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CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 303-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION COMMITTEE
OUTSIDE APPOINTMENTS TO THE SENIOR CIVIL SERVICE
MS JANET PARASKEVA and DR RICHARD JARVIS Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 57
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Public Administration Committee on Members present Dr Tony Wright, in the Chair Paul Flynn David Heyes Kelvin Julie Morgan Mr Gordon Prentice Paul Rowen Mr Charles Walker ________________ Witnesses: Ms Janet Paraskeva, First Civil Service Commissioner, and Dr Richard Jarvis, Head of Independent Offices and Secretary to the Civil Service Commissioners, gave evidence. Q1 Chairman: We now move on to our second inquiry, which is all about the way that the Civil Service is changing and the extent to which we now have external recruitment and your role in that. The Cabinet Secretary's mantra is, as you know, that we have a permanent Civil Service, but not permanent civil servants, and this raises all kinds of challenges for the Civil Service. We are particularly looking at this movement in how many people there are, who the people are and what effect it has, so your job is to monitor what is happening. Could you tell us how you read the current position? Ms Paraskeva: Our job is not to monitor what is happening, our job is to regulate entry on merit. Q2 Chairman: Well, your job is to regulate entry in a condition where there is far more entry from outside than there ever was before. Ms Paraskeva: That is right, and one of the things we have got to do is to make absolutely sure that the recruitment process is open and fair to all and that the appointments are made on merit so that the Civil Service gets the best in class for the jobs that it needs filling. Over the past ten or so years, I think it has been clear that the Civil Service needed skills that it had not necessarily grown of its own, trained accountants, IT specialists, HR specialists and so on. There has been, I think, an increase, therefore, in the numbers of people that have joined from outside because of the need to embrace those professions within the Civil Service, but, as I say, our role is really to make absolutely sure that when competitions happen, they put everybody on a level footing, whether they come from outside of the service or not. Q3 Chairman: You, rightly, questioned the way that I put the first question, but, in a way, it leads me to the question I really want to ask, which is the desire that I have that you would be more of a regulator. It seems to me that one of the things we want to know is what impact this greater external recruitment is having on the character of the Civil Service. Now, if you are not trying to find that out, if you are not monitoring it, who is? Ms Paraskeva: The Cabinet Office. It is the Cabinet Office's role to monitor overall what is going on and I believe they do this, but it is a management issue, not a regulatory issue, to know whether your staff are doing well and fulfilling their objectives. Q4 Chairman: You see, I think it goes beyond that. I think it raises all kinds of value issues of the kind that you talk about, so I am wanting to know who is looking at all of that. Ms Paraskeva: If you raised the question of values, I think it would be interesting for us to look over time to see whether there were more questions being raised in relation to the values and therefore appeals against the Code from people who had come in from outside as against those people who have been career civil servants. But I do have to hold the line, that the management issue is not the job of the regulator and judging people's performance is not our business. Q5 Chairman: I will ask David to pursue this line of questioning, but I will just ask you one more and it is not just about external recruitment, but a wider question, which is: do you think that anybody who is appointed to the Civil Service needs to be able to work for any government? Ms Paraskeva: Yes, I do, and that is the whole basis on which our Civil Service has been established and run. Q6 Chairman: I do not want to go too deeply into this, but do you not think that is an awful restriction on the kind of people that we can recruit to public service because there may well be dynamic, good people who say, "I want to come and work for the Government. I am really committed to the Government's approach to mental health", say, or whatever it is, "I don't actually like the Opposition's approach to it and I don't want to come and work for them, but I'm really committed to what this Government wants to do and to give two or three years of my life to it" and, if that person cannot be brought in, surely we are at a huge disadvantage, are we not? Ms Paraskeva: There are all sorts of ways in which people can work for the Government of the day in a political sense that is outside of the Civil Service. There are special advisers and there are other public appointments where the Government of the day sets up an organisation to carry out a piece of policy for them where ministers have a much greater say in the appointments to that organisation. If we believe in continuing what we have, which is an impartial Civil Service, we have to say to people, "however strong your personal political views are, they have to be left at the office door". Otherwise, how can we have a Civil Service which can be