Charles MOORE
Too many civil servants have embraced activist causes. The Government is right to rein them in
It is a basic doctrine of our system of government that ministers decide, and therefore account to Parliament for their decisions. It follows that they – not civil servants or other advisers – take the credit for success and the blame for failure. In cases of iniquity or irredeemable, systemic cock-up, they should resign. Any other system would evade the direct relationship that must exist between the voters and those who win the general election and then form a government.
In the case of the confusion over Covid-affected A-level and GCSE results, the responsible minister is the Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson. No iniquity is alleged, but if the general view is that the cock-up is irredeemable, Mr Williamson should resign or invite the Prime Minister to move him when convenient.
Given the immense difficulties of Covid, I would say Mr Williamson’s case is borderline, rather than open-and-shut. On the one hand, he has lost a lot of public confidence. On the other, his departure might solve nothing for the Government, or for schools, still wrestling with the plague. It is a fine judgment.
But I want to look at a different aspect of the doctrine of ministerial responsibility. How much does it mean when the structure and practice of the public service undermine its reality?
In the case of this summer’s exams, the body charged with making the decisions was not Mr Williamson’s department, but Ofqual. Ofqual is an “independent” regulator, a “nonministerial government department”. It is supposed to be free from political control, and thus maintain educational standards. The famous algorithm was its, not Mr Williamson’s. He did not even have the right to inspect it in detail.
In quiet times, such arm’s-length arrangements can work. Ministerial meddling is reduced; experts protect the standards. The trouble is that whenever things get difficult, the Government comes under pressure to intervene and the non-ministerial departments somehow vanish. How often, during the exams row, did you find Sally Collier, Ofqual’s nowdeparting chief executive, publicly defending what her organisation had done? She neither made the case for her policy, nor explained her errors.
The most glaring example of responsibility swerved is NHS England. It employs 1.2 million people, making it the largest public-sector employer in Europe. Its chief executive, Sir Simon Stevens, is accountable for more than £120billion of annual spending. Yet he has been almost invisible to the public since Covid-19 hit the fan. We have little idea whether he did right or wrong. We have to listen to the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, instead.
These arm’s-length bodies become closed little worlds, invested with great power, hard to hold to account, fiercely unwilling to take blame.
Then there are the government departments themselves. Here – in theory – the chain of command is clear. Ministers answer to Parliament for their departments and protect them from attack. In return, civil servants make sure that what ministers want gets done. The practice, however, now departs very markedly from the theory. I am not talking here about clearly bad behaviour, such as bureaucrats leaking or ministers turning on their officials in public. That, unfortunately, always happens. I am talking about what is now considered normal practice.
Defenders of officials often say, “Remember, they can’t answer back”. Yet nowadays they often can. Senior officials appear before parliamentary committees, as if they had an independent existence. They make lots of public speeches, often without consulting their ministers. Last month, Jonathan Slater, the permanent secretary of state at the Department for Education, spoke at the Institute for Government. He declared that “I feel at my best when I genuinely feel accountable for delivering something”. If so, would he like to take some responsibility for the exams fiasco?
It is increasingly common for a department to declare its own view on an issue which goes beyond government policy (and sometimes even contradicts it). Recently, the Tory peer, Emma Nicholson, alerted by complaints from many parents, began to protest to the Department for Education about its new materials for the Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) guidelines which become compulsory next month. Some of these “factsheets”, promoted by lobby groups with the help of departmental money, advise schools that they must, in the interest of transgender rights, institute mixed-sex lavatories. Breast binders, padded trousers, puberty blockers, cross hormones and surgery are all advocated. The Trans Inclusion Toolkit being pushed to schools sounds as if it does the job all too literally.
Another document for schools – an “inclusive package for ALL young people” – circulated by an LGBT organisation, the Proud Trust, and backed with money from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, introduces the “Dice Game”. On each face of each die is a word (or words), such as “penis”, “anus” and “hands and fingers”. Players are then invited, having rolled the dice, to think of exciting things to do with the combination chance has thrown up. This almost paedophilic fantasy is aimed at children as young as 13. None of the above is in the legislation, though the pressure-group documents often suggest it is. Mr Slater, however, is an enthusiast for trans rights, and tweets as the Civil Service’s “LGB&TI Champion”. During Covid, he has tweeted only once (so far as I can see) about the urgent matter of exams, preferring subjects such as Ramadan, Pride Month and Windrush Day.
The most striking recent example of departments going way beyond their impartial remit is their reaction to Black Lives Matter, following the killing of George Floyd. Several permanent secretaries, including Mr Slater at Education, and Sir Stephen Lovegrove at Defence, put out messages against “whiteness” or giving the hashtag for Black Lives Matter.
Since then, part of Mr Slater’s concern for what he calls “tackling the whiteness of senior Whitehall” has been fulfilled, in that he has been retired early on ministerial insistence. The permanent secretary of the Ministry of Justice, Sir Richard Heaton, has also been moved towards the door. In June, he wrote, on behalf of his department: “We must be clear in the workplace that racism and inequality are enemies we must keep fighting … It’s why the Black Lives Matter movement is so important. And that it’s not enough to be passively anti-racist; we must take a stand, and we must take action.”
The point is not that racism does not matter, but that definitions and remedies differ dramatically. Many mandarins have failed to recognise – as they failed with Brexit – that other views legitimately exist. They appear not to understand that their views, publicly expressed, undermine the neutrality of public service. What due diligence have they done on the organisation Black Lives Matter? It is a lazy assumption that, just because of its title, BLM must be right, and that taxpayers’ money should be spent in its cause. The mandarins are allowing HR departments to be used as a battering ram for political activism, undermining the Government’s right to make policy.
These trends suggest that the present Government is right to try to recall the public service to its chief duty, which is to stop striking attitudes and to make policy work. Hence the coming reorganisation of the Cabinet Office, the search for a new Cabinet Secretary and a new head of the Foreign Office – and the quiet but firm moves against all these woke Sir Humphreys.