Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I beg to move amendment 50, page 4, line 29, at end insert ‘with a fiduciary responsibility to spend taxpayers’ money responsibly.’. The civil service code and its entrenchment in statute is the central part of the civil service portion of the Bill. It is extremely important; we strongly support it. In a way, clause 7, which sets out some minimum requirements for that code, is the heart of this part of the Bill. We strongly support the values promoted here—integrity, honesty, objectivity and political impartiality. I am conscious that because the provision is so important, there is a danger of wanting constantly to add bells and whistles as if it were a Christmas tree, but we believe that a further minimum requirement should be added. As the Conservative party outlined in a paper, ““It’s Your Money””, published in February this year, a fiduciary responsibility should be placed on civil servants. The 3 Nov 2009 : Column 813 term generally means that someone trusted with the assets, wealth or well-being of a third party has a responsibility to manage them in the best interests of that third party. We believe that that is essentially at the heart of much of what the civil service does, and we would like to see it enshrined in the code. We believe that all employees in the public sector should abide by the principles of fiduciary responsibility, but the proposed code does not cover the full spectrum of people employed by the state. We discussed in the context of clause 1 the lack of a definition about who is covered. Many contract workers, agency temporary workers or employees of non-departmental public bodies are not covered by the civil service code. We propose that a separate code should be established for those employees, stressing the same fiduciary responsibility. I stress that we do not propose this fiduciary responsibility in any hostile spirit to civil servants; rather, I would say, the reverse. I believe that this provision would provide protection for civil servants, especially if it were backed with the amendments and new clauses grouped together on clause 9, which would place an obligation on Ministers—building on a point made previously—to respect the civil service code. Of course, the ministerial code already does that, although it is not, as the hon. Member for Cambridge (David Howarth) rightly pointed out, entrenched in statute, but nor would the Bill achieve that. Ministers have a duty to respect the civil service; they should respect not only its code of values, but its role in providing advice. Of course Ministers are not obliged to accept the advice of their civil servants, but they should surely always seek it, listen to it and make judgments after assessing it. When public money is spent badly or inefficiently, it is very often the consequence not of civil servants being lax, careless, inefficient or hopeless, but of them being forced to do things by unwise ministerial decision, often in the face of civil servants’ advice. I cited on Second Reading the example of the introduction of tax credits. It is now well attested that the then Chancellor, now the Prime Minister, was strongly advised by civil servants in both the Revenue and the Treasury that the way he proposed to proceed with tax credits would introduce serious risk of fraud and error, all of which came about. The advice was ignored and the result was a grave misuse of public money, not to mention the enormous human misery caused to hundreds of thousands of low-paid, hard-working people who found themselves required to pay back money that they had received in good faith. Those people thought that they were doing the right thing and obeying the law. The point about incorporating this fiduciary responsibility into the code of conduct is that if in those circumstances a Minister tells civil servants that they must go ahead and implement the policy regardless, against their own advice, there is at least some protection for those civil servants.