THE BRITISH CIVIL SERVICE: CHANGES UNDER DlSCUSSION

THE BRITISH CIVIL SERVICE: CHANGES UNDER DlSCUSSION

Evehn Sharp

THE FULTON COMMITTEE

Just over a year ago the Prime Minister announced the appointment of a committee “to examine the structure, recruitment and management, including training, of the Home Civil Service.” He said: “There have been so many changes, both in the demands placed on the civil service, and in the educational organization of the country, that the Government believe that the time has come to ensure that the Service is properly equipped for its role in the modern State.”

He added that there were two points he wanted to make about the scope of the committee’s inquiry. The first was that “the decision to set up this Committee does not mean that the civil service has been found lacking in any way by the Government in its current operations. On the contrary . . . the service meets the demands put on it with flexibility and enterprise.” The second was that there was no intention on the part of the Government “to alter the basic relationship between Ministers and civil servants. Civil servants, however eminent, remain the confidential advisers of Ministers who alone are answerable to Parliament €or policy; and we do not envisage any change in this fundamental feature of our parliamentary democracy.”

The committee is headed by Lord Fulton, the Vice-Chancellor of Sussex University. It has eleven members, four of whom are serving civil servants-two of them Permanent Secretaries, one the Deputy Chief Scientsc Adviser to the Ministry of Defence, and one the Economic Adviser to the Treasury. Also on the committee are two Members of Parliament, one Labour, one Conservative; two university professors; two representatives of industry; one representative of civil service staff.

It is a very different set-up from the Glassco Commission, which has recently been inquiring into government Organization in Canada. That, as I understand it, was a three-man commission, headed by an indus- trialist who had been a management consultant; and it cmployed an army of experts to prepare reports on special topics. It was charged to inquire into the organization and methods of operation of the various government departments and agencies, and to recommend the changes which would best promote efficiency, economy, and improved service in the dispatch of public business.

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The British go about these things in a much more amateur way; which is not to say that it is necessarily a worse way. To begin with, of course, the remit of the Fulton Committee is much more limited. I don’t think we should ever conceive of a single commission reviewing the organization and methods of all the Departments-we would think them too different in function for this to be successful. In any event, to our way of thinking it is the responsibility of each Department to review its own organization and methods-with outside help if necessary, the central responsibility being only to see that they do it.

Then the committee itself is a very different body from the Glassco Commission. Its members are most, if not all, very busy men, who must carry the work of the committee on top of their ordinary loads. They are unpaid, And they have a very small secretariat. They could commission investigations if they want to, but I should doubt if they will do much of that. They hear whatever evidence people care to put to them; they invite people whom they think may have ideas to contribute to come and talk, This is the traditional British way of tackling such problems-a sort of adaptation of the jury system; and it can work very well. But I sometimes wonder whether it doesn’t ask too much of the members of these commissions. Maybe we over-do the amateur method.

CertainIy the idea of asking management consultants to examine our civil service has not yet crossed our minds. No doubt this is partly because management consultancy has not yet achieved the standing in Britain that it has in North America. But it is also, I think, because we should instinctively mistrust the business efficiency approach to problems of government. In our philosophy one achieves efficiency in government by getting the right men, training them rightly, and picking the right ones for the top jobs. And that, I think, will prove to be the Fulton Committee’s main concern.

BACKGROUND TO THE COMMITTEE

Growth and Change in Gouernment The immediate background to the appointment of the committee is, as

the Prime Minister said, first the changes in the demands made on the civil service. There has been no inquiry into the service for nearly 40 years; and indeed there have been no radical changes since it was reorganized after the First World War. Meanwhile, the scope of government has vastly extended and in some directions its character has changed out of all recognition, just as it has in Canada, and indeed in every industrial democracy. The traditional functions of government have been the maintenance of law and order, defence, public health, some limited social services-and, of course, the raising of taxation to pay for it all. Now, in addition to the traditional functions, which themselves have

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increased enormously in scope and complexity, government seeks to plan the economy, intervenes in the affairs of industry, runs a number of major industries, increasingly uses taxation as an instrument of policy, is responsible for vast investment, including investment in projects of the most advanced technical nature and terrifying cost, provides social services on an ever-increasing scale, spends a very large proportion of our incomes for us. Indeed, I don’t need to describe it all to you-you have it all yourselves. Reading the chapter in the Glassco Report on Growth and Change in Government, I might have been reading about Britain.

