Making interchange work for the Civil Service

Interchange sounds great in theory. But our politics, and media, doesn’t like the 'revolving door'. And the civil service has a cultural problem with it too; it feels that civil servants who leave have betrayed the public ethos, and outsiders who have come remain that, outsiders. I am parti pris on this having left the civil service to work in the European Commission, returned, left again for British Airways, returned again, then retired and now have a wide portfolio of jobs in the private and pro bono sectors. I think we are wasting talent and skills by not promoting interchange as a positive good for the economy. At the Institute for Government, we recently had a great seminar on interchange. I came away with the following conclusions. Cabinet Office policy needs to change. The present system discourages interchange. The lamentable Advisory Committee on Public Appointments (ACOBA) is an inefficient blockage which provides no reassurance against impropriety. Funding arrangements discourage secondments. Salary limits make the civil service market uncompetitive in key areas like IT or procurement. We need a political champion who wants to make interchange happen. And civil service culture needs to change. I remember coming back into the Civil Service as CEO of UKTI, feeling in my own mind that I had come back home with some useful new skills and perspectives. But hardly anyone in the civil service asked me about life outside or how a different culture might approach the task in hand. Peter Ricketts and Brian Bender, my two permanent secretaries were exceptions and used the skills I brought. So what do we need to do? Not go to the US or French systems for sure. They may work but our political culture could not accept them. Nor do we need a statement of intent. The Civil Service Reform Plan already commits the government to interchange. What we need is to look at where interchange has worked and learn the lessons. Two examples came up in the seminar. The 2012 Olympics was such a logistical success because there was a marrying of public and private sector skills. (Paul Deighton has now become a minister, like Mervyn Davies, Mark Malloch Brown and Stephen Green before him. Interchange at ministerial level has also proved to be a good thing). Another example is the Territorial Army. No one thinks the part-timers coming in to the military are conflicted, or unreliable, or culturally inadequate. Why can the military handle it and not the civil service? We also need to combat the Daily Mail/Private Eye view that any civil servant moving to the private sector must be on the take. To the contrary, we should encourage civil servants. There is a waste of talent as they are discouraged from contributing to the economy in a later career by ACOBA and media criticism. The thing I find most encouraging is that Bob Kerslake and Jeremy Heywood, both ‘interchangers’ themselves, seem convinced of the need to do more to encourage it. But they need political support and a more detailed programme. I come back to the idea of a political champion. One last thought. In 1973, I joined an admirable Civil Service, full of principle, but hermetically sealed against an unreliable outside. It was pretty airless and narrow. Those days are long gone. Now, we do not have the Civil Service and the rest. We have a spectrum of Whitehall, arm’s-length bodies, NDPBs, local authorities, NGOs, non-profit organisations, public corporations, plcs and entrepreneurs. The more individual people can move within and between them and the private sector, back and forth not just one way, the more efficient our economy will be and the more open-minded our society will be.