trusted by any government? After all, when we change governments in this country, we do so really rather quickly. We do not know the result of the election until the next morning and you could not change all your civil servants at that rate. We would have to move to a totally different style of preparation for government. Q7 Chairman: We do not get this problem with local government. We do not think that you have to change the whole bureaucracy every time the council changes hands. You assume that these are public servants who are going to be able to work across the board, but they are recruited by politicians to work for them to advance their programmes. Ms Paraskeva: I do not think that they are recruited in such a different fashion. In fact, when one actually looks at the detail of the way civil servants are recruited --- Q8 Chairman: I think they are. Ms Paraskeva: There is a team of politicians at the end of the day that makes that appointment but the recruitment procedures are not that different. Q9 Chairman: You have categories of exemption from your open competition rules. Reading them, they seem to be quite wide exemptions. I do not know how many numbers are covered by it but people can come and work for two years, is it? Ms Paraskeva: Yes. Q10 Chairman: Without going through the open competition procedure. Tell me about how all that works. Ms Paraskeva: Indeed. If there is a very particular need and an urgent need for a set of skills in a department, then they can make that business case. Someone appointed in that way is of course still a civil servant and still signs up to the values and behaviours that we expect of a civil servant because they become a civil servant for that period of time. We have looked quite closely at the exceptions, when we were doing the work in preparation for the Constitutional Renewal Bill. We have tried to tidy some of that up and reduce the scope of those exemptions somewhat because it did look a little as though it had grown like topsy over time and I do think that that is something that one needs to keep under review, otherwise you could have more routes in through the side door than through the main door. Chairman: We must not get into all that. There are interesting issues there but we will not get into that today. Q11 David Heyes: I do want to push you on the Chairman's line here. I think that what we want to get at is the prime determining impact that external recruitment has had on the Civil Service. You mentioned the need to fill a skills gap, accountants, IT, HR professionals and the like, and clearly a great deal of that has taken place in recent years. How do we know and how do you know whether that has had the intended impact? Ms Paraskeva: It is the Cabinet Office's responsibility to monitor that. Overall it is the Cabinet Secretary's responsibility to oversee performance in the departments he has responsibility for. It is not our role to monitor that or indeed to become involved in any way in the performance of individual civil servants. Q12 David Heyes: Am I right that it would be your role to make an assessment of the impact that might have had on the values of the Civil Service? It is your job to promote and sustain the values of the Civil Service, is it not? Can you answer the question in that way. Ms Paraskeva: I could indeed and I think that I was in a way pointing to that a few moments ago when I said that the kinds of things we might look at in terms of those people who had raised appeals or against whom perhaps appeals had been raised in their background. If their background has indeed been external or internal, then that would be something that we should perhaps be monitoring and indeed could go back and look at the evidence we have from appeals that have been brought to us. We do not have that evidence at the moment but it is something which we could look at. Q13 David Heyes: That would be an assessment on a very narrow field of candidates, would it not? Ms Paraskeva: Yes. Q14 David Heyes: The 20-odd that you talk about. Am I right to see it that way? Ms Paraskeva: In the top 600 posts last year, there were external competitions for about 100-odd and I think, if I remember rightly, just over 40% of those were awarded to people from inside the Civil Service, 30-odd% I think from the private sector and 20-odd% from the wider public sector. Q15 David Heyes: So, significant numbers of people who may be bringing in different values and may have to learn to live with a different set of values in the Civil Service. I think you are saying to me that you would only be able to monitor and assess the impact of that on the basis of the complaints that you receive. Is that right? Ms Paraskeva: I think that is probably right, is it not, Richard? Dr Jarvis: Yes. Q16 David Heyes: But there are a very small number of complaints. It is not really giving you a feel for those very large numbers of people and the impact they might have. Dr Jarvis: I hope, if we are successful with getting these standard questions in departmental staff surveys that are done every year, over time you will be able to track knowledge and understanding of the values by civil servants as well as their confidence of the procedures for raising concerns. That is what we are trying to do at the moment. Ms Paraskeva: One of the things that we may need to do just listening to the line of questioning is to make sure that we can cross-relate from that data those people who