These developments in the role of government obviously raise questions about the kind of civil servants Ministers, with such formidable decisions to take, need to advise them. Most Ministers are, necessarily, complete amateurs in the subjects with which their Departments deal-be it finance, trade, transport, health, agriculture, aviation-what you will. Their expertise is in politics. Indeed it sometimes seems that as soon as a Minister really gets to know something about his subject he gets the itch to move- or, at any rate, is moved whether he wants to or not. Inevitably, there- fore, Ministers must depend to a great extent on their civil servants for the expertise in whatever subjects they are answering for; and given the sort of things they do now answer for, the cry is that civil servants today need to be more positive, more creative, more specialized than the civil servants of old.

One can go along with all of that; I certainly do. But the question is how do we achieve this without doing damage to the essential charac- teristics of the service? These I take to be its non-political character-its unquestioned loyalty to the Govement of the day; its professionalism- professionalism, that is, in the working of our system of government, stemming from its permanent character; its concern for equity-for treat- ing every one alike: its integrity. No one in Britain, I think, wants to sacrifice any of this; but these are not the characteristic qualities of thrusting tycoons. The main problem before the Fulton Committee seems to me to be how the service can acquire more of the qualities one associates with the successful businessman, without losing those of an objective and disinterested service.

Change in the Educational Organization The second development to which the Prime Minister referred as part

of the background to the appointment of the committee is the change in our educational organization. Today far more of the school population go on to university or other advanced education than used to be the case- and the proportion will increase. But the civil service pattern of recruitment is still geared to the system under which most childrcn finished their education by the age of 15 or 16, and nearly all the rest by 17 or 18. We still recruit to the general civil service classes at age 16 for clerical

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staff; at 18 or thereabouts (with some provision for graduate entry) to the intermediate, or what we call the “executive,” class; and a very few university graduates of high academic quality-less than 100 a year-to the most senior, or what we call the “administrative,” class. There is a large corps of professionally qualified officers, many of them recruited after some outside experience; but apart from these, we are not getting enough of the output of the universities. In particular, we are getting too few from universities other than Oxford and Cambridge; Oxford and Cambridge are still the main providers of graduate recruits to the administrative class.

The Professional Classes Part of the background to the inquiry is the position in the civil service

of the professional staff: the scientists, the engineers, the architects, the surveyors, the doctors, the lawyers, the economists, and so on. The role now of the professional staff is one of immense importance, and they form a very large group in the service: about as large, all told, as the administrative and executive staff put together.

For many years the role of the professional staff in the British civil service was a sore point. They were regarded as subordinate to the administrators, with no direct access to Ministers. In my experience this has long since changed; the professional staff are recognized as supreme in their own fields with, in some Departments, a contribution to make every bit as important as that made by the administrators. There is no question of their not having uninhibited access to Ministers-or, of course, of Ministers not consulting them as and when they want. But the decisions which Ministers have to take are, ultimately, political decisions; although sometimes the expert advice may be decisive. Which does mean that the advice coming to a Minister must, ultimately, be advice which takes into account many factors: the law, the cost, the alternatives open, the probable public reactions, the load on the Department, and so on; and this is the field of the administrator, the field in which he has been trained. Part of the argument is, however, that administrators and professional officers should work in tandem, that their responsibilities should be joint, at any rate in Departments where the work has a high professional content. This seems to me, I must admit, a misuse of qualifications and a confusion of responsibilities-but the argument is there. Above all, it is urged that professional officers should be as eligible for appointment to the top jobs-the posts of Permanent Secretaries, whom Canadians call Deputy Minister-as the administrative. Otherwise, it is said, the status of the professional staff will always be inferior. In fact they are so eligible, in the sense that there is no rule against it-but they very seldom get there: this, it is argued, is due to prejudice-to the grip retained by the administrators on the plum jobs.

