To move that this House takes note of the Report from the Constitution Committee Permanent Secretaries: their appointment and removal (17th Report, Session 2022-23, HL Paper 258).
My Lords, between 2013 and 2020, the number of Permanent Secretaries leaving averaged 5.7 a year. In 2020, 12 Permanent Secretaries or equivalents left their posts, including the Cabinet Secretary. In September 2022, the Treasury Permanent Secretary, Sir Tom Scholar, left his post on the day the right honourable Elizabeth Truss MP became Prime Minister. This was widely reported as a sacking, in order to move economic policy away from “Treasury orthodoxy”. Simon Case confirmed that there was no question of underperformance by Sir Tom Scholar. On the same day, Sir Stephen Lovegrove was moved from the role of National Security Adviser, a move that the noble Lord, Lord Sedwill, described as being “without merit”.
Since the Constitution Committee’s 2012 report, The Accountability of Civil Servants, the relationship between Ministers and civil servants had become more exposed and controversial. Recent departures raised questions about the nature of ministerial involvement in appointments and departures, and the possible desire to appoint politically sympathetic candidates. The committee decided to inquire into safeguarding the constitutional balance required on the appointment and removal of Permanent Secretaries.
The Civil Service Code sets out the role of the Civil Service as
“an integral and key part of the government of the UK”
that
“supports the government of the day in developing and implementing its policies”,
carrying this out with dedication to the core values of integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality. The code was put on a statutory basis by the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010—CRaG—and those values are reflected in the Act’s minimum requirements that civil servants
“carry out their duties for the assistance of the administration as it is duly constituted for the time being, whatever its political complexion”.
The committee concluded that the impartiality and perceived impartiality of the Civil Service is a central tenet of our constitution and not seriously challenged. It recommended that any fundamental challenges must be made consciously and openly, with careful scrutiny and cross-party agreement. Under no circumstances should significant changes to the constitutional balance of the appointment and departure process for senior civil servants take place through unscrutinised evolution of practice. Can the Minister unequivocally confirm that the Government agree with those conclusions?
The CRaG Act placed the Civil Service Commission and the principles of recruitment on a statutory basis, embedding appointment on merit and after fair and open competition, and granting the Prime Minister power to manage the Civil Service. A memorandum of understanding agreed in 2010 set out the respective responsibilities of the Government and the commission, which,
My Lords, not that many people are deeply interested in this subject—in essence, we are all in the Room—but, for some of us, this is a subject of deep concern and is hugely important. I very much welcome the Constitution Committee’s thorough, balanced and thoughtful report.
This subject is gaining more interest outside. It is interesting that today the Institute for Government has published yet another report that bears strongly on this subject. It is robust and pretty punchy and it supports a lot of concerns that many of us have felt for a little time. It was a pleasure to be invited to give evidence to the Constitution Committee; it was yet another stage in my therapy and I am grateful for that opportunity.
I want to make some general points. First, I pick up the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, about opacity—that is, the opaqueness of this process— and the lack of scrutiny over internal appointments in the Civil Service. This is a matter of deep frustration for Ministers, who often see appointments being made for posts that are very important for the work that they are charged with delivering yet they have little visibility, let alone influence, on how the appointment is made. When I was doing my review, which I found a fascinating process, I discovered, buried deep in the Civil Service Management Code, these words:
“Ministers … will have a legitimate interest in a small number of posts”.
I found that extraordinary. As a Minister, I felt that I had a legitimate interest in every single post in the department for which I was responsible. I might want to exercise that interest and influence over only a relatively small number, but the idea that Ministers have a legitimate interest in only a small number is quite offensive. That needs to be revised.
There is no effective scrutiny from outside of internal appointments. That is needed. A body that has already been set up is capable of being developed into such a body: the Civil Service Commission, whose role can be expanded by agreement with the Prime Minister and the Civil Service Commissioner. At the moment, it is not set up to do that. As the report makes clear, its independence is somewhat truncated because all its staff are themselves civil servants.
My Lords, I have the privilege of serving on the Constitution Committee under the excellent and careful chairmanship of the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, and I commend her on what she has said. It is a privilege also to follow the noble Lord, Lord Maude, with his great experience, which I am afraid I do not have.
In April 2022, Sir Matthew Rycroft, the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, wrote a letter to the then Home Secretary requesting a ministerial direction in relation to the Government’s Rwanda policy. He said that although he was satisfied that it was regular, proper and feasible for the policy to proceed, he could not quantify its effectiveness as a deterrent to the small boats phenomenon with sufficient certainty to provide him with the necessary level of assurance over value for money. As we know, the ministerial direction was given and the policy proceeded. The responsibility for ensuing expenditure rests firmly with the Government and cannot be blamed on civil servants. I always take comfort from my Welsh family motto, which the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, will appreciate, “Ar bwy mae’r bae?”—“Who can we blame?”
That episode was an example of a Permanent Secretary doing his job. His message was no doubt unwelcome to his political mistress in a very sensitive area of government policy, but Sir Matthew is still in his job. By contrast, Sir Tom Scholar was removed from his position as Permanent Secretary in the Treasury in September 2022 by Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, not for anything that he had done but because he represented “Treasury orthodoxy”. That was a highly political decision. I do not think we realised at the time that there was a “deep state” bent on ruining the ministry of Liz Truss in her short-lived tenancy of No. 10.
