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

I agree with the thrust of his argument on the value of a permanent, professional cadre of officials acting in support of ministers on the basis of mutual trust and confidentiality. I can see too the attraction in beginning his speech with a quote from Northcote and Trevelyan, whose reforms have led to a service largely free of patronage and its consequences. But there are dangers in dwelling too much on these Victorian origins of the Civil Service because the Northcote-Trevelyan model of recruiting officials by competitive examination as they left university, for a lifetime of service, is no longer the only way, or in some areas the predominant way, in which the top echelons of the Civil Service are populated. Instead there is a much more permeable system with staff being recruited directly at all levels and with policy making in the hands of those with expertise in economics or other disciplines, who might have been recruited originally for their professional expertise. It is important to try to anchor debate in modern reality, hard though this may be. (See, for example, how ministerial and other critics prefer the caricature of an all-powerful and wily Sir Humphrey of “Yes, Minister” to the modern equivalent satire/documentary of “The Thick of It” in which the Civil Service has a spectator role). Some important issues lie behind this modern reality which merit further discussion. First, how is the policy process to be conducted? Is there an expertise in supporting ministerial decision making which is a professional task in its own right, involving structured evidence gathering and analysis? Or should we adopt a less structured approach in which ministers are in the market for ideas and take them where they find them, including from the Civil Service, as one voice amongst many in a ministerially-orchestrated process. Civil servants tend to favour the first model, while not arguing that the evidence that they are synthesising and analysing for ministers should itself be drawn from only the Civil Service as opposed to a wider set of sources. Critics, including those keen to get in on this line of business, suggest that the service tends to not know about or give less weight to outside opinion so contested policy development is the way forward. Second, if the service is to claim expertise in the decision support space, where is this to come from? There needs to be a vision for and a set of underlying training and development tools for a cadre of professional policy makers, akin to those for other professional groups but harder perhaps to define and support than those for say law, accountancy and medicine. After being wrestled with for a numbers of years, this still seems work in progress. And if the policy space is also to be more permeable how are values, processes and standards to be inculcated in newcomers at all levels? Finally, how do we end the crazy merry-go-round of officials moving far too quickly between jobs and not building the real subject expertise which equips them to access up-to-date thinking in their area of responsibility? So as Martin says it will be good to have “more proactive communication setting out why officials are capable of doing their jobs to a high standard of professionalism”, including answers to these questions.