have come into the Civil Service later in their careers to see whether there are different answers from then than from career civil servants, so that is helpful. Q17 David Heyes: This is integral to your current wish to promote Civil Service values. You say that you have been active in that. Ms Paraskeva: Yes. Q18 David Heyes: Your annual report talks about that. Ms Paraskeva: Yes. Q19 David Heyes: Is this your way of assessing how that might be working? Ms Paraskeva: Yes. Q20 David Heyes: Tell me the things you would do to make that assessment. Ms Paraskeva: To make the assessment, we have to ask the question of the civil servants themselves in the way that I have described. Q21 David Heyes: Is there a systematic approach? Ms Paraskeva: Yes. Q22 David Heyes: Do you get the full questionnaires in? Do you interview them? How does it work? Ms Paraskeva: The audit will be a questionnaire to Permanent Secretaries and, as I say, we are directing them to involve their HR Director, the Nominated Officer and the Head of Internal Audit. The staff surveys go out every year to every single civil servant and that is the way in which we will get, if you like, the customer feedback to use a marketing term, of the Civil Service itself and what I would suggest in listening to you is that we may need to make sure that we can cross-relate, although they are anonymously filled in, by a question in there about how long a person has been in the Civil Service. If there is a pattern that emerges, that people feel more safe or less safe in raising challenges that they face when they have been career civil servants perhaps than when they have been recruited externally, that might tell us something about what we need to do further. Q23 David Heyes: If we were to ask you this same question at a future meeting maybe a couple of years from now, you would have the data available to give a more comprehensive answer. Ms Paraskeva: Yes. I think that, in two years' time, we would have a baseline established. We have asked that these questions be included in the staff surveys from October. I have no reason to believe that that will be denied us. Q24 Mr Walker: I am concerned about the fact that when people are recruited from the private sector to come and fill jobs in the Senior Civil Service, they often come in on better pay, conditions and bonuses than people doing the equivalent job working alongside them. Does that concern you? Ms Paraskeva: A couple of years ago, we raised a not dissimilar concern. But our concern was based not so much on whether or not you should pay somebody this amount or that amount but the fact that this information was not made clear in the information to candidates. A practice had grown up of putting in "attractive package" and what we were finding - and I think it was a couple of years ago in our annual report that we pointed out some examples of this - was that some candidates from the private sector were being awarded packages which seemed very much larger than the package offered to an internal civil servant on promotion. We raised this issue from our regulatory standpoint that appointments needed to be open and fair and that the advice to departments was that they should include in their information to candidates absolute clarity as to what the package was. Otherwise, if you were for example awarding a package much greater on the quiet, that would not be fair to those people who had seen the job advertised in the first place. You may well have attracted a much wider field had it been known that you were prepared to reach those heights in the salary. We have also persuaded people to talk about package and not just salary because clearly the Civil Service pension is not unattractive, particularly at the present moment, and it is very important to see the overall package. I have to say that we found even within a year that practice had improved and that we were finding that departments were now including in their information much more accurate detail of the package on offer. The other thing we suggested was that recruitment consultants should be properly briefed to know what the real top of the salary range was in order that we were not bringing people right the way through a lengthy recruitment process only to find that at the last minute they could not get the salary they were expecting. Q25 Mr Walker: I know that you are responsible for recruitment in the Civil Service but I want to express another concern that I think I share with Kelvin Hopkins. I think that people go into the Civil Service for a variety of reasons but I think that the overwhelming reason is that they want to serve the public and I think you get people in the Civil Service earning £100,000 a year who, if they were in the private sector, could well be earning five or ten times that sum of money. You get some really exceptional people. I become concerned because you have a civil servant earning £100,000 who is exceptional and you bring someone in from the private sector on £150,000 but actually, in the private sector, £150,000, although a lot of money, does not necessarily confirm star status on the individual. So, we have politicians and senior civil servants right at the top of the recruitment process being star-struck by people who really are not actually as brilliant as they may look on paper because the salary does not tell the full story. Ms Paraskeva: Indeed, salary does not tell the full story and what recruitment