That was not the only threat to stability. We had observed under Boris Johnson the rule of the spad, Dominic Cummings, who claimed that he had appointed personally the Cabinet Secretary. As for another senior civil servant in the Cabinet Office, he wrote in an email:
My Lords, I am very grateful for this thoughtful report. I am grateful to the committee for having asked the Civil Service Commission to give evidence to it. As the First Civil Service Commissioner, I lead the statutory independent commission that provides assurance that appointment into the Civil Service is on merit, after fair and open competition. I take on board the comments from the noble Lord, Lord Maude, about how we define merit. The commission regulates recruitment into the Civil Service and hears appeals from civil servants under the Civil Service Code. We play a unique role in the recruitment landscape and bring external expertise, acting as one of the checks and balances to the Government. We also provide confidence that recruitment is driven by candidates’ ability to do the job, wherever they may come from.
In my role as the First Civil Service Commissioner, I chair the recruitment panels for the appointment of Permanent Secretaries. The unique arrangements for this are set out in our Recruitment Principles. Throughout the appointments process, we attach great importance to Ministers being involved at the outset and through the various stages. Ministers must give their views on the job specification and person specification, and agree on the panel. They can meet all the shortlisted candidates, with the commission present, to give their views. However, the decision on which candidates meet the criteria rests with the independent panel, and the final choice of whom to appoint as a Permanent Secretary is for the Prime Minister. It is worth noting that, for other competitions for lower senior Civil Service grades, the panel not only arrives at a conclusion as to who is appointable but produces a merit order of those appointable candidates.
We agree with the committee that this balance of involvement is about right but that more must be done to make sure Ministers are aware of the ways in which they can be appropriately and rightly involved in these appointments. These are the most important public service leadership roles in the country. As a result of appearing before the committee and the concerns raised, the Deputy Prime Minister and I wrote to all Permanent Secretaries and ministerial offices in April this year outlining the existing process, and as a reminder that there is clarity on where Ministers could and should be appropriately involved.
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart, who brings a unique perspective on this subject. I am grateful to the committee for its report and to the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, for her thoughtful introduction to the debate.
Despite what my noble friend Lord Maude said, I hesitated before putting my name down for this debate—because I was not on the committee, I am not a former Cabinet Secretary, I am not the First Civil Service Commissioner, I am not a Front-Bench spokesman, I have never been involved with Civil Service reform and I am not a professor of government. However, during a career with a number of discontinuities, I served with 12 different Permanent Secretaries, all of whom were of the highest calibre. In a sense, that should not be a matter of good fortune, because you do not become a Permanent Secretary unless on the way up you have had good working relationships with a range of Ministers and other colleagues. I had much more trouble with spads than with Permanent Secretaries.
What concerns me is the trend over the last 30 years increasingly to politicise the Civil Service and to compromise its independence. Both parties—indeed, all three of the main parties—have been complicit in this. That should not be confused with attempts to modernise the Civil Service or strengthen it by bringing in people from outside to reinforce subjects where it may lack the necessary skills. I hope that, at some point, we might debate my noble friend Lord Maude’s excellent Independent Review of Governance and Accountability in the Civil Service, which aims to remove some of the tensions in the system that we have been talking about and to improve the outcomes.
What prompted this inquiry was the dismissal of Sir Tom Scholar from the Treasury, but this was the culmination of a trend that has been going on for some time under both Governments. I go back to 1997, when for the first time Orders in Council gave political aides powers to direct civil servants—powers normally reserved to Ministers. More information on what happened in the Blair Government can be found in Ian Beesley’s book, The Official History of the Cabinet Secretaries. For example, he tells us that Wilson—then Sir Richard, now the noble Lord, Lord Wilson—wrote to Blair:
My Lords, I welcome this debate on the appointment and dismissal of Permanent Secretaries and declare my interest as a member of the Constitution Committee and a former special adviser. I thank the clerks, my fellow committee members and especially the chair, the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, for their careful navigation of this sensitive terrain—and for putting up with me. I also thank the witnesses who appeared before us and helped illuminate such a nuanced subject.
The appointment and dismissal of Permanent Secretaries are two of the most important powers exercised by a Prime Minister. Although it was considered heretical 15 years ago, today a Prime Minister exercising choice in the selection of Permanent Secretaries is widely accepted and formally codified in the Civil Service recruitment principles. I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Maude for his tenacity in ensuring that this happened.
The power to dismiss, however, has not enjoyed the same degree of acceptance, for entirely understandable reasons. We can, no doubt, all recall instances where the dismissal of a Permanent Secretary may or may not have been justified. Some have been retired early, having openly revealed their private opposition to government policy, while others have been summarily dismissed on the basis of ministerial aversion to their supposedly orthodox views. In each case, the dismissal has been heavily debated. It is to be regretted that the United Kingdom does not, as in other jurisdictions, have any clear policies setting out the role of Ministers in the potential dismissal of Permanent Secretaries.
The Civil Service has since 2010 been underpinned by the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act, or CRaG. It makes clear that all competitions for appointments to the Civil Service should be on the basis of merit, following a fair and open competition, and regulated by the independent Civil Service Commission. The Act, however, has its deficiencies. Although it formally provides for an independent commission, the commission is entirely dependent for its staffing, premises and budget on the Cabinet Office and its chief executive is line managed by the propriety and ethics directorate within the Cabinet Office, which in turn reports directly to the Cabinet Secretary.
