Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: Pre-appointment hearing: First Civil Service Commissioner, HC 655
Tuesday 6 September 2016
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 6 September 2016.
Members present: Mr Bernard Jenkin (Chair); Ronnie Cowan; Mrs Cheryl Gillan; Tom Tugendhat; Mr Andrew Turner.
Questions 1-64
Witness
Ian Watmore
Examination of witness
Q1 Chair: Welcome to this session of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee on the pre-appointment hearing for the role of First Civil Service Commissioner. Can our witness identify himself for the record, please?
Ian Watmore: Yes, I am Ian Watmore. I have appeared before this Committee before as a former Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary but I am here in the capacity of being the Government's preferred candidate for the First Civil Service Commissioner.
Chair: Thank you. I think we will go straight on to question 1.
Q2 Mr Andrew Turner: One of the essential competencies for this role is to have an understanding of the role of the civil service. In your view, what is the role of the civil service?
Ian Watmore: The role of the civil service straightforwardly, in my opinion, is to serve the Government of the day to the best of its ability and to do so by developing and deploying its professional skills in a range of competencies from policymaking and diplomacy through to project management and IT. But the core is to provide the operational, administrative and policy services to the Government of the day.
Q3 Mr Andrew Turner: How do you see the role of the Civil Service Commissioner?
Ian Watmore: The Civil Service Commissioner, as I understand the role, dates back 160 years to a time when that civil service was not professional and was seen to be corrupt and/or nepotistic and/or not very good at its job. Under Northcote-Trevelyan, they created the modern day rules and principles by which the civil service operates. The Civil Service Commissioner has a role in upholding those standards, in short to ensure that the civil service remains operating with integrity, objectivity, honesty and impartiality. But it also has a key role in actively recruiting new people to the civil service, whether that is existing people to new roles or bringing people in from outside to the civil service. As First Civil Service Commissioner, my role will be to personally lead on the most senior of those appointments at permanent secretary level and, if it ever arose, at Cabinet Secretary level.
Q4 Chair: Can we just spend a little time on these first two issues about the role of the civil service and the role of the Civil Service Commissioner? It is striking that you mention technical or commercial skills, policy advice skills. We know this is what the civil service does, but what role do you feel the senior civil service should have in the leadership of government?
Ian Watmore: I think within an individual department it is quite clear that the senior civil service in that department has to manage and deliver the agenda of the Secretary of State and the ministerial team in that department. That can be at very close quarters with the Secretary of State maybe putting a new Bill through Parliament, but if you are a department like DWP or the Home Office it can be very far away from Whitehall delivering the operational consequences of those policies, for example running a prison—prison officers are civil servants. The range of services provided is quite different. When you get to the centre of government—and there is always a debate about is there one centre or three or four centres but by the centre I am primarily meaning the Cabinet Office, the Treasury and including No. 10—the role there is to support the Prime Minister, primarily, in the co-ordination of policy and operations across all of the other departments. A lot of the functions in a department like the Cabinet Office are about going out and interacting with the wider machinery of Whitehall.
Q5 Chair: You used words like manage, deliver, support, co-ordination. What role does leadership play in all these functions?
Ian Watmore: The leadership at the top of one of those departments, certainly the way I used to try to discharge it, I think is, first, to understand the totality of the Government’s agenda including those outside of your immediate ministerial team, so you get the richness of the Government agenda to your area. Secondly, you have a responsibility as accounting officer for how the money is spent in that department. Thirdly, you have a responsibility to ensure that the best top talent is available to your department, recruited and grown from within. Fourthly, you have to provide a role of inspiring the organisation. I think that is a key aspect of leadership, to get the many, often tens of thousands, of people in your department motivated and inspired to work in that department, raising morale. I often think that comes best from being very well connected with your staff—visits to the frontline, lots of communication and so on. It requires from time to time being the personal adviser on critical issues. The permanent secretary will lead the department on a range of fronts but will, on their own, occasionally have to intercede and make key policy advice interventions to the day with the Ministers concerned.
Q6 Chair: How would you rate the leadership capability of the senior civil service?
