Former standards adviser Jonathan Evans has urged the government to give more resources to the newly created Ethics and Integrity Commission, while telling MPs that he would like to see senior leaders talking more about ethics.
Appearing before the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee this morning as part of the committee’s inquiry into propriety and ethics, Lord Evans was asked what he would do if given a magic wand to improve public standards.
Evans, who was chair of the Committee on Standards in Public in Life – which was last month replaced by a new Ethics and Integrity Commission – from 2018 to 2023, said he doesn’t have a “silver bullet or magic wand, but I think you are much more likely to get good outcomes if people talk about these things”.
He recalled how during the committee’s research for its inquiry Leading In Practice, which considered how leaders can set and embed a culture of high standards, he had “an interesting conversation with a senior permanent secretary who said, ‘well, I don't think there are any ethical issues in our department’”.
“Which actually, given the department, which I shall not name though it is tempting to do so…” Evans said.
Urged by the committee to name the civil servant, Evans added: “No, I'm not going to name them, but, I thought it was laughable to suggest that there were no ethical [issues] but it was clearly just something that he felt that was not his problem.”
“So I think it needs to be something that people talk about,” Evans said.
“If this is a part of the conversation and the expectation, then you are more likely to have the little light bulb moment saying,: 'I suppose this is an ethics issue, and perhaps we ought to consider it'.
“So I think there is an issue about not just policing it, but actually educating people into it, and that that would be a really game changer,” Evans added. “As far as we could find a single game changer that would be one.”
EIC creation ‘makes sense but it needs much more funding’
Evans was also asked for his opinion on the new Ethics and Integrity Commission. He said it was sensible for the commission to subsume CSPL and that the formalisation of the CSPL's role in convening the heads of different ethics bodies “makes a lot of sense”.
He also said the commission’s new responsibility to send annual public report to the prime minister setting out the health of the standards landscape and where more needs to be done is “potentially quite a powerful tool”.
However, he warned that the commission will need a lot more capability and resources to deliver its expanded list of functions and noted that CSPL had just five staff when he was its chair.
Evans said the role of promoting and explaining standards to the public will be the commission’s “single most difficult task” because “getting anyone's attention nowadays, given the number of things that you can attend to, is challenging”.
“I don't know how they will do that, but it will not come easy, and it will require a resource if it's to be done meaningfully,” he added.
Evans also said the new responsibility to advise on duty of candour codes will be “a challenge for the commission initially, because there isn't the existing expertise ready to tap into, so they'll need to do some research so they know what advice to give”.
“If you look back 10 or 15 years, CSPL had a significantly larger budget than was subsequently the case, and it also had effectively a research budget," Evans said. "And that meant that there was an ability to do some research to back the judgments that it was making in some areas.
"I think if I were in Doug Chalmers’ position, I would be pushing hard to reintroduce some form of research budget, because, particularly on codes of conduct, somebody needs actually to do some work to know what is best practice. And I think that's something which will be important to give a bedrock from which you can then give advice. So I think a reintroduction of, I'm not talking a massive budget, but some money that you can then spend on research, would be very valuable for a new institution.”
Asked how much more capacity the commission will need, Evans said it was difficult to hazard a guess but that "you need at least five times as much as they do at the moment" and that this would "still actually be a very modest budget".
Peter Riddell, who was the commissioner for public appointments from 2016 to 2021, appeared alongside Evans at the session and said he was “very happy with the evolution” from CSPL to EIC “with some qualifications”.
He said the “major positive” is that EIC is not doing casework – “the important thing is the regulators are left to do that” – but this his big worry is the “really big remit” it has been given and its comparatively low level of resources.
Riddell noted that there was “an indication” in the exchange of letters between Doug Chalmers and the prime minister of “increasing resources” but said “we don't know how much it's going to be”.