what its role is in relation to the management of the Civil Service—and that has changed umpteen times over the last 20 years—but also at the moment a lack of clarity over who is running the Civil Service. Is it the minister? Well, no, only in a very strategic sense—but even he does not run the Civil Service because so much of it is delegated to departments. We also have a head of the Civil Service, but he does not manage it on a day-to-day basis, it is delegated to departments. And we all, particularly on matters with any monetary impact at all, have the Treasury there as well. Finding a solution to this is quite difficult.

  Q63  Chairman: You are taking us into longer and deeper territory. In a nutshell, is the conclusion from that that it would be a good idea to have a body which manages the Civil Service in a way that it is not managed at the moment?

  Mr Noon: It is the greater central direction, in our view. The process of delegation has led to fragmentation. We represent specialist grades who are scattered throughout the Civil Service. There has been a bit of a move back to having heads of profession, but there should be a stronger sense that if you are an engineer in government you are an engineer in government and you should be able to have a career across government rather than just being stuck in the Highways Agency.

  Mr Cochrane: Some tentative work is starting about getting the Civil Service to act more corporately. There is a project running in the West Midlands at the moment that is building on that, but a much stronger centre would lead to a much better Civil Service, in our view, and move away from some of the really silly situations we have got into now.

  Q64  Chairman: You are silent on this, Jonathan.

  Mr Baume: I do not think I am going to argue necessarily for the return of the old Civil Service Department. I recognise that there will always be a tension between the centre and individual departments. There are legal issues around that as much as anything else. The issue that Paul was talking about around careers is one that our members face. Even in the Senior Civil Service there is a tension between whether senior civil servants are part of a corporate leadership—and we are only talking of 3,500 people out of 480,000, so it is a very small group of people relatively in the Civil Service—or part of their own department rather than a corporate resource? This has bedevilled successive Cabinet secretaries. Then there are issues around pay and the rest of it. Another issue would come up with, for example, government lawyers, who are expected to move across departments. You are a government lawyer, not necessarily a lawyer in any one department, but we still have lots of different pay rates for lawyers across different departments, which seems to me a strange way of operating for the 1,500 people working across departments. There are lots of practical issues there, but, as you say, it starts to move us into slightly different territory.

  Q65  Chairman: To bring us back to the leaking thing for a moment, your submission, Jonathan, said that leaking, as you see it, is a political issue: it is politicians who leak and that is corrosive of the Civil Service. But is your conclusion that there is really nothing that can be done about that? Could civil servants not take a more positive role in doing something, saying something at least, about the way in which, if it is corrosive, it has a damaging effect on the Civil Service itself, through the permanent secretary, through the Cabinet Secretary into the political system?

  Mr Baume: I am not denying that civil servants do occasionally leak. That would be silly and naive to say—and of course we have the experience in the Home Office recently where clearly a civil servant was leaking, so it does happen—but I think it is relatively rare for civil servants to leak. I think that the majority of leaks that come forward come from political sources, either authorised by ministers or not—and I would not say in all circumstances they are authorised by ministers—and therefore you have a problem of political culture that has bedevilled successive governments—I would not say it is a Labour issue or a Conservative issue but nonetheless it is a political issue—and that requires a discipline by the most senior members of any government about what they see as acceptable. Permanent secretaries and others will take a stand when they can, but it is very hard when things emerge in the Sunday papers which are clearly being trailed for political purposes. There is very little that the Civil Service can do about that and I think it is a source of great frustration and it is corrosive in the broadest sense about the culture of government.

  Q66  Chairman: Do you think permanent secretaries should take a stand?

  Mr Baume: I am sure that permanent secretaries, whenever the opportunity arises, are very firm about it. Their room for dealing with it is very limited, because in the end it is a political/cultural problem.

  Q67  Chairman: In terms of the Civil Service Code, it says that if someone has tried to raise concerns, tried to take it through the system but at the end of that process they are still unhappy with the result, the only thing they can do is resign.

  Mr Baume: I think there are times when that is appropriate. As previous witnesses have suggested, there are times when it is this crisis of conscience. Clearly if something wrong is happening then the system should deal with that, and I think it will do, but if in the end you disagree with, for example—to take an issue that has already been explored—the conduct of the Iraq War, then you resign, just as people resigned over Suez or as somebody may resign over something where there are more limits. They may refuse to work on stem cell issues because they hold deeply religious views. Robin Cook resigned as a Cabinet minister. He took a principled stand. In every government there are times when people resign over principled issues. There comes a point where sometimes you have to do that and that is no different in the public sector and in the private sector.

  Q68  Chairman: You do not think there is anything short of resignation that we might consider?

  Mr Baume: The system is designed not to lead you to that decision, but people do sometimes get to a point where they fundamentally disagree with the approach that has been taken by an elected government. If Parliament has decreed a particular policy, that is the policy of the elected government of the day and if you simply do not believe in it or feel it is appropriate, then it is right that you resign if that is what you wish to do. It is not right that you try then to undermine it from within as a civil servant, because that fundamentally breaches the system. I think there will be times in any organisation when people feel that this is not a place they wish to be. I do not think it happens that often but I do not think we should condemn the fact that sometimes that is the only course around the conduct of an issue where it is about individual conscience rather than about wrongdoing.

  Mr Cochrane: Within a civil service that still has half a million posts, in most cases, even if we do get a crisis of conscience about one particular issue, it should be possible to move people elsewhere. Sometimes in very specialist cases you cannot, but with a will, solutions can be found to that without people being forced to resign. That is the choice that the individual makes.

  Q69  Chairman: I am struck by what you say about the tenure, the rotation of ministers and all that, because when we have been doing our inquiry into good government we have had civil servants tell us about their problems, as you are telling us, with rotating ministers. But we have also had ministers telling us about their problems with rotating civil servants. I am not going to ask you to talk about it now, but it is interesting that there is a perception on both sides that there is an instability in relationships that is causing difficulties in some instances.

  Mr Baume: I think there is a higher turnover in the Civil Service in terms of posts than perhaps would be good. It is a valid issue.

  Chairman: Thank you very much. I am sorry we have been all around the circuit, but thank you very much. If you have anything more to say to us, either privately or because you want to say more on some of the issues we are dealing with, please do get in touch with us. Thank you very much for this morning.