Ian Watmore: I did the capability review programme for Gus O’Donnell, which was a review of every Whitehall Department, so I got to see every Whitehall Department at close quarters. It was a few years ago but these things tend to not change as rapidly as they might, and it was probably 2006-07. We found quite clearly that Whitehall was good on strategy, curate’s egg on leadership and relatively poor on delivery. That was the sort of broad thrust of the conclusions from those reviews. I have been out of the system for four and a half years now so it is pretty difficult—
Q7 Chair: But what did you conclude needed to be done in order to address those two deficiencies at that time?
Ian Watmore: We concluded with delivery that we needed to recognise that delivering on the ground required special skills that your typical policy official would not necessarily have. You either had to do a proper programme of growing those skills by putting people into roles in junior positions or you had to bring those skills in from outside. Running a network of tax and benefit offices or prisons or things of that ilk requires experienced operational manager types and we recommended that they should be grown and recruited. For the core leadership functions, I think from memory our conclusion was we wanted to grow capability in some of the less fashionable areas of government at that time. Finance, HR, IT were immediate areas of focus but also areas such as project management, commercial negotiating and, as the internet was expanding its reach, the digital agenda. Our view was that it was necessary to get real functional experts into those roles rather than putting generalists into those roles so that that would then cascade across the organisation.
We were also in an era where diversity of talent was important, as it is in any era but at that time we were making a lot of progress, for example, on getting women to higher positions in the civil service. I remember the day quite vividly when we were around the Wednesday morning permanent secretaries table and Gus was able to say we have reached 50:50 for the first time where we have as many women permanent secretaries of departments as we have men. That seemed to me to be not just a triumph for diversity; it was a triumph of leadership and bringing talent through. I have to say from the statistics—I have no observation other than that—it has receded since then. I think we are now down to 20% of permanent secretaries are women and that is a weakness that I would hope the system is looking to address as it builds its leadership cadre for the next challenges.
Q8 Chair: It is interesting you mentioned leadership as a capability deficit at the beginning of that answer and that capability review, but then you did not mention any measures to address that deficit.
Ian Watmore: I thought I did but—
Chair: What are the measures that you implemented or recommended for addressing that deficit?
Ian Watmore: As I say, we recommended that the permanent secretary cadre of the departments had to respond to the negatives of the capability review. In the key areas of leadership and delivery, it was to create much stronger functional heads with real expertise who could collectively create a board that would manage the department.
Q9 Chair: But if a permanent secretary or emerging permanent secretaries have poor leadership skills, how does creating more functional capability down the command chain improve their leadership?
Ian Watmore: Do you mean their individual leadership skills as permanent secretaries?
Chair: Yes.
Ian Watmore: I think one of the challenges with the way the system used to recruit and promote people to permanent secretary was it promoted them to the top and then recognised where their deficiencies might be. They may have come up a particular channel, being very policy focused, and then they are put in charge of a very large department and they do not have the background to manage that sort of department. Increasingly what has been recommended over the years is that for people to reach the upper echelons of the civil service they have to have had serious, meaningful stints in key roles along the way so that as they approach the top they are not a one-dimensional civil servant; they have a breadth of capability.
The second thing that we had also been doing—and this was more of a coalition Government initiative—was to create leadership academies that were designed for people at different levels in the organisation. If we had a leadership academy for permanent secretaries it would not be teaching them the nuts and bolts of project management, for example, but it would be teaching them about where the risks and dangers of large projects lay and how to find the people that they needed to help them. At that time they are not going to become world class project managers at that level.
For more junior civil servants we introduced quite rigorous qualifications-based training. As a layperson on a voluntary basis, I lecture at Cranfield University on project management for civil servants. Civil servants go through that Cranfield course, about 40 or 50 at a time, drawn from right across the system. I do an hour’s session on project management for them and I have done it probably about eight times. They find it really good to interact with each other and with somebody who has done this sort of thing. They go back to their departments much more enthused about their skillset and also the network that they have built, and that is making the generation of leaders of tomorrow be more well rounded people.
Q10 Chair: You have described two kinds of learning for leaders. You have described the experiential learning, which the civil service has traditionally been very strong with but it tends to be rather unstructured. You have described more structured conceptual learning, which is instructed or learned in an educational environment. What other kinds of learning do senior civil servants lack?