My Lords, today’s debate has been given a new topicality by two reports. One was the report of the Institute for Government, which has been referred to, and the other, which has not been referred to, is a report in the Times of a speech by Mr John Glen, a Cabinet Office Minister, in which he is reported as saying that the Government are to introduce new rules for managers to deal with underperforming staff. It is now 25 years since I retired from the Civil Service, so I am not competent to give an informed commentary on the performance of today’s service. I want to concentrate my remarks on the constitutional implications of Mr Glen’s reported remarks on today’s subject of the appointment and dismissal of Permanent Secretaries.
We must start by recognising that, like the armed services and judges, the Civil Service and elected politicians are separate professions, both serving the Crown. Civil servants and Ministers should form a unity in working for the country under the leadership of Ministers, who have earned that right to lead by virtue of their election. However, the two professions are separate, and the obligations that they have differ in some respects. On the one hand, Ministers have a right to be served by people in whom they have confidence and they have a right, therefore, to have a strong voice in appointment, but the head of the Civil Service also has a responsibility to build for the future an impartial Civil Service competent to serve Governments of different colours, and my noble friend the First Civil Service Commissioner has a duty to preside over a process that reconciles these two obligations. I was pleased to see that the Constitution Committee concludes that the recruitment principles formulated by the Civil Service Commission strike a good balance in reconciling these two sets of interests.
I now turn to the removal of Permanent Secretaries. Although a Minister has a right to be served by a Permanent Secretary in whom he has confidence, he does not have the right to dismiss a Permanent Secretary. That is why Kwasi Kwarteng’s dismissal of Sir Tom Scholar was constitutionally wrong. If Mr Kwarteng and the Prime Minister wanted to remove Sir Tom Scholar, it was a matter for the head of the Civil Service. He should have handled it, not politicians. A Permanent Secretary, or indeed any official, is an employee of the Crown, not of the party in power.
My Lords, like others, I very much welcome this report from the Constitution Committee and the generally positive response it received from the Government. My purpose in speaking is, essentially, to add to what the committee recommends. There are three points I wish to make, picking up in part on what has been said by my noble friend Lord Maude and the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell.
My first point addresses what is implicit in the report but not dealt with in a dedicated section. It is the bit in the middle between recruitment and removal—that is, retention. The report recognises that, for the purpose of having a well-functioning department, it is necessary that highly qualified individuals are recruited on merit as Permanent Secretaries. It is necessary but not sufficient. The value is lost if there is a significant turnover in senior civil servants.
The report notes the churn in Permanent Secretaries in the period from 2019 to 2023. To refer to them as “permanent” appears a misnomer. Even before that, the length of service was not substantial. The extent of turnover is also shown in the report Who Runs Whitehall?, published today by the Institute for Government, to which reference has already been made. This turnover is not conducive to good government. Ministers are generalists, but so too are most senior civil servants. The value added by having Permanent Secretaries who know their department and have an institutional memory is lost if their tenure is not much greater, or indeed shorter, than that of Ministers. As the IfG report argues:
“Senior officials should be better incentivised to stay in post longer”.
To my mind, that entails not only the conditions of service but a culture of appreciating the work that they do. Good government relies on Ministers who can take decisions but respect the role of the senior civil servants, and civil servants who can, in the words of my noble friend, Lord Maude, in his independent review,
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“in discharging its functions, is independent of the Government and the Civil Service”.
Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, told us that the memorandum “requires updating”, and that a new framework was expected to be finalised in the coming months. When can we expect the new framework agreement to be published? Will it make clear that the CRaG Act allows the commission to assert greater independence, should it wish to, as the committee was advised by the Cabinet Secretary?
The recruitment principles published by the commission provide for ministerial involvement. In summary, Ministers can input into the job description, the person specification and the composition of the panel, and they can meet candidates. That provision is to operate in a manner that preserves the principle of merit and prevents engineering in favour of a preferred candidate. The first commissioner said:
“We give permission to appoint. It is not a duty to appoint”.
The committee concluded that that provision strikes an appropriate balance.
It was apparent, however, that Ministers were not sufficiently aware of the extent of their influence over appointments, or the limits on it. As noble Lord, Lord Maude, observed, Ministers already had
“a high degree of involvement in the appointment of permanent secretaries and directors general”,
but there was a case for more transparency. This echoed the concerns of the First Civil Service Commissioner.
It is incumbent upon Permanent Secretaries to brief incoming Ministers on how they can be involved in the appointment of civil servants, which should help to avoid some tensions. For very senior appointments, the Civil Service Senior Appointments Protocol applies. It provides for the selection route—an external or internal competition or a managed move—to be decided by the Senior Leadership Committee. The First Civil Service Commissioner and the Cabinet Secretary appeared to have different nuances as to who decides on the selection route. The Cabinet Secretary agreed to revise the protocol to reflect current working practices—in which, in our understanding, the Cabinet Secretary and the Prime Minister decide.