processes must do is test out, against a properly worked out personal specification, the sets of skills and expertise that candidates have. One of the other things that we have done in the last few years is to make sure that recruitment is not just on the basis of a 45-minute panel interview, that there are much more thorough ways of testing en route to that final interview the capabilities of the people who have been brought to longlist and then shortlist. So, the panel meets them not just at the very end but in one-on-one or two-on-one situations. We can also introduce pretty rigorous psychometric interviews, if necessary presentation skill interviews and media testing, so there are a number of different ways in which people can show their skills. That is one of the ways that I think you can get rid of the people who may have had a high salary but frankly, could not hack it in the day job. Q26 Mr Walker: They are intellectually just not up to it. Ms Paraskeva: Yes. Q27 Mr Walker: I am concerned that politicians from all parties have got into the habit of bashing Whitehall and bashing civil servants and I do not want that to continue because I think it erodes the self-confidence of those people we already have. Ms Paraskeva: I agree. Q28 Mr Walker: Then we get these disastrous private sector initiatives - and I am not hostile to the private sector, I rather like the private sector - and some of these IT initiatives where billions has been wasted by outside consultants proposing programmes that even they have not properly thought through and perhaps there would have been a civil servant who, if he had felt more confident, would have said, "Please, please, minister, do not follow this route because it could all end in disaster". Ms Paraskeva: IT is tricky territory. Q29 Mr Walker: I am using that as an example. Ms Paraskeva: It is not a bad example and I think the thing we forget is that there are probably far more IT disasters in the private sector than happens in the public sector. Mr Walker: Absolutely. Q30 Paul Rowen: Again going back to what was said earlier, the Government have set up a number of agencies, arms-length organisations. Are you involved in the appointment of the senior directors of those? Ms Paraskeva: Only where those directors are civil servants. Some agencies retain Civil Service status or Crown status and their staff will be civil servants and they are covered by our code and regulations. For non-departmental public bodies, the chairs and the members of some of those bodies are actually regulated by my colleague Janet Gaymer, the Commissioner for Public Appointments. Q31 Paul Rowen: Do you not think that you should be given the similar concern we had earlier on that they are taking on many of the functions of the Civil Service and how can you ensure that the same sort of Civil Service Code is enforced if you are not involved in regulating at least and monitoring those top bodies? Ms Paraskeva: If Janet were here, she and I would both agree that there is a gap between us in the regulation of the chief executives and senior staff of these NDPBs. Nobody regulates those. Q32 Paul Rowen: Let me give you an example and this is an example where, if you like, it does give an opportunity for a political appointment to be made. The former head of Personal Accounts Delivery Authority is now Lord Myners, Government Minister for the City, and he is a Labour Minister yet he was appointed six/12 months ago to lead PADA. How can you ensure that that sort of political cronyism, which he could be accused of, does not take place when there is that gap, as you say, between the two bodies? Ms Paraskeva: That is a matter for my colleague, Janet Gaymer, because that is a ministerial public appointment and not a Civil Service appointment. Our remit runs to the Civil Service rather than the wider public sector. Q33 Paul Rowen: But there is a gap, is there not? Ms Paraskeva: There is a gap. Q34 Paul Rowen: You cannot be sure that the people appointed adhere to the Civil Service Code. Ms Paraskeva: No, indeed. Q35 Paul Rowen: And the same sort of recruitment procedures. Ms Paraskeva: Indeed. Q36 Paul Rowen: Do you not think that should be looked at? Ms Paraskeva: I do and as, I say, if my colleague Janet Gaymer were here, I think she would agree. We both agree that there is a gap in that recruitment in that nobody actually regulates the senior executive posts in non-departmental public bodies. Q37 Paul Rowen: Have you put that in so that when the Constitutional Renewal Bill is brought out, that gap is covered Ms Paraskeva: The issue of public appointments is not covered in the Constitutional Renewal Bill as I understand it. The only issue that is covered is the issue of the Civil Service and the establishment of the Civil Service Commission as a statutory body. The Government chose to handle the issues of the Civil Service separately at this stage from the issues of the wider public sector. Q38 Kelvin Hopkins: Sir Christopher Foster acknowledged that there were considerable risks in bringing in people from the outside because "you know them less well and ... one out of three you wish you had not". This was reinforced when he said that he thought that the proportion of permanent civil servants should be kept at 80 to 90%. That is Sir Christopher Foster's view. Sir David Normington's Review of Senior Civil Service recruitment suggested that there has been too heavy a reliance on external appointments