John Reid’s stark admission that the Home Office is ‘not fit for purpose’ has suddenly thrown the issue of civil service reform under the spotlight. While public service reform has been something of a leitmotif for the Labour government, civil service reform has been conspicuously neglected. At one level this is to be expected – governments get distracted by ‘events’ and find it difficult to make the time to fix what’s going on in their own backyards. But recent events in Whitehall crystallize the case for action.
So what’s wrong? Ippr’s research will show that the core problem undermining civil service performance is the ‘accountability deficit’ in Whitehall. The non-accountability of the civil service stems from the doctrine of ‘ministerial responsibility’, which holds that ministers, and ministers alone, are accountable for everything that happens in their departments. Developed in pre-democratic times, this doctrine needs revising to take account of the realities of 21st century government. To illustrate, the 18th century home secretary, Lord Shelbourne, presided over a Home Office that employed one clerk and 10 civil servants, but today it employs over 70,000 officials.
We argue that, given the increased frustration with the pace of change in Whitehall, the time has come for more radical reform. Crudely, we have a choice before us: we can politicise the system and allow ministers to hire and fire – as they do explicitly in Australia and implicitly in Canada – or we can make the civil service accountable for what it does and use accountability to drive up performance. We argue for the second option.
We reject politicization on a number of grounds. In Britain, politicisation is unsuited to our constitution because there is no separation of powers. A politicised civil service would create an overbearing executive. Such patronage would also run the risk of increasing corruption in government – something Whitehall is mercifully free of.
A civil service commission, similar to the one in New Zealand, should be created to appoint permanent secretaries and review their performance. The commission would also be responsible for setting the strategic direction of the civil service, and for ensuring that Whitehall has in place the core capabilities – in areas like information technology and human resources – needed to deliver the government’s policy agenda.
A new commission would provide the strategic leadership that Whitehall needs to adapt to new challenges, and provide the performance accountability that the civil service has so far avoided. This, after all, is what is happening in the rest of the public sector. It is time to end this Whitehall exceptionalism.
But that only gets you so far. If we are going to insist on greater civil service accountability, we should be prepared to strengthen parliamentary scrutiny across the board. Ministers should be accountable for policy and resources and civil servants should be accountable for their operational performance. Obviously, the line between the two will often be blurred but parliamentary select committees are best placed to make the distinction. Committees should be strengthened and given the power to hold civil servants and ministers to account – in what we call ‘whole of government’ scrutiny. The rules protecting civil servants should be reformed, and committees should have the additional resources needed to scrutinise ministers and mandarins.
If the civil service is to be fit for purpose, then nothing short of a complete overhaul of Whitehall’s accountability regime will suffice.