I have a lot of time for Lord David Frost. He’s not only been a career diplomat but a pretty good negotiator with the EU when it came to Brexit. He’s also been more than willing since leaving Government to speak up about problems that those of his political background don’t speak about enough. He also resigned from the UK government when he was Minister of State for the Cabinet Office because he could not reconcile his conscience with the ‘direction of travel’ of the Boris Johnson administration. Outside of government Lord Frost has done what few in the political arena have done which is attack the increasingly obvious lunacy of ‘net zero’.
Because of Lord Frost’s reputation garnered in the Diplomatic Service and in politics, when he says something about how Britain is administered then I tend to sit up and take notice. Whatever he says is probably worth considering and in a recent Daily Telegraph article he’s taken aim at Britain’s permanent government, the Civil Service.
Lord Frost has basically said that in Britain the politicians have very little power to control the Civil Service, no matter what the political colour or make up of the Government of the day, policy is controlled by unelected Civil Servants. Cabinet Ministers he said are in an invidious position of not being able to shape government policy as per their democratic mandate.
Lord Frost said:
Imagine a friend comes to you. She has been offered the job of new chief executive of a large, long-standing, organisation – business, charity, school, whatever – and wants your advice. As you talk, the following becomes clear: she will not be allowed to move, or dismiss, any of the previous senior staff, however badly they are performing. Indeed she won’t be able to hold anyone to account for poor-quality work.
She will be able to bring in a maximum of three advisers to help, but they won’t be allowed to instruct, or have any say in managing, anyone else in the organisation. She will be prohibited from having any say in the organisation’s finances, pay arrangements, structure or HR policies. She will generally have no say over who is hired or promoted.
She can be summoned at just hours’ notice to answer in public on any aspect, however minor, of the organisation’s work. If her staff provide wrong information or try to conceal problems, they will not be blamed, but she will.
Would you advise your friend to be a Cabinet minister? Surely you would say: “You must be mad. You can’t change anything and you can’t run the organisation. How do you expect to achieve anything?”
Having observed politics for years I can well believe that the scenario that Lord Frost has described is pretty accurate. Whilst there has always been a ‘permanent government’ mindset in the Civil Service, something that the Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister comedy programmes were right about, things seem to have got much worse. It’s no longer the case of Civil Servants and the permanent government class giving impartial advice in order to keep the ship of state on an even keel, it’s now the Civil Service pushing its own preferred policies onto elected Government ministers.
We might vote for example for a party that promises to reduce migration or have a sensible energy security policy or a party that states unequivocably that women can’t have penises, but the Civil Service will ensure that few if any of these stated policies would come to full fruition.
Ministers will be sidelined or otherwise manipulated into accepting the Civil Service view of things and policies that might have been chosen by the electorate end up being dropped or watered down by the time that the Civil Servants have had their say. This is not good for democracy and merely gives us an unelected governing class that nominally takes its lead from Ministers but where the Ministers are basically impotent figureheads.
The state of Britain’s politicised Civil Service is a far cry from what the Service was intended to be which was independent and impartial and has now become a block on policies that voters may choose. Maybe it’s time to give Ministers more power over those who are supposed to serve them but instead serve themselves and their preferred ideologies. This might mean importing the American idea of civil service heads of departments being politically appointed by Ministers, something that I believe brings with it another set of problems, but I fail to see how long we can go on with Civil Service led undemocratic policy making before something comes along that makes the Civil Service change and become the servants of Ministers instead of their masters.
My only thought in respect of this is that the Civil Service is made up largely of qualified and quite clever people, whereas any old fool can, and does, get himself/herself elected just by parroting the right words, but might actually be as thick as two short planks.
I’m all for hiring based on qualification and cleverness but such powers need to be kept in check by democratic means. This problem of the civil service having a mind of its own and being unresponsive to those with democratic mandates is not new, I believe Barbara Castle spoke of it at some point.
It would be less of a problem having a civil service of ‘big brains’ and ultra competent people if more influence over them could be had by elected politicians but that course of action would not be necessary if the Civil Service could be trusted to be impartial and at present they cannot. Restore or legally require greater impartiality or have direct political control of the CS, at least at the SCS level.
Maybe set some sort of minimum academic standard for politicians. Contrary to what we might read they weren’t all educated at Eton or Winchester, Oxford or Cambridge.
It terrifies me that not terribly bright people get to make irreversible and far reaching decisions.
The House of Commons already contains a great deal of people who are what we could call high end in terms of intelligence, people such as lawyers, bankers and business people. The number of people from manual trades has consistently dropped over the years. It’s quite possible to look at the Commons and say that we already have the bright people in place there but we seem to regularly get MP’s who don’t care about their constituents nor the affect of policies on said constituents.
It’s also possible to be extremely academically bright but still be as thick as two short planks in other more practical areas.
I find it more terrifying how often the terribly bright people make terribly bad decisions, but are never held to account.
I’m all for having the best and brightest running administration but such people can create or end up in an echo chamber where only the views of their peers count. This is why there is a need for democratically elected politicians to hold them to account.
My father worked in the Cabinet Office many years ago. He told me that they keep a special dungeon in the Tower of London prepared for errant civil servants.
I think most of us have for decades understood the problem the civil service actually is but no government seems able to do anything about it. Could it be that the politicians we elect are too preoccupied with climbing the greasy pole towards ever bigger saleries and feathering their own nests to care about those useful idiots the plebs who elect them?
I’s one of those constitutional jobs that few politicians want to take on or are of a personal and political calibre to do. Greasy pole-ism may well account for some reluctance or it maybe the case that the CS manipulates the information given to CS reform minded Ministers in order to make it appear to be an unachievable and career destroying job.
Do either of you actually know any civil servants?
I was, in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, a lower level civil servant. I can’t say where or what I did because of OSA and what I noticed was that some civil servants who were much more senior to me, not all, but enough to be noticeable, were far more comfortable dealing with civil servants in the EU and at home than they were with elected ministers.
The Northcote – Trevellan reforms of the civil service in the 19th century created the idea of an independent and impartial civil service but it seems over the last twenty or thirty years enough of that impartiality has been lost or sidelined to become a problem. We still have the independence in civil service as envisaged by the NT report but less of the impartiality. Maybe it’s time for there to be a new NT style report that will bring about new positive reforms but such measures will need to be steered by a Minister or set of Ministers who are clever and determined enough to bring this reform about.
Fair comment!
Yes and I worked very closely with hundreds of ordinary civil servants for decades. The problem is not the ordinary folks who do all the heavy lifting the problem is the thousands of Sir Humphreys we are feathering their own nests.
There are indeed many lower level civil servants who are hard working and dedicated but I can’t say the same about some of the SCS types. A good example of something that could be described as nest feathering although not in a financial way, was something that I heard went on in a different dept from the one that I worked for. A staff LGBT group was set up. It attracted a lot of lower level staff who were genuinely having problems with poor treatment from colleagues and management because of sexuality. Unfortunately the SCS types who strong armed their way into managing it didn’t seem to give a toss about the ordinary lower range/grade staff, but were more interested in becoming seen as LGBT policy ‘experts’ something they could use to further their own careers. The ordinary staff, the ones the group was set up to help, didn’t get either a look in with regards deciding how the group should be run and neither did the group do anything for lower grade staff.
I heard later, after I left the CS, that this coterie of SCS types who took over the group had invited and fawned over Stonewall and gave Stonewall a lot of influence in that department.
Ok. Different experiences, different people