Last week, the House of Lords heard former officials and ministers criticising Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude’s plans to reform permanent secretary appointments. Though first civil service commissioner Sir David Normington has given ground in his new consultation on perm sec appointments, reformists remain unsatisfied (see Opinion). Indeed, with the year’s grace promised by Maude freshly expired, Normington’s consultation looks very like a bid to head off further reform.
The two camps now lie quite close: the only substantive split concerns whether the PM can pick any candidate approved as suitably qualified by the Civil Service Commission (CSC), or – as Normington has offered in his consultation – is only given a choice when two or more candidates are equally matched. The point seems arcane, but it matters.
Under the first system, the CSC is a quality-assessment body submitting options for a political decision; under the second, it’s a decision-making body that may invite the PM to adjudicate. So an apparently trivial distinction divides two opposing takes on the Whitehall power balance.
For ministers, it can be frustrating to have permanent officials: if you can’t fire your executive, your power is constrained. But if ministers expect to play a major role in choosing their top officials, those civil servants’ careers will become bound to their political masters’ – with every reshuffle or change of government demanding a changing of the guard. In times of relative stability – such as the last four years – that might not be too destabilising; but ministerial turnover is normally faster, and if during these periods ministers and perm secs both change, there will be little space for continuity in any aspect of a department’s work.
Certainly, giving the choice to the PM rather than the secretary of state makes the plan less likely to be destabilising; but the crucial issue is whether appointments lie with politicians, or with impartial officials. The Singapore system, lauded by reformers, works well in situ – but that country has never seen a change of governing party. Indeed, it’s currently led by the son of its first PM: the approach would work quite differently in a country where power regularly shifts across the political divide.
Indeed, the contrast between these two countries illustrates why the merit principle must remain undimmed. In a country with a single governing party, stability is not the problem – and ministers may choose new officials for new challenges. But in a country where power regularly moves between left and right, a permanent civil service is the only way to ensure a basic level of continuity in our system of governance.