Mandarins are masters of shifting blame

I DO not believe that the Civil Service has become politicised nor do I wish it to become so. I never knew or wanted to know the political preferences of civil servants.

When I discerned a resistance to reducing the size and reach of the state, I was generally confident that this was for reasons of self-interest rather than ideology.

The accusation of “politicisation” is a terrific defence against any attempt by politicians to create a genuinely high-performing civil service that will actually deliver what a democratically accountable government, of any stripe, decides to do.

Civil servants must be impartial in the sense of being equally able and willing to serve a government of a different colour, but that is emphatically not the same as being “neutral” or “independent”.

The Civil Service suffers from institutional complacency. As the new Minister responsible for the Civil Service, every draft speech or article presented to me started: “The British Civil Service is the best in the world.”

Yet the complaints by Ministers in all parties about the lack of institutional capability, inefficiency and failed implementation were legion. When we queried the evidential basis for this assertion, it turned out that the only relevant assessment was a World Bank ranking for “government effectiveness”, in which the UK ranked number 16.

I remember a conversation where it was proposed that rather than seek to improve our performance against these criteria, we should create a different index which might better recognise those qualities in which the British Civil Service was thought to excel.

So I was amused to see this summer a new index assembled by the Blavatnik School at Oxford, in association with the IFG, and (it coyly states in the fine print) “supported” by the UK Civil Service. The criteria are clearly selected to favour Westminster-type politically impartial systems – operational efficiency and effectiveness barely get a look in – and Singapore, which has a truly impressive bureaucracy, doesn’t even feature. Yet even in this index we come last among the Westminster-type systems, behind Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

Is this just me? Oliver Letwin, no enemy of civil servants, indeed married to one, recently bemoaned the quality of the work produced by policy civil servants outside the centre. He made the point that the cream tends to float to the centre of government, to No 10, the Treasury and the Cabinet Office. This has often led PMs and Chancellors to discount their colleagues’ complaints about the quality of the service. Because the civil servants who surround them are among the best, deficiencies elsewhere are discounted as the fault of inadequate Ministers.

It is significant that the longer Prime Ministers remain in office, the more jaundiced their view becomes. Tony Blair recently reflected on this: “If you had a crisis, there is nothing better than that British system… But when it came to how do you do health service reform or education reform, or the early battles I had in reforming asylum and immigration policy, I found it frankly just unresponsive.”

Are government failures always the fault of the of civil servants? Of course not. We all know there are myriad examples of failures caused by Ministers ignoring good advice.

But I and others have observed that all too often the first reaction of senior civil servants when something wrong is discovered is either to cover it up or to find a scapegoat, often someone who is not a career civil servant and who is considered dispensable.

There seems to be an absolute determination to avoid any evidence that the permanent Civil Service is capable of failure.

Another indicator is that if a Minister decides that a Civil Service leader is not equipped for his or her task, this has to be dressed up as “a breakdown in the relationship”, with the unspoken suggestion that this is at least as much the fault of the Minister as of the civil servant. It can never be admitted that the mandarin was inadequate in any way.

When I suggested that there might be room for improvement, the distinguished former civil service head, Lord Butler, accused me of a failure of leadership.

Actually the leadership failure is to pretend that all is well when no one, even civil servants themselves, really believes that.