We all find it difficult to stick to our new year’s resolutions, but the Home Office’s bid to be ‘fit for purpose’ in 2007 was one of the early January casualties as news emerged that the records of hundreds of British nationals convicted abroad had not been entered on to police databases.
No one would deny that the Home Office has to grapple with some of the toughest and complex policy agendas in government, but this latest episode has demonstrated the need for systemic reform. And not just of the Home Office – the administrative bungling there is widely reflected across Whitehall. Whether it’s the financial mismanagement in the NHS or the problems encountered at the rural payments agency, it is clear that the British civil service is struggling with the art of public administration.
This ought to worry any future Brown premiership that will depend on a high performing Whitehall. The lesson, however, seems clear enough: an unreformed civil service is a major barrier to successful government.
So what should Gordon do? The first thing is to properly diagnose what’s going wrong. The ippr argues that the root of the problem rests with the constitutional conventions that govern the civil service. It is these, after all, that ultimately determine how and why the civil service behaves as it does. We say that these conventions are anachronistic and severely inadequate. This is particularly true of the most important of them, the doctrine of ministerial responsibility, which holds that ministers alone are accountable for everything that happens in their departments. In other words, the flipside of ministerial responsibility is the non-accountability of the civil service. And it is this lack of accountability that we believe explains Whitehall’s poor performance. As one senior official said to us: ‘Why are we poor at delivery? Mainly it’s because there aren’t any rewards or sanctions for good delivery.’
Whitehall’s governing arrangements mean relations between ministers and civil servants are increasingly ill-defined, and their roles and responsibilities unclear. As a result, there is a ‘governance vacuum’ at the top of Whitehall: lines of accountability are confused and leadership structures are weak. This holds the civil service back and undermines its performance.
The view held by Sir William Armstrong, the former head of the civil service, that ‘I am accountable to my own ideal of a civil servant’ is no longer tenable. Instead, the doctrine of ministerial responsibility needs to be recast so that officials become directly accountable for clearly defined operational matters. This change should be underpinned by a new civil service executive, led by an empowered cabinet secretary, responsible for appointing and line-managing permanent secretaries and capable of rewarding high performers and removing those who don’t cut it. Such a body would at last provide Whitehall with the corporate leadership it needs.
This reform programme should appeal to a Brown premiership for a number of reasons. First, it strongly chimes with his view that, where possible, politicians should be responsible for setting the policy framework, leaving officials and public servants responsible for delivering it. Second, since the problem with Whitehall is fundamentally a constitutional one, Brown should ensure that he finds space for a reformed civil service in his promised ‘new constitutional settlement’. The civil service was neglected in the first wave of New Labour’s constitutional reform and this now needs rectifying. Further, given his interest in reviving parliament’s ability to hold the executive to account, Brown should support the prospects of improving the accountability of the executive as a whole – that is mandarins as well as ministers.
Ippr argues that administrative failures will continue unless civil servants are made publicly accountable for administrative and operational delivery. Ministers need to deal with the root of Whitehall’s problems and not just the latest crisis. Splitting the Home Office in two will not in itself solve things, unless it is accompanied by fundamental reform.