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The General Reuiezl; of Government Institutions These are the problems, or some of them, which lie behind the

appointment of the committee. They are part and parcel of a general soul-searching which is going on in Britain about its governmental institutions. The working of Parliament is being examined-and about time too. People concerned about the functioning of democracy want to see the ordinary Member of Parliament enabled to take a much more effective part than he can, at present, both in the business of government, and in his essential job of looking after the interests of his constituents. He needs-how badly he needs-more tolerable working conditions, more assistance in doing his job, more understanding of what the Government is doing. One of the suggestions for this, on which a start has already been made, is that there should be Parliamentary Committees specializing in particular subjects which would be able to cross-examine civil servants about the work of their Departments. I personally think this an excellent development, though some people are apprehensive about the extent to which it will drag civil servants into the political arena. An experienced civil servant should, however, be able to maintain the distinction between explaining what is going on-and why, and speculating on possible changes of policy, which is the Minister’s field.

Another development is the creation of the Parliamentary Commis- sioner-our version of the Scandinavian Ombudsman. His function is to investigate complaints against the administration brought to him by hlembers of Parliament. He has access to Departmental files, and should be able to get at the whole truth of what happened on any particular case of which complaint is made. This too, I think, is a wholly welcome development. The powers of the state now affect the rights and interests of individuals to a degree wholly unprecedented in time of peace; and the individual is often left with a bitter sense of grievance and a conviction that he has been unjustly used-that there has been abuse of power. It is almost impossible for him, or even for his Member of Parliament, to find out exactly why a decision went as it did-or at any rate to be satisfied that he has got the whole truth. The Parliamentary Commis- sioner will get this; and although 1 believe that in nearly every case it will be found that there has been no abuse of power, at least it will become apparent what the powers really are. This too will help to inform Parlia- ment, and perhaps to check the ever-growing power of the executive.

While central government is examining some of its own institutions, it has also set on foot a radical review of the organization of local government. But that is the subject of a separate talk.

Criticisms of the Cicil Seroice Coming back now to the questions before the Fulton Committee, the

problems I outlined above have been sharpened by criticisms which have

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been made, in various quarters, of the civil service. In 1964-65 a committee of the House of Commons examined recruitment to the civil service, and heard a number of witnesses from both inside and outside the service. They were disquieted by what they found. The service has been unable, since the war, to meet all its staffing needs, but has not, as it seemed to the committee, made any adequate examination of the reasons for its failure. The Civil Service Commission, through which the service recruits all its permanent staff, was not, in the committee’s view, moving with the times (they didn’t put it as bluntly as that, but that is what it came to). The effectiveness of their advertising and publicity methods needed critical examination; and their contacts with the universities other than Oxford and Cambridge were inadequate. They relied too heavily on non-specialist graduates for recruitment to the administrative class. At the same time the committee queried what they described as the unique significance attaching to the administrative class, and the notion that only a select few are fitted to undertake the high policy work. They finished up by recommending an inquiry of the kind the Fulton Commission is now undertaking.

Sharper criticism has come from some spokesmen for the left wing in politics. This is to be expected, since the great question that hangs over the service is whether it is well adapted to undertake economic planning, or to push forward radical social change. The record hasn’t been wholly successful since the war-where is the fault? In 1964 the Fabian Society, which, as some may know, has for many years done much of the background thinking for the Socialists, produced a pamphlet called “The Administrators-the Reform of the Civil Senrice.” They concluded that the service suffers from amateurism, a negative approach, too much secretiveness in the formulation of policy; and they recommended (amang other things) that responsibility for personnel management should be taken out of the Treasury, that there should be freer movement into and out of the service, that a School of Administrative Studies should be established providing a two-year course for, among others, graduates wanting to come into the service (something on the lines of the French Ecole Nationale d’Administration ) , that any distinctions between specialists and administrators in the senior ranks should be abolished, and that explicit provision should be made for two types of political appointment-experts who should be called in to help implement the particular policies of the government of the day, and personal aides who would provide general help to Ministers-a Ministerial “cabinet.”