Ian Watmore: I think everybody at any level can benefit from mentors—some people call them coaches, some people call them guides, some people call them mentors—because you can get a lot out of working with somebody who is perhaps a little bit less in the day to day but has a wealth of experience and where the relationship between—
Q11 Chair: But that is really an extension of experiential learning, isn’t it?
Ian Watmore: When I was growing up in the world of Accenture—when I was there it was Andersens—we used to regard our training programme in three broad channels, which are the ones you have described: the experiential, learning by doing it on the job, learning from others around you and so on; learning by formal training, including offsite training programmes, real-time learning, learning from books, these days it would be online courses; and learning from mentors and guides. Those were the three things.
Q12 Chair: There is another kind of learning, isn’t there, which one might call experimental learning? Looking at really high functioning organisations, they create space and opportunity for people to either model different kinds of situations and learn from them or carry out small-scale experiments and learn from failure. How good do you think the civil service is at this kind of learning?
Ian Watmore: I think of that as another example of the experiential learning, but I understand exactly what you are saying. If you have an organisation that creates a culture of innovation and space to try things and learn what works and not be castigated if it does not work, then I think you can learn a lot from both mistakes and successes. The civil service is less good at that and has always been less good at that because the fear of failure dominates the upsides of the learning that you respect.
I had innovation as a portfolio of my department once and we went out of our way to try to create the safe space environment to try things. The research into innovation, as you rightly point out, says that if you are not prepared to fail as an organisation you cannot really innovate because in the end you will stifle people’s natural talents.
Q13 Chair: You are going to be sitting on the Senior Leadership Board, I think it is called, advising on leadership development. How are you going to address this?
Ian Watmore: The Senior Leadership Committee, as I understand it, is drawn together from the HR types in the civil service plus a selection of the departmental heads. The role of the Civil Service Commissioner and one or two others is like an independent non-executive director to provide challenge to that group to deliver change. For me coming into it—I may change the view when I see what is on the ground—once I am assured that the core principles of Northcote-Trevelyan and so on are being preserved, the three things that seem to me to need most focus now are diversity by demographic, by which I mean diversity of gender, ethnicity and so on; diversity of skill, some of the things that we were talking about a few minutes ago, ranging from economists through to project managers and commercial managers; and the flexibility in the organisation to deploy the right people to where the fire is burning most strongly at the current time. I think that is true in any era, given added impetus post-Brexit. Those seem to me to be the priorities that I am coming in with from my mind-set.
I have not looked at it from within since I have left. It may be there are other issues but they will be the areas that I was intending to challenge the system of today on: what are you doing to improve your diversity demographic, what are you doing to improve your diversity of skill to get the right deep skills that we need in the organisation today, and how are you ensuring that the system does not bureaucratically bog down, moving the best talent to where the greatest need is? Those are the areas that, certainly from an incoming point of view, I would be proposing to do.
Q14 Chair: How urgent a priority is it to develop leadership in the civil service that can much more capably learn from failure? There is plenty of that about in any big organisation. Strong organisations learn from their failures. The civil service, as you have already said, is not so good at learning from failure. How urgent is that priority, because it does not seem to figure in your top three?
Ian Watmore: I think it is connected across them all, is my real point. In doing the experiential work that all of those areas require, you have to be able to give people the space in which to fail and—
Q15 Chair: Why is the civil service so bad at providing that space at the moment?
Ian Watmore: I have thought about this on and off over the years and I think in the end it comes back to you get hung out to dry—whether it is as a civil servant or a Minister, to be honest it is the same—for failure and not particularly rewarded for your many successes. You have 100 projects, one goes wrong and 99 go right; people do not mention the 99 and they zoom in on the one. In the end, people become risk averse. They try to do failure avoidance rather than innovation.
Q16 Chair: How much is that because they do not trust their superiors to protect them from the consequences of failure?
Ian Watmore: I don’t know. I think that varies with the superior.
Chair: I am sure it does, yes.
Ian Watmore: By superiors, you mean Ministers as well as civil servants.
Q17 Chair: How are going to promote more trust in the organisation to create this space for learning from failure?
