The roles of ministers and permanent secretaries should be complementary not conflicting

The paper, to which Francis Maude has taken such a strong objection, is curious in origin. It is under the joint name of YSC, a firm of business psychologists, and consists of clichéd statements of the obvious about what good leaders need to do, plus muddled and misleading passages about relations with ministers. The reference to balancing ministers’ or high-level stakeholders’ immediate needs or priorities with the long-term aims of their department is plain wrong, both constitutionally and practically. Permanent secretaries should not have policy agendas of their own. The Civil Service exists to serve the priorities of the government of the day. The alleged clash between the two has fuelled public debate over the Civil Service since the Richard Crossman diaries and his battles with the formidable Dame Evelyn Sharp. Of course, the departmental view has from time to time been asserted against the instincts and wishes of ministers. But these have been aberrations. Martin Donnelly, the BIS Permanent Secretary, defined the traditional role correctly last week in a speech at the Institute for Government—the Civil Service should not place constraints on ministers but should advise and serve them. And sometimes that means presenting advice that ministers do not like about, say, the implementability of a project. Mr Maude’s Civil Service Reform Plan places an obligation on permanent secretaries to warn about implementation risks. Yet even if permanent secretaries should not have their own policy agendas, they do have longer-term interests, distinct from current ministers: as Mr Maude himself put it in a letter to colleagues, the Civil Service should retain the ability to serve a future government. This partly means being prepared for a change of party in office after an election, or of secretary of state after a reshuffle, as is covered by well-established conventions. There is also the deeper stewardship role of permanent secretaries in ensuring that a department has the right capabilities to serve ministers: that civil servants have the appropriate training, experience and expertise. This is not in any way in conflict with duties towards current ministers: rather the reverse. By ensuring that the Civil Service is in good shape, permanent secretaries are acting in the interests of the government of the day. They also have to manage the day-to-day duties of a department, operations which ministers do not regard as immediate priorities, but which, if they go wrong, can create big political problems. This also involves contingency planning and ensuring that departments are resilient. The duties of permanent secretaries were well set out by Akash Paun and Josh Harris in the IfG’s Accountability at the Top paper. In addition, and omitted from the leaked document, is the responsibility which permanent secretaries have to Parliament as accounting officers. This is a long-established personal responsibility to ensure that proposals are both ‘regular’ (i.e. legally justified’) and also represent value for money. It requires permanent secretaries to be ready to challenge ministers, who can then overrule them. Not a single ministerial direction has been requested by a permanent secretary since 2010, perhaps not surprising but in itself a cause for concern. In many ways more significant are the continuing tensions between Mr Maude and some senior civil servants over the pace, direction and depth of civil service reform – as surfaced at a recent meeting of the Public Accounts Committee. The latest row should be seen as another skirmish in this continuing engagement. As the Institute has set out recently, the Civil Service urgently needs to prepare, on a cross-Whitehall basis, for the challenges that will follow from the 2015 spending review. The lack of reform to date is largely down to a lack of corporate leadership in the Civil Service. The civil service leadership, backed by the Prime Minister, urgently need to set out a core agenda for change that can be supported by civil servants and politicians alike.