This last suggestion was persuasively developed by Mr. Samuel Britten, a distinguished financial journalist, in a book called The Treasury under the Tories, 1951-64. Dismayed by the failure of Britain, ever since the war, to grapple effectively with its economic troubles, by the recurrent financial crises which have prevented Governments from achieving


anything like the development of social policies they havc intended, he sct out to examine whether this was due to the politicians, the civil servants, or the hard facts of Britain’s position in the world. And he concluded that a good deal of the responsibility lay on the civil service. So, among other things, he suggested that there should be a new class of adviser, distinct from the main civil service, whose job would be both political and technical. These advisers would be selected in accordance with the personal preferences of Ministers, and move freely into or out from the academic world, industry, the professions, and elsewhere. They would tend to change with governments. They would be a sort of politically appointed brains trust, examining the whole framework of assumptions on which day-to-day policy is based, and injecting new ideas on particular topics. Ministers would feel more coddent, Mr. Britten thought, in getting advice from people known to be of their own political way of thinking; and Permanent Secretaries would be freer to devote most of their time to running their Departments. But while relegating the permanent officials to a more subordinate role, Mr. Britten wanted to see a more effective kind of senior permanent official. It was his thesis that the barriers between the administrators and the outside world should be broken down, that there should be more movement in and out, and that civil servants should be more profcssional-by which I think he meant more specialized.

Much the same line has been taken in evidence submitted by the Labour Party to the Fulton Committee, though to what extent Ministers support this evidence is not clear. The Party want to see “a more forceful concept of public service, and a civil servant who is more professional, adaptive and creative; . . . more personal involvement in the execution of policy or negotiation on the public’s behalf with private interests.” And they have elaborated the suggestions made by the Fabian Society and Mr. Britten, including the suggestion for Ministerial “cabinets.”

TOPICS IIEFORE THE COMMITTEE

What I have said up to now has, I hope, given some idea of the topics before the committee. I have no idea which of those I have mentioned they are regarding as most important to their terms of reference, or what other topics may have come up in their discussions. All I can do is to pick out the ones that strike me as most important.

The General Structure of the Service First I would like to take the proposition that the way to deal with the

civil service is to have practically no classification at all; to put everyone -administrators, professionals, executives into one vast pool-and may the best man win. To some extent, the Treasury themselves go for this. In


proposing to the Committee that provision should be made for attracting many more non-specialist graduates to the service-a proposal which, I think, everyone would support-they have suggested that there should be a new staff structure to comprehend both the present administrative and executive classes; though they would still single out the ablest graduate entrants by a “star” system-which seems uncommonly like retention of the administrative class.

Along with this proposal for a single structure, comprising both the small administrative class and the very much larger executive class, must be considered the suggestion-which the Treasury do not support-that there should be no distinction between the administrators and the professionals. This suggestion has the backing of the professional staff representatives, anxious for recognition of their equal status; and also of some of those who feel that the administrators are too amateur, need to be more scientific, more technically minded, in this world of technology.

To my mind the idea of pooling all the middle and senior staff, administrative, professional and executive together-over 100,000 of them all told-in one vast, undifferentiated class, is thoroughly bad. It would create appalling management problems, and as a result a great deal of staff discontent, as everyone supposed himself eligible for every promo- tion, and developed a grievance every time he was passed over. In any case such a structure simply would not relate either to the needs of work or to the varying qualifications and abilities of individuals recruited to do particular kinds of work. I believe that the civil service system of recruiting people at different ages, and with different educational qualifications, to do the different kinds of work needing to be done, and classifying them accordingly, has been highly successful. It needs adapt- ing, certainly, both to the changing needs of the work and to the changing educational pattern-but not throwing overboard.

Of course it’s important that infinite care should be taken to classify people appropriately, and to provide opportunities for transference from class to class. Above all, care should be taken in picking the likely winners and seeing that they get their chance to go right up. But to proceed on the basis that everyone is equal seems to me lunacy.

