Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I very much appreciate the speech by the hon. Member for Chichester (Mr. Tyrie), but I assure him that I am actually a unicameralist who voted accordingly in our series of votes in the Chamber. I voted for unicameralism and against everything else, as did a number of my comrades on the Labour Benches. Indeed, half of all Labour Back Benchers voted for that amendment, despite the attractions of being put out to grass towards the end of their careers. They still voted in a principled way for unicameralism, and I was very pleased by that. I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak, and even more pleased to be a member of the Select Committee on Public Administration, which my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright) so splendidly chairs. It has really been an experience: we have discussed these matters at length on many occasions and interviewed many senior figures from politics and Government. I want to cover several issues, but I start with the right to statutory protection for an independent civil service. The civil service has certain problems. This view may be unfashionable, but I do not like the idea that the civil service should be permeated by business and outside interests. It is absolutely accepted that we should have staff of the highest intellectual calibre in the senior civil service, but they should be career civil servants who see themselves as lifelong, committed people—committed to the service of the public and the state. They should not have one foot in business, nor should they be politicised. They should not look for financial advancement or advantage at any stage; they should see themselves as servants of the state and have a moral compass—to coin a phrase—in respect of their attitude to the job. The post of senior civil servant should be a special calling, not something tainted by association with making money and the like. I am worried about drift in the civil service. Some people see it as beneficial to the service, but I do not. It has been suggested to me, for example, that there is an in-house corporate lobby for the six big energy producers, meaning that civil servants resist proposals for localised renewable energy systems by dragging their feet and making life difficult for those involved. It is not without significance that we have less renewable energy than every other European country apart from Malta and Luxembourg, and I suspect that civil servants have had a part to play in that. I do not blame all civil servants, but the accusation has been put to me and I suspect that there is a basis to it. Some years ago, a leading business man was employed by a company to secure private finance initiative contracts from the Department of Health, and all of a sudden he was appointed as the Department's industrial director, levering out PFI schemes from the inside to his friends on the outside. He subsequently went off to become a banker. The civil service should not consist of such people. They should be in banking, no doubt, and in private business, but they should not be representing the public interest from inside the civil service. That has concerned me for a long time. There is another fact about the civil service which worries me: civil servants have tended to be dominated by the prevailing ideology of the past 20 or 30 years. When I was a student many years ago, I met a former senior civil servant who was a university lecturer. He said that in his day there was a genuine debate inside the civil service about economics, and if policy changed there were always civil servants around who were schooled in an alternative view, and they could put it into practice. That is not the case now. The Treasury was at fault in not seeing the recent crisis that occurred. I hear very little criticism of the Treasury, but I think that it was at fault. If somebody had been ringing the alarm bells, we would not have got as close to the cliff edge as we did. Perhaps I have a dream that there was once a golden age for the civil service when it was dominated by people of good will—career civil servants who were not at all tainted by the interests of money outside, and had open minds. Another fact about the civil service is that it is, in all things, wise to be able to discuss one's view with someone who opposes them. In this Chamber we have an enormous range of views, and every time we put forward a view it can be challenged. Someone who surrounds himself with people all of whom agree with him, or eliminates from his office anybody who disagrees with him, will finish up making mistakes. That has happened in the past. An example that has been put to me is that of Nigel Lawson, as Chancellor, pushing the exchange rate mechanism strategy. Apparently he did not want people who took an alternative view, and surrounded himself with those who supported the ERM strategy. That was a catastrophic mistake that went badly wrong; I suggest that it was even responsible for his party's loss of the general election in 1997. It was the folk memory of the disaster of the ERM strategy that destroyed the Tory Government more than anything else. If Nigel Lawson had had around him people who took a strongly different view, he might not have made that mistake. I like to think that our civil servants will be strong enough to welcome alternative views and at least to have a debate about major matters of policy. I have another concern, about the Comptroller and Auditor General—but excuse me, Mr. Deputy Speaker: I have a sore throat and a cold, and I do not think that I shall be able to continue for much longer because of my mild indisposition. Having made some of the points that I wished to make, I will save the rest of my remarks for another occasion.