We found the Senior Leadership Committee to be an opaque body; its role was described in apparently contradictory terms. We recommended that its considerations should be as transparent as possible, providing the commission with an annual account of its activities. We found the governance concerning selection routes for very senior appointments to be convoluted and unclear. The Civil Service Senior Appointments Protocol and the Recruitment Principles should both be updated to provide the necessary clarity. The Cabinet Secretary, consulting the First Civil Service Commissioner, committed to ensure that this will be done. Will the Minister update the Committee on when we can expect to see an updated protocol? What processes have been put in place to give greater transparency to the work of the Senior Leadership Committee?
Simon Case told us that discussions had taken place through the Senior Leadership Committee, the Civil Service Commission and ACOBA—the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments—on how to make external by default recruitment work, and that proposals were imminent. We look forward to seeing the forthcoming work on the rules concerning business appointments.
The noble Lord, Lord Pickles, chair of ACOBA, wrote to the committee, welcoming our work on safeguarding the constitutional balance and advising that,
“ACOBA has long argued that”
the business appointment rules
“are not fit for purpose”.
Will the Minister update the Committee on the Government’s implementation of their proposals on reforming the business appointment rules, changes to Civil Service contracts and a ministerial deed to make the business appointment rules more enforceable?
The Recruitment Principles do not apply to the Cabinet Secretary, who is appointed by the Prime Minister on the advice of the retiring Cabinet Secretary and the First Civil Service Commissioner. The committee recommended that, given the importance of that role, including as head of the Civil Service, the appointment process should be made more open and transparent while maintaining that the Prime Minister make the final choice. The current and previous first commissioners share that view. It would also have the merit of strengthening Permanent Secretaries’ confidence in the management of the Civil Service.
Speculation about the role of special advisers in the appointment of senior civil servants has also impacted confidence. Alex Thomas from the Institute for Government captured the problem in his expression of concern at the idea that a special adviser such as Mr Cummings might purport to have recruited or dismissed officials. He said:
“We only have his tweets and evidence to go on … but I think that Dominic Cummings’s sense of, ‘I appointed so-and-so’, or ‘I dismissed so-and-so’, is deeply unhealthy. It obviously formally comes back to the Prime Minister and is done in the name of the Prime Minister. A reinforcement and underpinning of that important principle would not go amiss”.
The noble Baroness, Lady Stuart, the First Civil Service Commissioner, expressed her view that:
“The two absolute red lines … are, first, that Ministers cannot see candidates without the presence of a commissioner or representative of the commission; and, secondly, that special advisers must play no role in the … process … They cannot be in the room”.
The committee concluded that, although discussions between Ministers and special advisers are impossible to regulate, the decision with respect to appointments must be that of the Minister. Special advisers must not be formally involved or make public statements. What further measures are being taken to ensure that Ministers and special advisers understand that?
In the rare circumstances a Permanent Secretary is dismissed on performance or misconduct grounds, this is a human resources matter, which should follow the process of performance and misconduct management outlined by the Cabinet Office. Problems arise if ministerial conduct appears to undermine that due process. Confidence in the departure process requires careful scrutiny. The committee recommended that the Civil Service Commission should play a role in the dismissal or departure of senior civil servants on performance or conduct grounds by ensuring that due process is followed.
Recent removals on what appear to be political or ideological grounds might indicate insufficient procedural safeguards around departures. We recognise that a Permanent Secretary has to foster a positive relationship with the Secretary of State. However, forming a positive relationship is a two-way process. Incoming Ministers should allow Permanent Secretaries time to establish a productive relationship before seeking their removal.
The committee concluded that there is a case for formalising the departure process in situations where there is no issue of performance or misconduct. It recommended that the process should be set out in writing, requiring Ministers and the Prime Minister to explain to the Civil Service Commission—in private if necessary—their decision to remove a senior civil servant. A written record of the decision and the reasons for it should be kept. These processes would need to be sufficiently flexible to allow a Minister to replace at short notice where a working relationship has broken down.
The critical point about the departures of Sir Tom Scholar and Sir Stephen Lovegrove was the extremely short timeframe in which the decisions were enacted. It conveys that no meaningful process could have possibly been followed. Some recent high-profile removals have been conducted in the public eye and might be seen to reflect a desire on the part of Ministers to personalise appointments and assert their authority.
Some witnesses were of the view that in recent years Ministers have been more willing to make a public statement by dispensing with the services of a civil servant. Such behaviour risks senior Civil Service turnover coinciding with ministerial churn, reinforcing the perception of politicisation, damaging institutional knowledge—we probably saw this acutely in the case of Sir Tom Scholar—and weakening the governance of the country. What steps are the Government taking to mitigate the potentially chilling effects on civil servants of the perception that recent high-profile removals of Permanent Secretaries lacked merit or due process, or were driven by personalisation or political grounds?
There was also concern that high-profile removals of senior civil servants could lead to officials hedging their advice. This is particularly pertinent to Permanent Secretaries’ role as accounting officers, with a duty to
“assure Parliament and the public of high standards of probity in the management of public funds”.
They routinely scrutinise proposed government policy against the criteria of probity, propriety, value for money and feasibility. The accounting officer function is a valuable aspect of the constitution, relying on speaking truth to power. A shift towards ministerial patronage risks a chilling effect, to the detriment of the public interest.