Ian Watmore: I think it should be a given in the civil service leadership of the day that they are prepared to give the space for people to try things and then back them to the hilt.
Q18 Chair: But this requires a huge cultural change.
Ian Watmore: It does.
Chair: How are you going to bring this change about?
Ian Watmore: I don’t think it is for me to bring it about. I am not in charge of HR for the big departments.
Q19 Chair: Is this not one of the core values of the civil service? Is it not intrinsic to the functioning of the civil service?
Ian Watmore: The functioning of the civil service that the Commission is responsible for achieving is around delivering the values of the organisation, and we have talked about those.
Q20 Chair: Isn’t one of the values effectiveness and how is this organisation going to be effective if there is a lack of trust within the organisation?
Ian Watmore: Again, I come back to the push for trust. I absolutely agree with what you are talking about in terms of leadership and innovation and creating the space, but the system as a whole has to protect people when they make honest failures. I remember a very good example of a project. It happened to be a Gordon Brown policy initiative, which made it even more interesting. Normally at the time if Gordon Brown wanted something done people tried to do it to the bitter end but it was one where after about a year it was patently not working. It was an interesting policy idea that was just not working on the ground and a group of people got together and proposed to the Chancellor of the day to withdraw that project, take the short-term brickbats of it because they were going to be a lot less than the long-term brickbats that would have come when the project blew up in its face. It was lorry road user charging, if you remember the policy initiative. We killed that project off within a year.
It was a potentially good idea but it was an example of a project that had failed so let’s fail quickly. We tried to use that to say if it is okay with a Gordon Brown project, we can do this more broadly. That was certainly part of the drive for the innovation culture of a few years ago, but my feeling is the system has retrenched to castigating people for failure and not really celebrating their successes.
Q21 Chair: What should be taught in the leadership academies, or indeed in the proposed civil service leadership academy, in order to promote this change of behaviour? How are we going to do this? You are going to be sitting on the Senior Leadership Board that is looking at this.
Ian Watmore: My personal view on this is quite straightforward. People who are good managers and leaders at whatever level in the organisation create the space for what they want to have achieved underneath them, they empower their staff to do it, and if their staff try in all honesty to do the right thing and it does not come off, they protect them. To me, that is the civil service response to this cultural change.
Q22 Chair: You were suggesting that these good leaders emerge and they naturally do this. In the civil service they don’t, so what should be done to address it?
Ian Watmore: We teach that sort of thing in the leadership academies. When I talk about project management to my Cranfield lot, I am talking to them about what makes a project go well but I am also talking to them about what happens when things do not go well: how do you respond? Do you put the shutters up or do you become open about the problem? Do you dump on others or do you step up to the plate and face up to the challenge? We have a discussion among ourselves about those sorts of issues and my job as the lecturer there is to try to empower those people to go back and say, “The next project I am in charge of, that is the way I am going to behave”. If we can do that then we are growing a cohort of leaders that will behave in a way that—
Q23 Chair: This will be very much where we want to focus our attention and scrutiny of the civil service, which ironically is not where you have laid the emphasis in your responses.
Ian Watmore: I honestly do think it is a semantic term. Inside the core delivery of all of these capabilities, it is leadership, innovation, culture, change, all of the things that you have to put together in order to deliver a more diverse, better skilled and more flexible organisation.
Q24 Chair: When we say “culture”, what do we mean by culture?
Ian Watmore: A good example of a culture point that we have just talked about is: is it a culture of fear of failure or is it a culture of celebrating success?
Q25 Chair: It is about what then?
Ian Watmore: I think the best organisations are the ones that celebrate success and the ones that are protective of the people who have failed, provided they have not failed in a criminal or a downright going off-piste sort of way where they are flatly rejecting instructions.
Q26 Chair: An organisation learns most by focusing on its failures but without blame.
Ian Watmore: It is an interesting discussion. In my project management lecture, I start with the piece of work that was done by the former OGC on the eight common causes of project failure, which is very much to your point, learning from what went wrong with major projects, things like don’t implement big bang in one go but introduce in a pilot phase, get aligned with your suppliers, that sort of thing. My contrast is the eight good things that happened on the Olympics, which is why the Olympics worked, and I talk about the eight things we got right on the Olympics and can we find those eight things to be taken forward? I argue that you learn from both. You learn from your mistakes but—
Q27 Chair: I would put a slightly different complexion on it. I would say the success of the Olympics was that they dealt with failures as they arose in a non-blame environment and therefore learned—
Ian Watmore: I would agree. We could discuss the eight offline because I am sure we could find—
Chair: I am going to move on.
