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

Some of the responses have built on Martin’s argument, drawing out the logical consequences. Richard Mottram notes that, given Martin’s argument hinges on the competence of the Civil Service in providing policy advice, it is important that we continually challenge and improve the quality of that advice. This is a theme very close to the Institute’s heart, and it is good to see the Policy Profession taking responsibility for improving quality drawing on much of our earlier work. Alan Budd notes the need for the Civil Service to avoid being characterised as a “priestly cult”, where only those practising its arts can judge whether it is doing a good job. This is certainly a view the Institute would share, and we have put forward our own proposals for how accountability at the top of Whitehall could be strengthened. Others have challenged aspects of Martin’s speech. Rob Whiteman, Chief Executive of CIPFA, draws on his past experience in local government and Whitehall, to argue that there would be benefit in splitting out the three roles currently combined in the permanent secretary – namely administrative head of the department, principal policy adviser and accounting officer. I have to admit to being a little sceptical on this, and tend to agree with the Treasury’s traditionally argument that you want a point of undivided responsibility on the civil service side at the top of a department. But we should spend more time thinking about the combined abilities of departmental top teams, rather than focusing solely on the permanent secretary. In this context, it is striking how heavily Whitehall’s top teams are comprised of people from a policy advice background doing a policy job. This leads on to my biggest concern with Martin’s argument. He explicitly focused on the policy role of the Civil Service, and rightly noted that this encompasses not just advice, but also implementation. However, most of the examples Martin drew on came from the world where officials are advising ministers, who are then taking the decisions. There was relatively little on the process of turning those decisions into action. As Jack Straw has pointed out repeatedly it is reasonable to ask ministers to decide whether an investment in new technology will yield benefits to the public in terms of improved services. But if something goes wrong when implementing that new technology (and in every major project, things are going to go wrong), ministers should be able to look to their civil servants to work out how to get it back on track. This is a professional job requiring professional competence and judgement. Our recent case studies on policy implementation show that ministers can and should play an active role in implementation – but that does not absolve the Civil Service from taking responsibility for turning their decisions into action. Competence in implementing policy goes to the heart of Martin’s argument – without it is difficult for the Civil Service to build up the trust it needs to do its job. Sue Street, the former DCMS Permanent Secretary, was surely right when she commented that the Civil Service is seen as less good at implementation than advice. Certainly the politicians I meet tend to be more influenced in their thinking about the Civil Service by the repeated tales of woe captured in books like The Blunders of our Governments and Conundrum. The latter book, co-authored by Richard Bacon MP, a long-serving member of the Public Accounts Committee, points to the need to understand repeated failures not as stupid people acting badly (though this does happen, inside and outside government), but as something that is fundamentally driven by much deeper institutional and cultural forces. Listening to Martin speak, at least part of those deeper forces seemed to me to be embedded in the amazing psychological feats that the UK’s system demands of its policy advisers. They must make the strongest arguments possible to ministers based on the available evidence, but subjugate their views about the correct answer to that of the minister. And then work tirelessly to publically advance and implement their minister’s views. And then all the time knowing that if the minister changes (with or without a change of government), they can end up arguing the opposite case with equal vigour. This job is not undoable, but it does call for a particular personality. It is unsurprising that most senior policy civil servants are very good at intellectualising the subject at hand and comfortable with high levels of ambiguity. It’s interesting just how different these characteristics are to those usually advocated by those running major projects – where the focus is on the practical, not the intellectual, and where ambiguity is an enemy, not a friend. For the Civil Service, it is surely vital to have top teams capable of leading in both these worlds, and indeed being able to combine them constructively within a single organisation. I’m not sure Martin’s speech recognised enough how difficult it is for teams dominated by the first mindset to even understand the arguments being advocated by those coming from the second. I trust that the debates started, or energised, by Martin’s speech will continue into the autumn. It has certainly been useful to have a clear argument off which to hang the many individual components.