I turn to the issue of devolved Administrations. For Permanent Secretaries and their equivalents who are accountable to the Scottish or Welsh Government but who belong to the UK Civil Service organisation, there is potential for confusion about the boundary between devolved competence and reserved matters. The most pertinent recent example was the First Minister of Scotland’s decision in March 2023 to appoint a Minister for Independence. Simon Case agreed that
“it would be ‘unusual and a bit worrying’ if civil servants in Scotland were supporting an effort to ‘break up the United Kingdom’ and provided assurances that he was examining this issue to determine whether ‘further guidance and clarification’ should be issued to civil servants ‘about what is and is not appropriate spending’”.
The committee was concerned about this point—indeed, it still is. It concluded that
“it is important that the principle of a single civil service across England, Wales and Scotland is maintained”.
It said that the Cabinet Secretary must
“manage challenges as they arise”
and provide clarity that senior
“civil servants … should work and spend public funds exclusively on matters within devolved competence”.
When will further guidance and clarification be issued to senior civil servants in Scotland and Wales? What guidance is given to Permanent Secretaries in Scotland and Wales on seeking a written direction from the relevant devolved Minister?
I conclude where I opened, with the committee’s conclusion:
“Under no circumstances should significant changes to the constitutional balance of the appointment and departure processes for civil servants take place through unscrutinised evolution of practice”.
I beg to move.
I pay huge tribute to what the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart, has done as the First Civil Service Commissioner. It is interesting that she is the first former Minister to sit as a Civil Service Commissioner, yet that ministerial perspective is important when you are looking at the appointment of very senior civil servants. In my recommendation, there should always be two former Ministers, one from each of the major parties, on the Civil Service Commission—partly to ensure that there is no politicisation, in the sense of people who would not be acceptable to an incoming Government of a different colour being appointed to key posts, but also to bring that ministerial perspective to judgments. Reference has been made to the strange and uncertain role of the Senior Leadership Committee, which needs to be brought into the daylight.
Then there is this question of merit. I have no problem with appointments being made on merit. Why would any Minister want a key official who is charged with delivering their agenda not to be of high merit? But who is to be the judge of merit? There is no objective test for it; these are human judgments being made by human beings about other human beings. There is absolutely no reason why Ministers should not be able to be part of judging the merit of particular appointments, as they already are for Permanent Secretaries and directors-general, and to be given a choice of appointable candidates of sufficient merit for roles that they consider critical for the discharge of their responsibilities. If this were to happen, it would likely reduce the amount of blame that tends to get attached; if Ministers have more involvement in the appointment of civil servants, they will have less justification for criticising them when things go wrong.
One reason why things sometimes go wrong is that civil servants in very senior roles, including Permanent Secretaries in charge of big delivery departments— the IfG’s report today makes this clear—are predominantly drawn from the policy side of the Civil Service and are, frankly, woefully underprepared for taking on these huge responsibilities. My hopeful attempts to introduce a much higher degree of training for these big roles ran into the sand. For reasons which no one has ever explained, what we agreed should be done—putting Permanent Secretaries and aspirant Permanent Secretaries through top leadership courses in top business schools—just did not happen.
Ministers need to be able to be more involved in more appointments and should have more visibility. I do not understand why it is said that there cannot be a role for special advisers in observing the selection process—not being involved in it or influencing it, as the law is quite clear that they must not be involved in management. Them having some ability to see what is happening, and to throw some light on these very mysterious and opaque processes, would be very valuable. Nothing in law or good practice prevents that.
The IfG report makes the point that the pay of senior civil servants has fallen. It should be higher and we should have a smaller Civil Service with better pay, particularly for senior officials and Ministers—I can say this because my ministerial career is now, happily, well behind me. It is not appropriate that Ministers, who carry all the responsibility and accountability for what is done by their department, are served by officials who in many cases are paid more than them. It is very difficult, but it should be dealt with. Ministerial pay has fallen far further behind than civil servants’ pay.
There have always been Permanent Secretaries being removed. Fixed terms have not particularly increased this, as they can be extended—and generally should be—for less than the five years. When civil servants leave because there has been a failure in the relationship, we should be unequivocal and unembarrassed about paying up. When there is a failure, it is often not a personal failure of the individual—maybe it was the wrong appointment or, as I have said, they were insufficiently prepared. We should take responsibility for that and ensure that they are properly paid. The idea that you cannot reward failure is pandering to media concerns. We should be much more grown-up about this and accept that sometimes these things happen. There should be proper process. It should be unusual, but when it happens you should pay up and accept that there is a general responsibility for it having happened.
I strongly commend the report of the Constitution Committee, which is a very worthwhile piece of work.
“I will personally handcuff her and escort her from the building. I don’t care how it is done, but that woman must be out of our hair”—
I shall leave out the embellishments that he gave to that message.
It is clear that, in recent times, successive Governments have pushed the fuzzy boundaries of our unwritten constitution. The ballot box does not convey unbridled power to election winners. The sovereignty of Parliament, important as it is as a principle, is subject, as Winston Churchill wrote in his A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, to the rule of law. That includes international law. The judiciary is independent. Another principle of our constitution over the years is an apolitical Civil Service which does not
depend on political patronage. We can see the origins of this in Samuel Pepys’s time, the 17th century. It was written of him by a contemporary that he introduced
“The principal rules and establishments in present use”
in the offices of the Admiralty, and that he demanded
“Sobriety, diligence, capacity, loyalty, and subjection to command”.