Take the professionals and the administrators. The idea that they should be mixed up is much in vogue. But their jobs are different and need different qualifications, different training, a different outlook. Essen- tially the administrator is concerned with the political answer to problems -in the sense of what it is possible for government to do-the professional with the technical; and the two are not always the same. Maybe the jobs are not always rightly classified; maybe the administrators need, today, to be different sorts of people. But the distinction remains and has to be recognized. To say that the professional staff are equally apt for the administrative job flies in the face of the facts.

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A good deal of the heat engendered by this subject is due, I am sure, to the question of pay. Different classes of staff are apt to have irritating minor differentials, while the professional staff were for long underpaid. I have always believed that senior professional staff should be paid at least as well as the administrative where that is what the market warrants -as, in many cases, it does; better, if one needs to pay them more, as one may, to get the quality required. Pay, however, is outside the remit of the Fulton Committee.

The Administrative Class Inevitably, a great deal of the argument about the British civil service

rages round the administrative class. I may as well admit that I am an unrepentant believer in the idea of the administrative class; that is, a corps of people recruited and trained to advise Ministers in the framing and implementation of policy, and to be responsible for the e5cient functioning of Departments. I think the service needs to recruit some of the ablest graduates, from a wide variety of disciplines, for this purpose; and the British civil service has been successful in doing this-and still is. The administrators are not, of course, exclusively recruited in this way; about half are drawn from other civil service classes, and every Depart- ment is always (or ought to be) on the look-out for potential material, whether in the executive or in the professional classes. Also there is, nowadays, some very limited recruitment to the class from other professions in middle years. But the graduate entry sets the standard.

Nevertheless, while believing in the idea of the administrative class, I would agree with some of the criticisms made of the administrators. They do need to be more positive, more creative, and more specialized. This, I think, has sometlung to do with their education, and a lot to do with their training. The majority of them have been educated in the humani- ties; they have graduated, most of them at Oxford or Cambridge, in the classics, history, modem languages, English literature, etc.; though nowadays a good many have read economics. Some of the critics would like to see the entrance examinations slanted to bring in more scientists, mathematicians, technocrats of one kind or another. I don’t believe in this. By and large, their intellectual training is not apt for political administration, Nor do they want to come into administrative work early in their lives anyway, and it would be a waste that they should. But I think that the contents of some of the arts courses may be a bit too remote; may be at least partly responsible for producing the kind of cynical detachment in the face of politics which can be so exasperating in the administrator. This, perhaps, is a criticism of our educational system-or of parts of it, and changes, I think (and hope), are coming. Meanwhile the civil service simply seeks to get some of the best the universities produce, and I believe that is still right.


Coming now to training, the civil service has always been a firm believer in training on the job. Recently, the Treasury have instituted a six-months’ course in administrative studies, with a high content of economics, for all administrative recruits after their first two (proba- tionary) years. How useful that is proving I don’t know; I can’t help feeling myself that it comes too early in a man’s career, and is not suffi- ciently differentiated. Whether the committee will be attracted by the suggestion that all graduate recruits should be put through a two-year course before starting to work, I don’t know; but I hope not-for all the high reputation of the French system. Training on the job still seems to me the best training in the early years.

What I do believe is that the civil service needs to give greater responsibility to its young administrators at an earlier age. Too many of them find themselves for years little more than one link in a long paper- passing chain-and some of them wither in the process. Throughout the service responsibility needs to be pushed down-which means a conscious effort on the part of management in every Department to see that this is done. I also believe that, fairly early in his career, the administrator should be encouraged to specialize. By which I don’t mean that he should stick on one job, or even in one Department, but that he should specialize in some particular field of administration-the social sciences, trade and industry, finance, and so on. And I would far rather see him given a year or so in his thirties-or even forties-to study his particular field than see him spend two years being taught administration before he has any notion of the realities of government.

