Civil Service (United Kingdom)

Her Majesty's Civil Service is the permanent bureaucracy of Crown employees that supports UK Government Ministers. Ministers are responsible to the Sovereign and Parliament in administering the United Kingdom, but their executive decisions are implemented by civil servants, who are employees of the Crown and not Parliament. Civil servants also have some traditional and statutory responsibilities which to some extent protect them from being used for the political advantage of the party in power. Senior civil servants may be called to account to Parliament.

Establishment

Offices of state grew up in England, and later the United Kingdom, piecemeal. Initially, as in other countries, they were little more than secretariats for their leaders, who held positions at Court. In the 18th century, in response to empire and economic change, institutions such as the Office of Works and the Navy Board grew large. Each had its own system, and staff were appointed by purchase or patronage. By the 19th century it became increasingly clear that these arrangements were not working.

In 1806, the British East India Company established a college in London for training administrators based on the recommendation of officials in China who had seen the Chinese examination system. The civil service based on examination similar to the Chinese system was advocated by a number of Englishmen over the next several decades. (Bodde 2005)

A permanent, unified and politically neutral civil service, in which appointments were made on merit, was introduced on the recommendations of the Northcote-Trevelyan report of 1854, which also recommended a clear division between staff responsible for routine (“mechanical”) work, and those engaged in policy formulation and implementation in an “administrative” class. The report was well-timed, since bureaucratic chaos in the Crimean War promptly caused a clamour for the change. A Civil Service Commission was accordingly set up in 1855 to oversee open recruitment and end patronage, and most of the other Northcote-Trevelyan recommendations implemented over some years. This system was broadly endorsed by Commissions chaired by Playfair (1874), Ridley (1886), MacDonnell (1914), Tomlin (1931) and Priestley (1955).

The Northcote-Trevelyan model remained essentially stable for a hundred years. This was a tribute to its success in removing corruption, delivering public services (even under the stress of two world wars), and responding effectively to political change.

Lord Fulton's committee report

Following the Second World War, however, demands for change again grew. There was a concern (illustrated in C. P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers series of novels) that technical and scientific expertise was mushrooming, to a point at which the “good all-rounder” culture of the administrative civil servant with a classics or other arts degree could no longer properly engage with it: as late as 1963, for example, the Treasury had just 19 trained economists. The times were, moreover, ones of keen respect for technocracy, with the mass mobilisation of war having worked effectively, and the French National Plan apparently delivering economic success. And there was also a feeling which would not go away, following the war and the radical social reforms of the 1945 Labour government, that the so-called “mandarins” of the higher civil service were too remote from the people. Indeed, between 1948 and 1963 only 3% of the recruits to the administrative class came from the working classes, and in 1966 more than half of the administrators at under-secretary level and above had been privately educated.

Lord Fulton’s committee reported in 1968 . He found that administrators were not professional enough, and in particular lacked management skills; that the position of technical and scientific experts needed to be rationalised and enhanced; and that the service was indeed too remote. His 158 recommendations included the introduction of a unified grading system for all categories of staff, a Civil Service College, and a central policy planning unit. He also said that control of the service should be taken from the Treasury, and given to a new Department, and that the “fast stream” recruitment process for accessing the upper echelons should be made more flexible, to encourage candidates from less privileged backgrounds.

Into Heath’s Downing Street came the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS), and they were in particular given charge of a series of Programme Analysis and Review (PAR) studies of policy efficiency and effectiveness.

But, whether through lack of political will, or through passive resistance by a mandarinate which the report had suggested were “amateurs”, Fulton failed. The Civil Service College equipped generalists with additional skills, but did not turn them into qualified professionals as ENA did in France. Recruits to the fast stream self-selected, with the universities of Oxford and Cambridge still producing a large plural majority of successful candidates, since the system continued to favour the tutorial system at Oxbridge. The younger mandarins found excuses to avoid managerial jobs in favour of the more prestigious policy postings. The generalists remained on top, and the specialists on tap.

Margaret Thatcher's government

Margaret Thatcher came to office in 1979 determined to prefer the market to the state: government should be small but active. Many of her ministers were suspicious of the civil service, following the New Right doctrine that public servants always seek to increase their own power and budgets.