Where any of those virtues were found wanting,
“no interest or authority was capable of moving him in favour of the highest pretender”.
The Northcote-Trevelyan report of 1854 enshrines, as our colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, put it in 1999 in his Founder’s Day address at Hawarden Castle, the home of Mr Gladstone, the
“core values of integrity, propriety, objectivity and appointment on merit, able to transfer … loyalty and expertise from one elected government to the next”.
Those are the core principles.
Recent shenanigans seem to be a threat and an affront to these principles. The essential challenge with which the Constitution Committee sought to grapple was whether in the modern era Ministers should be able to choose their own teams of civil servants, those with whom they felt comfortable. I detected some of that wish in the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Maude. In America, the spoils system of patronage in relation to the civil service was abolished in the 19th century, but since Secretaries of State are appointed directly by the President and do not have to be Members of Congress, their immediate executive staff are deemed to be outside the American civil service, and they of course change with the Administration.
The Constitution Committee in this report reaffirmed that the current recruitment principles strike the correct balance in maintaining an objective, merit-based approach to recruitment, particularly for Permanent Secretaries. Any move towards greater ministerial involvement would risk upsetting that balance. We held that it is unhelpful for Ministers to seek to personalise appointments and assert their authority because, among other things, it risks Civil Service turnover coinciding with ministerial churn. It creates a perception of politicisation of appointments and damages institutional knowledge. Political alignment should never be a factor. We also called for departure processes to be formalised to guard against the improper removal of civil servants. In particular, we urged that Ministers should be required to explain any decision to replace a senior civil servant to the Civil Service Commission, and called for more transparency about the role of the Senior Leadership Committee, which we termed an opaque body—a word that the noble Lord, Lord Maude, has taken up.
In their response, the Government said that they shared the committee’s belief that the impartiality and perceived impartiality of the Civil Service is a central tenet of our constitution. The Government also accepted that broad political alignment should not be a relevant consideration in the appointment of civil servants. The one area which was disappointing in their response was the Government’s reaction to our desire to ensure due process when senior civil servants are dismissed on conduct or performance criteria. We called for the intervention of the Civil Service Commissioner, but the Government’s view was that formal human resources processes already exist around performance management, conduct and discipline issues.
I am hopeful that the rot has been stopped. The continuance of Sir Matthew Rycroft in office, despite his warnings over the Rwanda policy, is encouraging. Ahead of us, we have the prospect of a change of Government, and we shall follow with interest how well the loyalty and expertise of the Civil Service, and particularly its Permanent Secretaries, translate into a new environment.
We are proud of our permanent Civil Service in this country, which exists to serve the Government of the day. I like to think that what we have is an impartial Civil Service. I have my doubts whether such a thing as it being non-political—with a small “p”—is possible, but it is impartiality and a commitment to the Government of the day which are important.
An effective Civil Service must continue to develop its own people, as well as recruit new talent from outside to bring in new skills. The commission plays a significant part here. We regulate external appointments into the Civil Service and, by virtue of the senior appointments protocol, recruitment at director-general level, which is the level below Permanent Secretary. I welcome the Minister’s commitment to publication of a revised Civil Servants Senior Appointments Protocol in the near future. The independence of the commission is a critical part of how the most senior roles in the Civil Service are recruited on merit, following that open and fair competition.
I also sit on the Senior Leadership Committee in my role as the First Civil Service Commissioner. I agree with the committee that it is important to codify and clarify the remit of the SLC and the first commissioner’s role on it. I am pleased that this work is under way, and look forward to its publication shortly. I also believe that the SLC membership should always include the Government lead NED as a further source of external cross-government expertise.
We believe that there are major benefits to external recruitment, testing the market for the skills the Civil Service needs and refreshing the talent available to serve the country. The commission itself has seen the benefits of recruiting externally by default, but some departments would benefit from embracing “external by default” a bit more enthusiastically.
I share with the Committee that the commission will be carrying out a thematic review into the rigour with which the external by default policy is applied, and we are doing this with the agreement of the Minister for the Cabinet Office. This will be a root-and-branch review, intended to look at the premise of external by default, how it is currently delivered and where there are still opportunities to be realised by recruiting people from outside into the Civil Service. We will be working closely with the Government People Group, which is responsible for Civil Service HR. I believe this is an excellent way to use the unique regulatory perspective of the commission and our 14 commissioners, who come from a wide range of professional backgrounds, including the private sector and the wider public sector.
The commission is currently responsible for entry into the Civil Service. Under the existing arrangements, we play no part in exit. I am pleased that our secretariat also serves the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, which is chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Pickles. The commission welcomes the work under way by the Government and the noble Lord on reforms to the business appointment rules. If there are implications for the commission’s own regulatory work, we will respond to those.
The commission is the appellate body for complaints from civil servants under the Civil Service Code. The code itself is owned by the Cabinet Office. We take this role seriously. Now that the full results of the people survey are available to us, we have written to all Permanent Secretaries in Scotland, Wales and England in order to engage in outreach with their departments over the coming year. We will ask each department for a list of the department’s nominated officers, details on the number of code complaints that the department has received, and the number of code complaints that have been upheld by the department. We are keen to ensure that civil servants understand the provisions of the code and are aware of the ways in which they can make a complaint, and that adequate processes are in place within departments.