I agree with the proposition that there should be more movement both in and out of the service at the middle levels. We need people in the service with first-hand knowledge of business and industry, of local government, and so on; and these fields perhaps need people who understand how government works. This isn’t easy to fit into the conception of a permanent service, which I am convinced is still the right concep tion; and there are all the usual problems of st& reactions, pay levels, pensions, etc. But I believe we could do more if we set out to do it. I think, however, that a certain amount of nonsense is talked about second- ing people for a year or two to other employments. It sounds fine; and certainly we need to learn from other organizations how they set about their problems, and what management techniques they use. But if a man is seconded for a year or two it seems to me unlikely that he will-or can-be given real responsibility. I am convinced that responsibility is the most important thing in training.

I would myself at least t r y to be more brutal about the enforced retirement of those who have got into senior positions but who for one reason or another are not proving successful. We have machinery for enforced retirement, but it can only be used in the most extreme cases. I don’t


lay a great deal of weight on this; for it must be part of the price of a permanent service that people are permanent, the not so good as well as the good. But I can’t help feeling that sometimes we ought to be more ruthless than we are. Might it not be a condition of appointment to the most senior posts that a man may be asked to retire after some given number of years that proves to be for the advantage of the service? It would never be easy; but it might make it more possible to do something in the unhappiest cases which we all know exist. At the least we should make it easier for the people who know themselves to be misfits to get out.

I have great sympathy with the view that there should be less secrecy about the work of civil servants. I would like to see more open discussion of administrative problems between civil servants and people outside; and I think we would come up with better answers if this were encouraged. This could do a lot not only to improve the quality of the advice being given by civil servants, but also to toughen and roughen the quality of the civil servants.

Selection for the Top Jobs C~riouslv little attention seems to have been paid, in all the discussion

so far, to the way in which people are selected for the top jobs-except for the plea that these should be open to professional staff. Yet this seems to me to be the central management problem-its most critical function, and one which we, in the British civil service, really do rather badly.

Except when it comes to the top jobs our system is that every Depart- ment is responsible for its own promotions; and this we regard as vital to every Permanent Secretary’s responsibility for the efficiency of his Department. Enormous effort goes into the selection of people for pro- motion, and we try to be ruthless in going for merit. In this respect the civil service has improved out of knowledge during my 40 years’ experience. But the filling of the top jobs-the Permanent and Deputy Secretary posts-is regarded as a function of central management, and as the responsibility of the Head of the civil service, who traditionally has been the Permanent Secretary of the Treasury, though now he is in charge only of the personnel half of the Treasury. Ministers, of course, have a say in the filling of these posts-and the appointments have to have the approval of the Prime Minister; but it is the Head of the service who effectively settles them, though he must satisfy the Minister concerned.

At this stage-especially at the Permanent Secretary stage-appointments are made, more often than not, from outside the Department. A man is brought in from another Department, not necessarily from one with any relationship to the one of which he is taking charge. Sometimes this may be unavoidable-if a vacancy occurs unexpectedly, and there is no one with experience of the Department ready for the top job. Some-


times it may be the right move-if the Department needs shaking up, and the man’s qualities and experience fit him to do that. But as a poZicy it seems to me to be mistaken. A chief official is at a great disadvantage if he knows nothing about the work of the Department and its ways; or about the institutions with which it deals. A Minister is better served by a chief official who knows his field-provided, of course, that he has the necessary ability. First-class ability is always the most important qualifi- cation. I am only pleading that there should, as a general rule, be expertise as well.

The reason why the top posts are so often filled by an interdepart- mental move is partly the old nineteenth-century theory, which still survives, that administration is an art which any good administrator can apply to any set of problems. The non-specialist theory. However valid this may have been when the scope of government was much more limited than it is today, when the work of the Home Departments was all more or less of the same general character, it seems to me to have little validity now.

But this habit of filling the top jobs from outside the Department is also due to the fact that these appointments are all too seldom planned well ahead; it is not unheard of for the selection to be made almost at the last minute. The fact is that the service is still a collection of independent Departments, and that the Head of the service has a very limited responsibility for it. His ability to move men from one Department to another-except when it comes to the top jobs-depends on the coopera- tion he can get from other Permanent Secretaries; and he doesn’t get enough. Getting the best people for the top jobs means finding the likely starters early, wherever they may be in the service, and giving them a good range of experiace-and above all responsibility. This needs a collective effort by all the Heads of Departments. For which at present there is no mechanism.