She immediately set about reducing the size of the civil service, cutting numbers from 732,000 to 594,000 over her first seven years in office. The Wardale Report in April 1981 launched a 'bonfire' of senior civil service posts and functions were privatised. Derek Rayner, head of Marks and Spencer, was brought in to set up first a small Policy Unit in No. 10, and then an Efficiency Unit in the Cabinet Office: this ran a programme of efficiency scrutinies, which by 1985 had saved £750m. Meanwhile Michael Heseltine had introduced a comprehensive system of corporate and business planning (known as MINIS) first in the Department of the Environment and then in the Ministry of Defence.

A Financial Management Initiative was launched in September 1982 (Efficiency and Effectiveness in the Civil Service (Cmnd 8616)) as an umbrella for the efficiency scrutiny programme and with a wider focus on corporate planning, efficiency and objective-setting. But by the mid 1980s, although cuts had been made, transformation had not happened. In February 1988 Robin Ibbs, recruited from ICI in July 1983 to run the Efficiency Unit (now in No. 10), published his report Improving Management in Government: The Next Steps. This envisaged a new approach to delivery featuring clear targets and personal responsibility. Without any statutory change, the managerial functions of Ministries would be hived off into Executive Agencies, with clear Framework Documents setting out their objectives, and whose chief executives would be made accountable directly (in some cases to Parliament) for performance. Agencies were to, as far as possible, take a commercial approach to their tasks. However, the Government conceded that agency staff would remain civil servants, which diluted the radicalism of the reform. The approach seems somewhat similar to the Swedish model, though no influence from Sweden has ever been acknowledged.

The Next Steps Initiative took some years to get off the ground, and progress was patchy. Significant change was achieved, although agencies never really achieved the level of autonomy envisaged at the start. Meanwhile, the accountability of the remaining civil servants began to be improved. MINIS-style business planning became standard, and delegated budgets were introduced, so that individual managers were for the first time held fully accountable for meeting objectives, and for the resources they used to do so. The Priestley Commission principle of pay comparability with the private sector had been abandoned in February 1982. Performance-related pay began in December 1984, was built on thereafter, and continues to this day.

Next Steps may always have had the ultimate goal of privatisation. Certainly, the focus on smaller, more accountable, units revived the keenness of Ministerial interest in the perceived efficiencies of the private sector. Already in the late 1980s, some common services once set up in the expectation of economies of scale, such as the Property Services Agency or the Crown Suppliers, were being dismantled or sold off. Next, shortly after Thatcher left office, in July 1991, a new programme of market-testing of central government services began, with the White Paper Competing for Quality (Cm 1730). Five-yearly or three-yearly policy and finance reviews of all agencies and other public bodies were instituted, where the first question to be answered (the “prior options exercise") was why the function should not be abolished or privatised. Strategic contracting-out also took place, where the Government did not wait to examine whether a private sector solution would be more efficient, but went ahead with it on the principle that the private sector was always more efficient and more responsive. For example, the Government's internal Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA), a civil-service staffed consultancy which monitored and directed internal government IT projects was closed down as it was leading the fight to retain internal expertise. This has led to most IT services within the UK Government being managed by private companies; the US firm EDS now has a large proportion of the total, which some have suggested gives it the capacity to manipulate pricing, or even be a strategic threat to UK interests. In November 1991 the Private Finance Initiative was launched, and by November 1994 the Chancellor of the Exchequer had referred to it as ‘the funding mechanism of choice for most public sector projects’. In 1995 the decision was taken to privatise the Chessington Computer Centre, HMSO, the Occupational Health & Safety Agency and Recruitment & Assessment Services.

The Citizen’s Charter

It was believed with the Thatcher reforms that efficiency was improving. But there was still a perception of carelessness and lack of responsiveness in the quality of public services. The government of John Major sought to tackle this with a Citizen’s Charter programme. This sought to empower the service user, by setting out rights to standards in each service area, and arrangements for compensation when these were not met. An Office of Public Service and Science was set up in 1992, to see that the Charter policy was implemented across government.

By 1998, 42 Charters had been published, and they included services provided by public service industries such as the health service and the railways, as well as by the civil service. The programme was also expanded to apply to other organisations such as local government or housing associations, through a scheme of “Chartermark” awards. The programme was greeted with some derision, and it is true that the compensation sometimes hardly seemed worth the effort of claiming, and that the service standards were rarely set with much consumer input. But the initiative did have a significant effect in changing cultures, and paradoxically the spin-off Chartermark initiative may have had more impact on local organisations uncertain about what standards to aim for, than the parent Citizen’s Charter programme itself.

