Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I apologise, Sir Alan, for being a little previous in attempting to intervene during the last grouping. I have worked out that I last led for my party during the Committee stage of a Bill in 1992—so perhaps I am a little rusty. However, I hope that I shall get the hang of it before long. The Conservative party supports the proposal in amendment 10, but new clause 33, which stands in my name and in those of my hon. Friends, goes further. The Bill has been in gestation for 150 years: it has taken a long time to get here. It does some very good things, and we support its purpose of putting the civil service on a statutory basis—but it is deeply eccentric that after 150 years, we have a Bill to put the civil service on a statutory basis that does not say what the civil service is. This is a moveable feast—and one that is broadly at the discretion of the Government. It seems to be almost at the whim of the Government, too. I am always astonished that if a Member of Parliament puts down a parliamentary question to the Cabinet Office about civil service numbers, answer comes there none. The question is referred to the Office for National Statistics, as if the number of civil servants were an external phenomenon that the Government tried to track out of interest, but they had no concept of its being a crucial management tool. In truth, at this stage, it is a management tool of considerable bearing on reducing Britain's ballooning budget deficit. The fact is that the numbers of civil servants have varied enormously. The Government claim that they have reduced the size of the civil service. They claim to have "achieved 86,700 workforce reductions" as part of the Gershon programme. Civil service employment was 522,000 in 2008. I accept that that was down from the 2004 peak of 570,000, but it was still higher than the 516,000 level of 1997. The recent fall is deceptive. There has been a significant expansion in the size of the quango state, which is not shown up in civil service head-count figures, and there has been a growth in the number of quangos classified as public corporations, rather than as part of the civil service. In 1996, 89 such bodies were classified as public corporations, but by 2008 that number had doubled to 178. Staff in public corporations are generally not classified as civil service employees for civil service head-count purposes. No fewer than 568,000 staff are now employed by public corporations, compared with 525,000 civil service employees. Mysteriously, only 31,000 of those public corporation staff are included in civil service head count. There has also been a shift of bodies from the civil service into public corporations. For example, the Forensic Science Service became a Government-owned company in 2005 and was transferred out of the Home Office, so was no longer counted in civil service head counts.