I wish to take this moment to place on record my thanks to the hard-working commissioners and staff of the commission, who have in the past year regulated more than 90,000 appointments into the Civil Service and chaired 229 senior Civil Service competitions. I thank the committee for having been the spark for two useful commission initiatives and for giving us the impetus to do them in a timely manner.
“Do not try to use the policy unit to run the government; do not attempt to divorce permanent secretaries from their Cabinet ministers; do not be tempted by Napoleonic models, shifting resources ... from the Cabinet Office to No 10”.
Robert Armstrong was quoted in the Spectator in February 2002 as having said this:
“I am worried about the politicisation of the civil service. It is a particular problem in Downing Street”.
Dominic Lawson, perhaps a more partial commentator, wrote in February 2006:
“So the heads of our Civil Service departments do nothing to restrain Mr Blair and his colleagues from one hare-brained ‘eye-catching initiative’ after another. They have become merely a conveyor belt for political whims, having ceased to be public servants in the truest sense”.
We also saw the use of the government information service as a political weapon, a practice followed by the coalition and Conservative Governments, who gave sympathetic newspapers exclusive previews, frequently sidelining the clear guidance in the Cabinet Manual that:
“When Parliament is in session the most important announcements of government policy should, in the first instance, be made to Parliament”.
More recently, this Government have not had an unblemished record, with the controversial departures of Jonathan Slater at the DfE, Philip Rutnam at the Home Office, and the noble Lord, Lord Sedwill. As the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, mentioned, the arrival of Dominic Cummings poisoned this particular well; he made it clear that he had no time for Permanent Secretaries, and civil servants will remember his “hard rain” speech.
However, to my mind, the summary dismissal of Tom Scholar was an infringement of a totally different order: a direct challenge to the independence of the Civil Service and to the principle that Ministers cannot sack civil servants—we are not their employer. No specific reason was ever given for his departure. As the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, said, we know from the Cabinet Secretary that there was no question of poor performance, and we know from the noble Lord, Lord Macpherson, that it was not about political views. He said:
“I have worked with Tom for about 25 years, and to this day I have no idea what his political views are”.
The statement by the then Chancellor sheds no light at all. His bland statement ended,
“he leaves the Civil Service with the highest distinction”.
Tom Scholar himself said:
“The Chancellor decided it was time for new leadership at the Treasury, and so I will be leaving with immediate effect”.
But the new leadership at the Treasury was Kwasi Kwarteng. If he wanted to change the direction of economic policy, that is the one thing at which the Civil Service excels—and on which it may shortly be tested again if it has to alter policy to reflect a new Administration.
When questions were asked as to what had happened, the then Exchequer Secretary said in an Answer to a PQ:
“It is long-standing Government policy not to comment on individual personnel matters”.
There may have been good reasons why the committee did not get oral or written evidence from either Tom Scholar or indeed the then Chancellor, so we may never know what happened.
The Times came to its own conclusion, publishing on 14 September 2022 a letter that read:
“The sad fact is that in sacking Sir Tom Scholar, one of the ablest civil servants of his generation, the prime minister and chancellor have sent a clear message to the civil service that they are not interested in impartial advice and intend to surround themselves with ‘yes’ men and women. That is a sure route to bad decision-making and weak government. It is also another small step on the road to politicising the civil service”.
The Financial Times went a bit further. It said:
“Truss had pledged war against so-called Treasury orthodoxy and ‘abacus economics’, of which Scholar was a totem after six years at the head of the department”.
Against that background, I wonder whether the conclusions of the committee were robust enough. In paragraph 131 it concluded:
“Under no circumstances should civil servants be dismissed on purely political or ideological grounds”.
But that is exactly what happened. On page 5 it concluded:
“We do not consider the small number of recent high-profile removals of senior civil servants on what appeared to be political or ideological grounds to amount to a trend”.
I hope that it is right, but we need to build in better safeguards than we have at the moment, as the committee recognised.
In conclusion, I am always interested in what my noble friend the Minister has to say, but at this point in the electoral cycle, I will also pay particular attention to what the Opposition spokesperson says.
The Act is also almost unique in the developed world in placing no direct controls on the promotion of existing civil servants through purely internal mechanisms. An internal exercise all but guarantees the selection of an existing civil servant and deprives, in most circumstances, the Civil Service Commission of its oversight function. I acknowledge the work of the Secretary of State at Defra, who, in his previous role as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, put in place a mechanism to ensure that all Civil Service vacancies had to be advertised externally by default, unless otherwise agreed by Ministers. It is telling that, according to the IfG report published today, only 22% of Permanent Secretaries have had experience in a leadership role outside government for more than three years.
To avoid the risk of the very highest positions being gifted through patronage, additional controls have been placed on the internal promotion of candidates to director-general and Permanent Secretary roles. This has been done through the statutory document known as the Civil Service Senior Appointments Protocol. It states that decisions on whether these posts will be advertised externally are reserved to a body called the Senior Leadership Committee and that all such vacancies shall be overseen by the Civil Service Commission, regardless of how they are advertised.
As we have heard, our committee found that the composition, role and influence of the Senior Leadership Committee were highly opaque matters. While the SLC includes the First Civil Service Commissioner and, I believe, the government lead non-executive director, its membership is still dominated by Permanent Secretaries. A more balanced composition, with clear ministerial accountability, would surely help ease some of the anxieties that exist around this committee.
