Guest blog: A response to Martin Donnelly's speech on the Civil Service

It was not intended as a criticism but as a warning. I agreed most strongly with the arguments set out in Martin’s speech which were almost identical with my own views about the role of what he called central policy civil service. If it is a priestly cult it is one of which I have been proud to be an occasional member. (Though perhaps that is a contradiction in terms and I have not really been a proper civil servant at all but one of the technical experts, mentioned in the speech, who may be encouraged to join for short periods or a substantial career. Not a priest but a lay cleric.) My concern, and use of the expression, were based on the fear that civil servants would be seen as a special group of people who were selected and initiated into the mysteries of correct conduct, which only they would be qualified to judge. You have to be a civil servant to recognise a good one. It would follow that selection and promotion would be in the hands of civil servants and that no one else should be involved. This is not exclusive to civil servants, or to priesthoods for that matter. It applies across many professions and it is under challenge elsewhere; the selection of judges is an example that comes to mind. In my question to Martin I said that there would be no problem if all involved could give the same lecture as he had; but if this were not the case there could be difficulties if, for example, ministers believed they should be involved in the selection of permanent secretaries. (No doubt due to shortage of time, Martin did not answer that particular point.) The role of ministers is, I think, part of a wider problem of how civil servants respond to criticism. There will, reasonably enough, be some resentment if civil servants seem to be saying in reply, “You don't understand what it means to be a civil servant. Only civil servants understand that.” Matters are made worse if the implication is that ministers are here today and gone tomorrow, while the civil servants guard the eternal verities. Civil servants do make mistakes and we have to try to understand why they happen. An important distinction is between mistakes that occur despite the norms and ethos of the Civil Service and those that occur because of that ethos. It is the latter, of course, which are more serious. Martin, in his response to me, listed ways in which civil servants were subject to external sources of evaluation, including departmental non-executive directors (an innovation since my time). There is also, of course, the Civil Service Commission. My recollection of Sir David Normington's speech to the Institute for Government is that its conclusions were close to Martin's, which can either be seen as endorsement for them or as evidence of the priestly conspiracy. But I also remember similar arguments in Oliver Letwin's speech which would rather stretch the idea of a conspiracy. I think the challenge remains. How can the arguments for the tradition which has continued and evolved since the Northcote Trevelyan reforms, and which was so eloquently defended by Martin, be presented without provoking the response, “There you go again?”