Ian Watmore: But the point I am making is that you learn from your successes as well as your failures. A culture that tries to do both is a positive culture; a culture that just fixates on the failures and then blames is a negative culture. That is just an example of culture to me.
Q28 Ronnie Cowan: Thank you, Chair, for that lengthy cross-examination. Sir David Normington split the role because he was also—was the term Public Appointments Commissioner?
Ian Watmore: It was.
Ronnie Cowan: It has now been removed. Do you see it as being to your advantage just to focus on the one role?
Ian Watmore: I do. It always used to be as it is now. I personally think it is better that way and certainly it is for me. I am very happy with it and I happen to know Peter Riddell, who is the other half of this potential duo, very well and I think we can work very co-operatively together.
Q29 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Part of your role is looking after the civil service code and I wanted to know how happy you are with the Government’s compliance with the civil service code. I was just looking on here at the last audit report that was produced. I have the 2013 one and I think that is probably right; it was compared with the 2011 audit. There are certain areas where there is room for improvement. Would you like to comment on those?
Ian Watmore: I don’t have the benefit of the data.
Mrs Cheryl Gillan: I can tell you. It says there are areas where there is room for improvement: clearer routes in place for staff wishing to raise code concerns, clearer statements on how complaints raised will be investigated, training of nominated officers or guidance networks available for nominated officers, nominated officers’ role specifications. There have been improvements in certain areas: organisations having a formal statements policy on how the code is upheld, identification of potential risk groups in organisations and safeguarding, information given to candidates about jobs and reference to the code in staff induction training. There have been improvements but there still appear to be several weaknesses. Would you like to comment on any of those?
Ian Watmore: I think this is something that is broader than the civil service. A lot of organisations have codes and value statements and the like and they are either honoured in their breach or there is no real mechanism for holding people to account from within. I think we can all cite examples of quite horrific behaviour in other organisations. The civil service, in my experience, has always taken its code very seriously, both at the institutional level and at the individual level, and I think that is really important. It is part of the culture of the organisation, but when it does go wrong, as it will from time to time in an organisation of 400,000, you need clear, robust procedures for dealing with it and you need a culture in which the so-called whistle-blowers or complainants or whatever have a safe space in which to raise their views.
I think that is an area that the civil service, certainly in the last months when I was there, would probably have said it needs to learn a lot. I don’t know what it has been doing in the interim but that would be an area in which I would definitely want to have an early look. It seems to me that you can’t really administer and protect the code if you don’t have good open and transparent but safe and protective spaces as well for people to raise grievances, have grievances heard and have the issues dealt with.
Q30 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Have you read the code yourself?
Ian Watmore: Yes.
Mrs Cheryl Gillan: I was quite surprised to find that some fast-tracked civil servants have not read the code at all.
Ian Watmore: Some people never read the Maastricht Treaty. It did not stop them commenting on that in the press.
Mrs Cheryl Gillan: I will stop you there. I think that is a political point.
Ian Watmore: I have read the code and I remember it being expected that everybody who applies to the civil service, particularly fast stream and so on, should read the code and it should be part of their induction. If it is not, that is another area we can focus on.
Q31 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: What about the ministerial code?
Ian Watmore: I have read the ministerial code, not in the recent past. I did when I had Ministers, if you see what I mean. I think the ministerial code is in itself outside of the Civil Service Commissioner’s remit but it dovetails with it and, therefore, it is important.
Q32 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: The point I was going to make is do you think, as I think, that if you are going to read the civil service code you need to also read the counterpart?
Ian Watmore: Particularly for people who are interacting with Ministers. If you are in the Outer Hebrides running a benefits office it may be less important than if you are in Whitehall advising the Prime Minister.