Despite the protocol being a statutory policy issued under CRaG, we learned in evidence from the Cabinet Secretary that decisions on whether to advertise Permanent Secretary vacancies externally are apparently taken not by the Senior Leadership Committee but, in reality, bilaterally by the Cabinet Secretary and the First Civil Service Commissioner. That places us in the slightly anomalous position where law and administrative practice are at variance. The commitment from both the Cabinet Secretary and the First Civil Service Commissioner to update the senior appointments protocol is therefore welcome, although it is important to note that the power to vary that protocol is reserved by Section 17 of the Act to the Prime Minister, not the Cabinet Secretary.
I will end with a word about the role of special advisers in the appointments process. The Constitutional Reform and Governance Act expressly forbids special advisers authorising the expenditure of public money and exercising any management power in relation to the Civil Service. It does not, however, forbid their advising Ministers on either of those matters, which is an important distinction that, I think, our report fairly reflects.
There are many more points that I would like to make, but time does not allow. I therefore echo the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, in asking my noble friend the Minister when we can expect the updated protocol and the published terms and membership of the Senior Leadership Committee on GOV.UK.
It is timely to be discussing this now as we approach a general election. I remember that when senior appointments had to be made during a period leading up to an election, I, as head of the Civil Service, was authorised by the Prime Minister to sound out the leader of the Opposition, not to give him a veto but to ensure that the planned appointee would be acceptable if there was a change of Government. I never encountered any difficulty about this, and I hope that, if necessary, that is happening today.
We can take some encouragement from the fact that, under Mr Sunak’s regime, the instability among Permanent Secretaries appears to have diminished and from the fact that the Government have accepted all the main recommendations of the Constitution Committee. Like others, I warmly congratulate the committee on its report. We can also be, at this moment, further encouraged by both the leader of the Opposition and his chief of staff knowing the Civil Service from the inside. I therefore have confidence that the conclusions and recommendations of the Constitution Committee in support of an impartial and politically independent Civil Service will be respected by any new Administration. I want to see deficiencies in the performance of the Civil Service put right but, in my view, this can be done only by good and respectful leadership on the part of the Civil Service and Ministers, not by imposed regulation of the sort threatened by Mr Glen.
“give honest, questioning and challenging advice to ministers”,
ultimately accepting the outcome once a Minister has taken a view.
When I did research in the 1990s on the relationship between Ministers and civil servants, I found that senior Ministers viewed their officials in a positive light. There was a culture of mutual respect, which, as this report recognises, has in recent years been eroded. We need to bolster that culture. As is clear from the committee’s report, it is a question of attitudes, not formal relationships and processes. Too often, Ministers are critical of officials, often, it appears, because the Ministers lack confidence—in one or two cases it is the opposite, and they display overweening self-confidence—and have no ingrained understanding of the role of the senior Civil Service.
How, then, do we encourage mutual respect and trust, derived from a mature understanding of the respective roles of Ministers and Permanent Secretaries? The answer is, at least in part, to be found in my second point, which is the need, already touched on today by my noble friend Lord Maude, for Ministers, Permanent Secretaries and other senior civil servants, to be trained in key leadership skills.
As my noble friend Lord Maude said in his review:
“The organisational health of the Civil Service is overwhelmingly dependent on its people: who they are, and how they are appointed and managed”.
Permanent Secretaries need to be leaders and not just managers. The same applies to Ministers. Leadership encompasses taking people with you and ensuring that they feel part of a team, rather than employees who are told what to do. Yet, as the IfG report shows, and as has been mentioned, few senior officials have prior experience in a leadership role.
I initiated a debate in the House in 2021 making the case for training. In it, my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe, drawing on her experience in business, endorsed the argument, noting that training helps senior managers get the best out of their staff. She also agreed that training should be provided to those who need it and not simply to those who want it. Training is essential to ensure that we get the best out of Permanent Secretaries and that Permanent Secretaries get the best out of those who serve in their departments. The same applies to Ministers, so perhaps my noble friend can update us on progress.
Thirdly and related—a point I have pursued on a number of occasions, including in the 2021 debate—civil servants need to appreciate the significance of Parliament. The report refers to Section 3 of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act but makes no mention of subsection (6), which requires the Minister for the Civil Service to
“have regard to the need to ensure that civil servants who advise Ministers are aware of the constitutional significance of Parliament and of the conventions governing the relationship between Parliament and … Government”.
It is crucial that Permanent Secretaries—and Ministers —do not see Parliament as either irrelevant or an unfortunate irritant. Good government needs an effective Parliament. Although the provision in subsection (6) forms part of the Civil Service Code, it is by no means clear to what extent it is applied in practice. In the context of the committee’s report, it would be valuable if those considered for appointment as Permanent Secretaries had to demonstrate not only their awareness of the provision but what they had done in their previous posts to ensure that it had been applied. I do not expect my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe to be able to address the point in detail this afternoon, but it would be good to hear from her in writing what progress has been made in ensuring the clear and measurable application of the provision.
We need to ensure that Ministers and Permanent Secretaries know how to work together to lead cohesive and goal-oriented departments. This report is an important contribution to ensuring that we get the most out of those who head government departments. Its success will be demonstrated if the recommendation at paragraph 131 is implemented but never required.