Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I am grateful for that ruling, because some of my remarks will range more widely than those that we have heard hitherto. I agree with everything that I have just heard, in a typically thoughtful and interesting speech from the hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Dr. Whitehead). When Lord Falconer described the Bill in his evidence to the Joint Committee not as a constitutional reform or renewal Bill, but as a "Constitutional Retreat Bill", he was basically correct. The radicalism of the early prime ministerial statement in 2007 has been virtually entirely lost in this legislation. The removal of the clauses on the Attorney-General, among many other things that have been referred to today, is a reflection of that. However, Lord Falconer was wrong about one thing: civil service reform, as embodied in clause 1. The clause applies part 1 of the Bill to the civil service of the state, on which new clause 33 would give us an annual report. Clause 1 is radical, but in a curious way: it is a triumph for the status quo. Indeed, in places it even offers the possibility of restoring the status quo ante for the civil service. The clause entrenches the principle of an independent, impartial and permanent civil service recruited on merit. In doing that, we need to recognise that, by comparison with the civil services of many other major democracies, we are at one extreme in our levels of impartiality and impermanence. It is on such issues that I am at my most conservative, and I welcome this triumph of the status quo. We have had—and to a large degree we still have—a civil service that works. The history books suggest that since Northcote-Trevelyan dealt a blow to patronage, we have been well served by the people who have come into the civil service, and we are still well served. Anybody who has worked there will know the sense of duty, commitment and loyalty that the civil service can show to the Government of the day. There is still such a thing in this country as a public service ethos, and the best of them in Whitehall have it in bucketfuls. If clause 1 makes a contribution to reaffirming that ethos, the legislation will have been worth while. The civil service is an important pillar of our constitution. This legislation will strengthen that pillar, if only a little. In this triumph of what I have described as the status quo, we need to realise that we are setting aside many other approaches to the relationship between elected Ministers and, on the one hand, Parliament and, on the other, the appointed civil service. One of those approaches, which has often been discussed, would be to make the civil service more directly accountable to Parliament, as the Institute for Public Policy Research has suggested. Another approach, favoured by the think-tank Reform, would be to give Ministers more say over the direction of the permanent civil service establishment. That would take us in the direction of the United States. A third approach would be to keep most of the civil service as it is, but to superimpose at the top a cabinet system in each Department. I will not linger on those approaches, except perhaps briefly on the third one. My guess is that one reason that support for civil service legislation has gathered pace in many quarters, especially in Whitehall itself, is that we have, de facto, tried the cabinet system over the past decade and, having tried it, found it wanting. I wonder whether that is why Lord Butler, among others, changed sides on this issue. He was a former opponent of a civil service Bill; now he is a supporter. When people refer to the growth of presidentialism under Tony Blair, what they mean is the growth of a cabinet of advisers, largely temporary and party political, right at the heart of No. 10 and No. 11. Their position was reinforced by Orders in Council in 1997, giving advisers direct authority over civil servants. That was a profound mistake that has rightly been reversed. Cabinets should not be allowed to become part of our political culture. The bypassing of the civil service that came with that, and the impact of sofa government, were both disastrous for us. Clause 1 and its companions do not guarantee that that will not happen again, but they send a clear legislative signal that that is not how our civil service should operate. That is why I said earlier that this chapter of the Bill will entrench not only the status quo but, to some degree, a status quo ante. When I was in Whitehall, I was not a supporter of proposals for a civil service Bill. I thought that such legislation would be a waste of parliamentary time. However, I then sat on these Benches in the early years of the Blair Administration watching the new Labour Government bypassing officials and prejudicing the ability of the civil service to offer impartial advice to the Government, and that led me to conclude that we might need legislation to protect the civil service from the new culture of advisers and to signal Parliament's support for the ethos of public service set out in the civil service code of conduct, which had recently been improved prior to the arrival of the Blair Administration. This part of the Bill lays the ground on which a proper relationship between the civil service and politicians can be maintained for the future. That relationship requires Ministers to provide strategic direction to the civil service. It also requires the civil service, led by permanent secretaries, to implement that direction, having warned Ministers—and having been given a reasonable opportunity to be heard by Ministers, a point that Robin Mountfield has made on numerous occasions—if those officials think that the direction of a policy is deeply flawed or would result in a failure of delivery. I do not pretend that the lack of leadership that we have seen from time to time recently is a uniquely Labour disease. It has afflicted previous Governments as well. It is, however, reasonable to ask how things have operated recently. For example, how much strategic direction can have come from the merry-go-round of ministerial reshuffles that we have had? I think that we have had four Secretaries of State for Transport in three years, four Defence Secretaries in four years, and four Home Secretaries in five years. The right hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts (John Reid) takes the record, having held seven Cabinet posts in eight years. He described the Home Office as "not fit for purpose", but it was ministerial leadership, not the civil service, that was not fit for purpose. From what I have seen, the civil service aches for good leadership. It wants to implement the plans of elected Governments, not to thwart them. It is when politicians fail it—and only then—that some civil servants are transmogrified into a caricature of Sir Humphrey. This is not just about a failure of strategic leadership, however. Ministers have also used the civil service in ways that they should not have. The Neill Committee warned, as early as 2000, that Ministers were pushing senior civil servants to the margin in the provision of advice, while interposing their own advisers. The role of the adviser was being transformed into that of a spin doctor, a fact reflected most notoriously in the Jo Moore affair at the Department for Transport, Local Government and the Regions. Imagine the state of morale when the permanent secretary in that Department was quoted as saying—I shall not use his exact language; I shall just use the first letter of some of his words—the following:""We're all f***ed. I'm f***ed. You're f***ed. The whole department is f***ed. It's the biggest cock-up ever. We're all completely f***ed."" Morale must have reached a terribly low level for that exchange to have taken place, and that applied right across Whitehall, not just in that Department. The Better Government Initiative—a group of Britain's most senior civil servants—stated in a recent report, which is available on the web:""Providing candid advice has always been a difficult and potentially risky task for the civil service. There are suggestions"—" that phrase is typical mandarinese—""of a loss of confidence amongst civil servants that this is a part of their job."" We need this legislation. It was envisaged in the 1850s, and it is typically British that it should have taken us 150 years or so finally to get round to it. There have been several periods in which having the civil service on a statutory footing might have helped it, including periods during the past decade. Let us now get the job done.