Q33 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: This role is two days a week, effectively, and is well remunerated. I believe, from your CV, that you carry on quite a large range of activities. I think currently you are a church commissioner, you are on an IT supervisory board, you are chairman and trustee of the Migraine Trust, you have a position with Quantum Sports, and you were talking about your lectures at Cranfield. Are you satisfied that you do have that capacity time-wise, because this is quite a demanding role?
Ian Watmore: Yes, I do. I thought about all this quite clearly, and anything of that other list that became a problem I would wind down, with one exception. I wish to retain the church commissioner role through its tenure. It is a very important role. But all of the roles you mentioned are at most one day a month, so I am probably looking at a combined portfolio of roles at the moment, including the ones you have listed, of about 12 days a month and so I can do that. The important thing about the other roles is that they are all voluntary and I can do them on my timetable. The needs of this job come first and I fit the other things around it, so it is that way round.
Q34 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Where I was leading to is that this is a senior position and a demanding position that certainly we think needs a great deal of attention. Where would you see other agencies or individuals or committees assisting you? For example, could you see a role for this Committee in assisting you in carrying out your responsibilities?
Ian Watmore: Absolutely. As the Chair knows well, I have always liked the way that this Committee has been prepared to get into meaty issues and do inquiries and take evidence hearings and the like. I think we learn a lot from your ability to interrogate people in a different way, whether it is in a commissioner role or a civil service role. In the same way that we were having a conversation about leadership, I am very happy if this Committee has a leadership focus to reframe some of the language that I have been using in that capacity. It seems to me we should be very joined-up and I would hope that you will hold us to account but equally I would hope that we can learn from your inquiries and your evidence gathering and your sessions. I think you have shown yourselves to be a very good Committee in the sense of getting into the right issues, doing the evidence base, learning lessons, promulgating them and taking them forward. So, very much so.
Q35 Ronnie Cowan: I was going to touch on your current portfolio, but I am happy with your answer there. Looking back at your CV, given that it is a five-year appointment, since leaving Accenture in 2004, the CV reads 2004 to 2005, 2006 to 2007, 2007 to 2009, 2009 to 2010, 2010 to 2012. I am wondering why these jobs don’t last longer when this is a five-year appointment?
Ian Watmore: First of all, on my past I have only ever been employed by three organisations in my life: one, Accenture, two, the civil service and, three, the Football Association for 24 years, seven years and one year. I have only broken out the roles within the civil service there just to illustrate. The first one was a role for Tony Blair. In 2007 he retired but I was still a civil servant. I was by then a permanent secretary civil servant, so I moved to do a role for Gordon Brown. My third role was for the coalition Government. I have highlighted those out as separate roles, having done them for three different Prime Ministers, but they are all one continuous stream within the civil service. Basically, I have done roles within Accenture and roles within the civil service. They are my two main employers and then I had my midlife crisis and joined the Football Association and then returned. I hope that answers that.
For this role, however, things are quite clear. First of all, having a five-year term of office is immensely helpful to do the job properly, to do the job with strength of independence and so on, partly because you have the time to make a difference—five years is a meaningful time to make a difference—and partly because you are not angling for an extension or beholden to somebody to stay in the role. Once appointed, you have five years and that is it. I think that is a really good aspect of the job for operating in what could be difficult territory at times.
Q36 Ronnie Cowan: What would your ambitions be for those five years?
Ian Watmore: I think, without reprising too much of what I said earlier, the most important things for me about the Civil Service Commission is that in five years’ time the civil service as a whole will have moved on in the fronts that we have been talking about. It will still have protected Northcote-Trevelyan and all that flows with that. It will be moving into a more diverse leadership at the top, more women at the top, for example, and a greater pipeline of women coming through, to use that as an example. We will have a greater breadth of skills at the top and more people recognising that you do not just have to be a superb policy person to get to the top of the civil service; more people like Stephen Lovegrove, for example, who came in from the outside as a commercial person and is now in his second department, more people of that ilk. We will be looking back and saying we got the right resources moved around in the system to help the country face its perhaps biggest challenge in modern times, which is how to move through the whole Brexit agenda.
If I could say at the end of five years greater diversity, greater skill base, we collectively did the job on Brexit and we have preserved Northcote-Trevelyan, I think that would be a good legacy.