in recent years. Do you sympathise with those views? Ms Paraskeva: I would like to see the evidence. It is easy for any of us to say that we rely too heavily on people from outside or even the opposite, or we need more expertise from outside. I think that it is for the Cabinet Office through line management to assess whether what we are trying to do in opening up recruitment at the top to people with skills from the private or wider public sector has benefited the Civil Service and, once we know that, to address that alongside the talent management and succession planning policies that have been developed there. I think that these are exactly the kinds of things that Sir David Normington has been looking at in his review. Q39 Kelvin Hopkins: But it is not just about skills, it is about loyalty, values and other things as well. Ms Paraskeva: Indeed. Q40 Kelvin Hopkins: When I was a student many, many years ago, the ultimate achievement was to get into the administrative class of the Civil Service from university. That was seen as the target and only the best got in. Very high quality people went into the Civil Service. Ms Paraskeva: I think it is still seen as certainly among the top three careers that people leaving university actually seek. Q41 Kelvin Hopkins: Following on from what my colleague Mr Walker said, there are differences of value. Business values are perfectly appropriate for business. But, public service values are vital in the public service. I think Mr Walker said that many people go into the Civil Service do earn good salaries although they could earn more outside but they choose to stay in the public sector. I myself know people who say, "I want to serve the public; I want to be in the public sector; I do not want to be in the private sector". Do you not think that those kinds of values are vital in a public service? Ms Paraskeva: I do and indeed of course from the outside appointments that we make, over 20% of them come from the wider public sector and I think that movement in and out of local authority positions into central government and back again is probably healthy for both. Central government policies after all are put into practice locally and some of the feedback there that can be brought back cannot be a bad thing. For people from the private sector, it is very interesting when we ask the questions that we do at interview about the Civil Service values, sometimes people say to us, "Why do you think that the private sector does not hold those same values?" and we are actually challenged in our assumptions that in fact, for many people working in the private sector, they too would hold not dissimilar values of honesty, objectivity and so on. Q42 Kelvin Hopkins: I have no doubt that that is the case and I know that many people in the private sector have very strong social consciences and so on. Have these views not been rather disparaged in recent years? It is the business ethic that certain governments have wanted to inject into the Civil Service and to play down these more traditional sets of values. Has that not been the case? Ms Paraskeva: I think that some of it has been the desire of the Civil Service to embrace some of the professions that it had not grown such as HR professionals and IT expertise that we could not possibly have grown within the Civil Service because of the rate of change and development in that whole industry. I do not think that waters down the Civil Service in any way at all. Q43 Kelvin Hopkins: Clearly, in things like science, one needs scientists and there are technical experts as well, but the generalist who was traditionally employed in the Senior Civil Service often with a PPE or a classics background but very, very bright, would be more the rule. If civil servants have to have understanding of the world outside, would it not be better to recruit them early to become career civil servants, permanent civil servants, but then spend considerable periods seconded out to experience the world outside so that they cannot be accused of living in an ivory tower, a bubble or whatever. Would that not be another approach? Ms Paraskeva: That is an approach I have
heard Sir Gus O'Donnell actual promulgate - "if you want to get on, get out", I
think I have heard him say and he does not mean get out and go, he means get
out and get some expertise and experience of how things are delivered out there
and then come back. Indeed our own
recruitment procedures, which is where we would come at it, recognise somebody
who had been seconded as still being as it were within the Q44 Kelvin Hopkins: My own desire certainly for the future would be that people are recruited early to the service of the State. In France, they have this very strong sense of "the State" (L'Etat) and, wherever they work, they will always come back, retraining their Civil Service pension, their Civil Service post and their promotion within the Civil Service. They would be servants of the public, of the State, and of the public interest, and in this they would not be compromised in any way. Perhaps I dream of a golden age which may have passed, I do not know, but would that not be much better than what we have now? Ms Paraskeva: I do not think that it is that far from what we have now as I see it. You are formalising something that I think is beginning to happen across the Civil Service. Q45 Kelvin Hopkins: I certainly hope so. There is one example I know of a man - and I have raised