Political neutrality

One of the constitutional principles governing the senior British Civil Service is political neutrality. (Bogdanor 2003 p. 237)

This contrasts with other central bureaucracies in which appointment to, and loyalty in, senior positions is based on partisanship and ideology. For example, in the United States the top several layers of government departments are political appointees who change with different administrations. By contrast, political appointees within the British ministries consist only the Ministers themselves and their political advisers, generally known as Special Advisers.

However, in the last decades of the 20th century, some political observers have claimed that the British civil service has started to become increasingly politicised. The main complaint relates to an increase in the number of Special Advisers, particularly in the 1990s under the Labour Government (when there was also a wholesale turnover of Press Officers). Defenders of the Blair Government on this point acknowledge the upward trend in the number of Special Advisers, but argue that this began before the arrival of the Labour Government, and that the total number still amounts to no more than three or four individuals in each Ministry. They also argue that public money to support the work of the opposition parties ("Short Money") has trebled since 1997.

Critics also point to instances of conflict between Special Advisers and members of the civil service. There has been one well-publicised incident — the tensions between Martin Sixsmith and Jo Moore, who both worked for Stephen Byers when he was Transport Secretary. Both resigned following a scandal relating to an email sent by Jo Moore on the day of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, which was widely felt to be inappropriate. However, a Select Committee enquiry into the affair by the House of Commons Public Administration Committee in 2002 heard from civil servants themselves that Special Advisers "protect civil servants by carrying out work that might raise doubts about Civil Service neutrality."

A second complaint relates to the involvement of ministers in the appointment of senior civil servants. Prime Ministers have final say over very senior appointments such as Permanent Secretaries and the Cabinet Secretary, but are supposed to choose from a handful of shortlisted candidates purely on the basis of merit without political consideration. Some observers claim that recent Prime Ministers, particularly Margaret Thatcher, exercised these powers of patronage to appoint Permanent Secretaries which were sympathetic to her government's aims.

Civil service code

A new civil service code was launched on 6 June 2006 to outline the core values and standards expected of civil servants. The core values are defined as integrity, honesty, objectivity, and impartiality. A key change from previous values is the removal of anonymity within the core values.

Heads of the Civil Service

• Sir Warren Fisher 1919-1939
• Sir Horace Wilson 1939-1942
• Sir Edward Bridges 1945-1956
• Sir Robert Armstrong 1979-1988
• Sir Robin Butler 1988-1998
• Sir Richard Wilson 1998-2002
• Sir Andrew Turnbull 2002-2005
• Sir Gus O'Donnell 2005-Present

Miscellaneous

Whitehall is the central London street on which many ministries sit. Whitehall is therefore often used as a by-name to refer to the executive branch of Government, and particularly the civil service (somewhat as in earlier days European foreign ministries were referred to by their addresses as "the Quai d'Orsay", "Wilhelmstraße" or "the Sublime Porte"). This contrasts with Westminster, which is used similarly to refer to the Houses of Parliament, and "Downing Street" or simply "No. 10" which is used for the Prime Minister's office.

The BBC television series Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister are a parody of the Civil Service and its relationship with government ministers. The portrayal is a caricature, but many insiders recognise a considerable element of truth in it, and though the Civil Service reforms since the 1980s have made the portrayal of powerful civil servants like Nigel Hawthorne's Sir Humphrey Appleby increasingly out-of date, the programme continues to have many legions of loyal fans, including ex-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

References

• Bodde, D., Chinese Ideas in the West [1]
• Jonathan Tonge, The New Civil Service, Baseline, Tisbury 1999
• Christopher Foster, British Government in Crisis, Hart 2005
• House of Commons Public Administration Committee, "These Unfortunate Events": Lessons of Recent Events at the Former DTLR, HMSO 2002 [2]

See also

• Departments of the United Kingdom Government
• UK topics
• public administration

External links

• Site explaining what being a civil servant is all about, maintained by a senior public official, Martin Stanley
• Official Civil Service website
• List by date of Public Records Office records on the machinery of Government and Civil Service management, March 1974 to 2000
• Directory of Civil Service guidance
• BBC brief on the British Civil Service - h2g2
• Cabinet Office site for the new civil service code