The result of the ad hoc, last-minute method of picking Permanent Secretaries is, inevitably, that appointments are apt to be made from people who are known to the Treasury; and often indeed they are Treasury men. Behind this lies, I suspect, a strong Treasury conviction that it is better to have Departments under Treasury-trained men. And indeed I would agree that people who are going to the top ought, if possible, to have had some years in the Treasury-ought to have had some experience of both the financial and the organizational problems of government. What I don’t believe is that for a man to have spent most of his working life in the Treasury is the best training for taking charge of some quite different Department.

But the worst result of the lack of planning of the top appointments is, I think, that we miss many men who would make very good Perma- nent Secretaries. Time and again, the Head of the service has the greatest


difficulty, when it comes to the point, in finding the m a for the posts to be filled. Yet the service recruits excellent material, and has many first-class men in the middle ranks. It fails to pull them out early enough, and to give them the training and experience they need to go to the top. We have accepted-I think rightly-that appointment to the top posts is a function of central management, I would say its most important function. But so far we have failed, in a service made up-again I think rightly-of largely independent Departments, to find the way of doing it well.

Treasury Responsibility for the Civil Service This brings me to the question of Treasury responsibility for the over-

all management of the civil service. As I’ve said, several of the critics of our present system are urging that responsibility should be taken out of the Treasury, on the theory, I suppose, that the Treasury is necessarily too much concerned with economy. I am not so sure that this reasoning is sound. Wherever responsibility lies, economy in administration will still be very important, and will still be a concern of the Treasury. One of the strong points of the present arrangement is that the personnel department, being part of the Treasury, doesn’t have to get anyone’s consent to spending, and has direct access to the Chancellor when a big financial issue is at stake. Also T think the critics underestimate what a good job the Treasury has done on the civil service over the years.

Nevertheless, I agree, on the whole, that the Treasury is not the best place for the management of the government machine. But this is because it seems to me that responsibility for management ought to lie with responsibility for the job; and that, in relation to government, means with the Prime llinister. I would not go along with the suggestion that responsibility should be transferred to a glorified Civil Service Commis- sion, Our Civil Service Commission, you will understand, is at present solely concerned with recruitment, on behalf of all Departments, to the permanent, pensionable civil service. It was set up to prevent jobbery in appointments, to ensure appointment by merit. I think responsibility for recruitment needs to be brought more closely into relationship with responsibility for the functioning of the machine-that there was a good deal in the criticisms of the Civil Service Commission made by the Parliamentary Committee; but I would not try to bring the two closer together by pushing the main responsibility out to the Commission-to any commission. I want to see it brought right into the centre-into an even more central position than it now holds.

But it isn’t easy. Plainly the Prime Minister‘s load is aIready heavy enough. If he became ultimately responsible for the functioning of the machine, he would need another hfinister to take the load-and some people are afraid that this would simply mean a junior Minister. But I

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do not see why it should not be a senior Minister-one in a central coordinating post.

Tied up with this is the question whether we have not reached the point where we need to develop a Prime Minister’s Department. This, of course, is a bigger question, and one which raises a lot of hackles. h4ention it, and you hear people muttering about a Presidential system -as though that were enough said. But, after all, we are already part way there. The Prime Minister’s private secretariat, plus the Cabinet office, amount, between them, to an embryonic Department, only they prefer to do their good by stealth. All I would say is that if the idea of a Prime Minister’s Department is not too temble, that, it seems to me, is the right place to put responsibility for the government machine.

One additional-and to my mind enormously important-reason for putting the responsibility for the machine directly under the Prime Minister, is that that might do something to ensure that the machine is geared to the implementation of the Government’s policies. What I am getting at here is the distribution of functions among Departments. This is, intrinsically, the most diEcult of subjects, and it is inevitably made a great deal more difficult by the fact that it must involve the personal standing of h4inisters, to say nothing of the furious interdeparhnental quarrels involved. But it is of immense importance to the efficient working of the machine, and, more than that, it has a direct effect on the policies that emerge. Only a Prime Minister can force through significant changes in the Departmental set-up, and he needs to be advised by a corps of staff who know his mind and his policies if he is to understand what changes are needed to produce the results he wants, and what they entail.