it many times on this Committee and it is my last point - who was an American health company professional who worked for a company whose job was to secure Private Finance Initiative contracts for his company. He was then recruited as a senior civil servant to lever out PFI contracts from inside the Department of Health. He then went off to a Swiss Bank, which apparently is now in deep trouble, but was that man concerned about the public interest or was he concerned essentially about business? Ms Paraskeva: We have to be very careful when we recruit and indeed, not just when we recruit but when people leave. That is not my business but it is the business of one of the other committees that Richard serves in terms of business appointments of those civil servants who leave and work in the private sector. Q46 Mr Walker: On recruitment - and again this is a burning concern of mine - I think that the Civil Service should absolutely go and recruit the best people/the best graduates, but one thing that does concern me is this thing called fast-track. I do not get fast-track because, if you are going out and recruiting a pool of very good people, they should be, when they walk through that door, competing on an equal footing and, if you start separating them out very quickly, I think that you can damage morale but actually I think that you are creating artificial distinctions that in the long term may be damaging to that organisation. You have to have a group of people coming who feel that, from the moment they walk through that door, they are competing on an equal footing on how they perform in that job and how they perform in partnership with their colleagues and I think that fast-track is not something necessarily that some private sector companies do - and I know that I might be arguing against myself here - because I know that some successful private sector companies judge you on the job that you do over your first two or three years. They do not immediately put you on a fast-track as soon as you walk through the door. Ms Paraskeva: We do look very closely at recruitment to the fast stream and one of the things that we have asked about - and sometimes we do step over the line as to what is really in our jurisdiction or not - is what happens to those people who have been in the fast stream and how many of them actually in the end get through to the Senior Civil Service and how many do we lose en route. Q47 Mr Walker: What about those who are not? Ms Paraskeva: Indeed, but there are very
many different sets of skills that we need across the Civil Service. Remember that we are talking about a Civil
Service that is not just Q48 Mr Walker: I am a fairly good judge of character and I had someone work for me who was incredibly bright, got a Masters from LSE, a very bright young man. He did not pass his fast-track exam. He is not going to be a caseworker in a job centre. The guy is incredibly bright. What happens to him? Is his career now over in the Civil Service? Would he be best advised to leave and go into the private sector? Management consultants like McKinsey have up or out. What they like you to do is reach a level, that might be director level just below partner, and then they say, "Listen, you are not going to make it to partner but you have a fantastic career going on in the private sector. They love you at BA" or something. So, then they build these strong relationships with former McKinsey people. Ms Paraskeva: As far as I know, the Civil Service does not have those kinds of structures. What it does is to recruit some of the best graduates not only for their intellectual ability of course but also for their ability which they test through role play and in all sorts of ways to get decisions made in the kinds of environments in which the Civil Service will be working. Q49 Mr Walker: What happens to the 23-year old who has a Masters from a top university who does not get through on fast-track? What career will they have in the Civil Service? Will they be a caseworker at a job centre as you suggested? Ms Paraskeva: Not necessarily. There will be other posts available to them but they may not gain the faster promotion of the fast stream. There are many examples of people in the Senior Civil Service who came up what is often euphemistically described as the hard way by entering in the most junior positions and working their way through because they were able and the Civil Service has actually recognised their skills, abilities and talents and given them proper promotion. What we are interested in is to see whether all the investment that is put in those in the fast stream actually delivers in the end the most able and appropriate people to the top of our Civil Service. I do not know the answer to that. We have asked it out of interest because one of our roles is to monitor recruitment into the fast stream. Q50 Chairman: Do you think that we have enough data on all this at the moment? Do you think that we know enough about the character of the Civil Service now in terms of its recruitment patterns? Do you think that we know enough by department about where everyone has come from, what happens to their career, the relationship between mode of entry and progression and so on? My sense is that these arguments about the value or non-value of external recruitment are conducted in a sense in a vacuum which I think you have half acknowledged. Yet, unless we know something pretty hard about this, what