We know the pattern. A bus company wants to get rid of a marginal route. First, they cut a couple of services. Then they can point to an overall drop in passenger numbers as a reason for cutting the service altogether. Readers will surely be familiar with similar ploys in other areas. Under the Tories, it is also happening in public administration.
Ian Birrell, writing in the i on Mayday, identified a:
drive to blame "the Blob" for their failures with snide briefings about "snivel" servants who are supposed activists, anti-Brexit, sloppy snowflakes or workshy. Ministers complain their brilliant policies are being frustrated by obstructive bureaucrats. Boris Johnson even blamed them for his stupidity over the Partygate affair.
The civil service is not as resistant to change as failing politicians like to make out. I was only a junior civil servant in 1964 when Labour returned to power, but I attended seminars (possibly arranged through the CSCA staff union) at which senior civil servants spoke. I remember in particular Sir Eric Roll welcoming the proposals to improve economic planning. There was a sense of optimism and enthusiasm for a government under Harold Wilson which signalled a break with the past. Sadly, many of the aspirations went unfulfilled, broken not by the civil service but by the power over politicians by conservative trade unions,
For the sake of party balance, I cite Edward Heath's success in 1970 in pushing through accession to the EEC. Then, as now, Labour was predominantly Eurosceptic, but Conservative policy from Macmillan onwards was to join the European project. Colleagues closer to the ministerial floor than I observed that administrative civil servants known to favour closer European ties whose careers had advanced under Macmillan, then languished under Wilson, suddenly saw a boost to their prospects. That was an indication that top civil servants are not as immovable as the current Tories seem to believe. Later, Margaret Thatcher had an even more thorough putsch surrounding herself with more "people like us". It should be remembered that Sir Bernard Ingham, Mrs Thatcher's conduit to the press and strongly identified with her world view, was a civil servant. Indeed, a criticism of the Blair-Brown administration is that they were not as ruthless as they could have been in moving on those civil servants who were not sympathetic to Labour.
There is a malaise in the service. The excessive use of financial and management consultants is partly responsible, as noted in a previous post. Then there is the host of special advisers (SpAds) which Baroness (Gisela) Stuart, a former Labour MP and later a Chair of the Civil Service Commission, drew attention to in her evidence to the Civil Service Appointments Inquiry. So far from reducing the number of SpAds as promised in election campaigning, Cameron and Clegg actually oversaw an increase. Numbers went up further after Conservatives gained an overall majority in 2015. The last official total from March last year was 126.
Clearly the status and morale of the civil service should be restored. What needs to be done is to reduce the number of special advisers, taper off the reliance on management consultants, appoint competent ministers who may be trusted to remain in post for most of a parliament and to raise the salaries of top civil servants to the same bracket as those people with similar responsibilities in industry and finance. Sadly, this government is likely to do the reverse.
The Fulton Commission in 1968 drew attention to the culture of the generalist in the administrative civil service at the time. There were not enough specialists or competent managers. Nor was there any systematic career planning. The Civil Service Department and Civil Service College were set up as a result. They survived through two changes of administration until the radical shift in Conservative thinking under Thatcher and Heseltine. The latter, in devolving recruitment to Departments, also reversed a hard-won agreement from the 1960s for equal pay.
I would wind the clock back to the 1970s with one twist. Graduates with arts, especially classics, degrees tended to dominate the intake into the administrative civil service. While a knowledge of ancient history is surprisingly valuable in addressing the international politics of today, and modern foreign languages are essential, science should not be neglected. I would introduce positive discrimination in favour of numerate and scientific degrees in recruitment such that arts and sciences were balanced fifty-fifty. It might not even be necessary to prolong this discrimination as the visibility of scientifically-educated civil servants at the top level increased.
(See also the view from a socialist in https://leftfootforward.org/2023/04/blame-it-on-the-blob-how-civil-servants-are-bearing-the-brunt-of-tory-government-failings/.)
No comments:
Post a Comment