If I could make only two changes in the civil service the two I would go for are, first, much more effective arrangements for selecting men for the top jobs; and, second, much more attention to the distribution of functions among Departments. If I could add a third it would be much more concentration on the taking of responsibility by staff at an early age.

The Political Aides Now for the suggestion that Ministers should be assisted by political

aides who would help them in working out their policies, and form a liaison between them and their Departments. I can understand very well the attraction of this suggestion to those on the political side of the fmce. A new Minister coming into a Department is a lonely man; and any Minister is a very exposed man. He cannot at the outset feel sure that his civil servants are in sympathy with his objectives; he must often be impatient with the objections they see to doing some of the things he wants to do; he is afraid of becoming the prisoner of his machine.

Nevertheless, a good Minister in fact soon takes charge of his machine,


while a poor one will be carried by it. It is useless to talk of improving the quality of the most senior civil servants, and at the same time to propose something which can only depress the quality. The Minister must, in the end, depend on his civil servants; above all, what he needs to do is to establish a relationship of mutual confidence. To interpose political aides between himself and his Deparbent could only destroy the confidence and must create friction. Mr. Britten, in advocating political aides, envisaged men of a very high quality, who would work in the greatest harmony with the civil servants. He was optimistic, I think, on both points; but however that may be, it is certain that the introduction of political aides would diminish, if not destroy, the confidence between the Minister and his permanent staff. And that would not, in the long run, pay Ministers.

The Labour Party, in advocating the introduction of political aides, said that one of their functions would be “to transmit the Minister‘s political impulse to the Department.” But that I should regard as, above all, the function of the Head of the Department, and as inseparable from responsibility for management. The idea that you can regard running the Department as something separate from the purposes for which it is being run is the recipe for indifferent management.

The introduction of experts to help in particular subjects on which the civil service has not got the necessary expertise seems to me quite a different matter. But these should not be regarded, nor should they be made, as political appointments. It may be the Minister who first sees the need for a particular expert, and he may have his views about whom he wants. But given mutual confidence between himself and his senior staff, there should be no difficulty in reaching agreement, provided it is understood that such appointments will be made on the usual merit basis. Indeed, experts are brought in now, though it is only honest to admit that civil servants sometimes resist the idea that they are needed. But they should not resist-and, I think, would not, once it was understood that this was part of the system.

CONCLUSION

To sum up, then, I do not think that we need any basic change in our long-standing system of a permanent civil service, recruited by open competition from school and university leavers, and at later ages from professionally qualified men. Kor do I think that we need any change in the general classification of the service according to the educational attainments and abilities of the various entrants. In particular I believe in the concept of the administrative class. But all this, of course, you have to take as the view of an old civil servant, and one of the administrative class at that.


I am wholly opposed to the interposition of political aides between Ministers and their permanent staff. Well-you’d expect me to be, wouldn’t you? But, though here I am only guessing, I should think that most Ministers, past and present, would be opposed to it too.

But I do think that senior civil servants need to be more positive, more creative, more specialized. I think this will be helped by developments in our educational theories-which I hope and believe are coming. Mainly, however, it depends on better training; on seeing that young administrators are given real responsibility early in their careers, and also, I think, on seeing that they specialize in particular fields of administration.

I would like to see more movement between the service and other employments; men with experience of business and industry, local government, etc. coming into the service, and civil servants going out to them. And I would also like to see much more open discussion between civil servants and the outside world. Less anonymous civil servants.

In my mind, the most important improvement needed in the civil service lies in the selection of people for the top posts. This needs long forward planning, picking out the likely starters in their early years, seeing that they get the right experience-and the early responsibility. It needs a collective effort by all Heads of Departments.

Finally, I would agree that responsibility for the machinery of government should be taken out of the Treasury-provided that it can be brought more directly under the control of the Prime Minister.

THE BRITISH CIVIL SERVICE: CHANGES UNDER DlSCUSSION

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