are we doing? Ms Paraskeva: I think that it is getting better but we do need to establish some baselines against which to measure properly, so that we are not left with just perceptions about how things are. We actually need some hard data. I do think that that has improved. As I say, it is not our business. However, as I have said a couple of times, we do sometimes stray across the line of our powers as indeed you have encouraged me to do today and I think that we are very keen to see what patterns are emerging because they tell us something then about the kinds of recruitment policies that we need. Q51 Chairman: I know that your role is this limited one of just making sure that the appointment process works properly, but obviously we do ask you questions like Kelvin did about your view of the Normington Review. As the people who are engaged hands-on in monitoring the recruitment process, is it possible for you to form a view on whether you think that the proposition is broadly right that the Civil Service has not grown enough of its own people as an organisation and therefore that you would expect in the next period for the numbers coming from the outside to diminish and the numbers growing up inside the organisation, if all the skills development programmes work, to increase. Is that something with which you can help us? Ms Paraskeva: We are engaged in some of the discussions post-Normington and I think that what as Commissioners we would say is that it is not a question of whether you have this percentage or that percentage of home-grown or external recruits, it is a question of getting the best people for the job with the skills that you actually need and for their appointment to be on merit. I think that to set a target that we must not have more than, say, 30% of people drawn from the private sector might be setting ourselves a bit of a strait-jacket. I think that if we are the guardians of appointment on merit, then we would want to see the best people recruited and we would hope that, through the talent management regime and the succession planning that the Cabinet Office is now working extremely hard on, it will mean that civil servants themselves actually will get the development that they need to compete against the market so that, when we market test, civil servants come through and demonstrate that they have what we need to take those top jobs. Q52 Chairman: What about the business of the decision to go to open competition for appointment? I am unclear about quite how this works. Departments can decide for themselves whether they want to go to open competition or not. I am not sure whether they have to consult the Commission on whether they should do this or not and of course the question that then comes out of it is, if open competition, testing the market, is good for some appointments, why is it not good for all appointments? Ms Paraskeva: Indeed, that is a question that might well be asked. It is for departments to determine whether or not they go to open competition up to the levels that are considered then by the Senior Leadership Committee. I sit on that Senior Leadership Committee, and so will be part and parcel of decisions that are taken as to whether the most senior posts go to open competition. We have a protocol for the top 200 posts that assumes there will be not only competition but open competition unless there is a business need to do otherwise; or unless people just do not believe that the market could provide the sets of skills that are required; or if a speedy appointment is required. So, I am part and parcel of those decisions in a committee which is chaired by the Cabinet Secretary. Q53 Chairman: So, you do not think that there should be always open competition? Ms Paraskeva: Personally? Q54 Chairman: Yes. Ms Paraskeva: I do not know. I do not know is the genuine answer. I would need to look at the cost/benefits. I do think that one of the recommendations that is coming out of the Normington Review is that we need to look not just at the most senior jobs in terms of open competition, but it may be that we need to be bringing people in mid-career, so that they and the Civil Service itself can get a better feel for whether these are the people who want to stay longer in the Civil Service and develop the next part of their career there and I do think that that is an interesting change because jobs for life went out of the window a while ago everywhere. Q55 Chairman: A final question regarding what we were talking about earlier on, the whistle-blowing matters, just so that we can complete the circle. When we talk about this, we tend to talk about it entirely in terms of the Senior Civil Service. People who have these problems working in a particular environment and so on. What I would like to know from you is, do you get complaints from down the ranks of people who just think that there are fellow civil servants who are not doing things which the Code says that they should do? Ms Paraskeva: Yes, we do. Q56 Chairman: In numbers? Ms Paraskeva: Not disproportionately. The meeting in Q57 Chairman: Thank you for all that this morning. I have tried to stop us getting into the wider territory. We are allies in trying to get the Civil Service to build in the legislative programme this year and I hope that our alliance will bear fruit. Ms Paraskeva: I hope so too. Chairman: Thank you very much for this morning.
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