Q37 Ronnie Cowan: We share in common 35 years experience in IT, which is what I did before I became an MP.
Ian Watmore: Good. It would be very interesting to talk to you about that.
Ronnie Cowan: I also have a five-year contract because I was elected. I am looking at your skillset and your IT skillset is very impressive. How much of that do you think you would bring to this role?
Ian Watmore: It is probably not in itself at the forefront of this role. However, I think there are two different ways. One is I have a credibility when talking to the civil service leaders about what we mean by these newer skillsets, because people recognise I have the digital IT background and project management background but they also know that I was able to do their job. When they argue, as some of them do, “You can’t be a permanent secretary off those skillsets because you need to have done X, Y or Z”, run a private office for a Minister and all that stuff, I am living proof that you don’t. There are other ways to the top, so I use that experience to demonstrate the art of the possible.
The second thing is I would like to believe that we will use the digital world as a commission and as a civil service to be more open in a whole variety of different ways, open in terms of telling the world what we are doing but also open to comment and criticism from outside, using social media to have, for want of a better word, dialogues with different groups of people who have opinions, and hopefully that will make us better. Rather than do it all in formal meetings or informal meetings, using social media would be a way in which I would like to use the technology. But it is not fundamentally about how to make universal credit work or something, which is a different challenge and not for the Civil Service Commission.
Q38 Chair: It is interesting you don’t mention in the openness statement how important it is to be open to internal dissent and internal criticism.
Ian Watmore: Very much. I believe all organisations of any size, if they operate an open, challenging culture, come at the top end of the higher performing organisations. The self-learning, internally open to challenge organisations are the best. The next tier down might be ruthlessly well controlled but closed to new ideas and challenge. The very best are the ones that have openness, transparency and challenge at their heart.
Q39 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: How well equipped do you think you are for your adjudicating role?
Ian Watmore: Do you mean in terms of technical competence or my personal status?
Q40 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Being able to display independence of thought, word and deed, because you have a quasi-judicial role so far as the code is concerned.
Ian Watmore: Yes. First of all, as I answered to Mr Cowan, having the fixed term of office gives you that space to operate and it was one we were talking about earlier. I am not beholden to people to keep for the next six months so I have the space to do what is necessary. I have a pretty unusual CV, some people would say weird CV, in that I have worked for—if I count the last few years as working—35 years, 20% inside the civil service, 80% outside the civil service. I have seen how a lot of other organisations operate, both the ones I have worked for and my clients, so quite a breadth of experience to bring to this. I am not constrained in my mind by a model that says, “This is how the civil service works and all we can do is polish and improve it”. I come from, as the Chair was saying earlier, “Let’s see if we can bring other ideas and make it better”.
I had a reputation when I was in the civil service for speaking my mind to other civil servants, in a nice way I hasten to add, and they listened generally. Once you have proved you can do what the core job is, if you have an opinion on something they were prepared to listen because I was coming at it from a different perspective a lot. I have never been shy of challenge.
I have held a variety of regulatory roles over the years, leading to probably the most headline one being when you work in a football organisation and you ban Alex Ferguson from the touchline when he is the most successful manager and he is a near neighbour, that takes some courage.
Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Should I declare an interest? I am married to a man who supports Manchester United.
Ian Watmore: Even more so. He had broken the rules for about the 85th time and the consequence was that he should have a touchline ban. I have done those high profile roles. I have spent a bit of time in the last period with the Information Commissioner’s Office, albeit as a non-executive director, but he has a regulatory role over freedom of information and data protection. I used to have other roles in the civil service that were quasi-regulatory as well, so I have been in that space.
When I was at Accenture, I was the managing partner, as it was originally described, of Andersens and then the chief executive. We had some very difficult cases to hear about bad behaviour from senior executives at a time when we were floating the company and, therefore, the consequences were not just bad normal consequences, they were extra bad because they would lose their slice of the flotation. We did some notable firings of people who, it transpired, were people who were perhaps good at the job in one sense but appalling role models in other ways. Back to the point that the Chair was making about culture, we noticed that when we got rid of one or two of the bad apples, the palpable uplift on the rest of the organisation was huge because they saw action being taken and not blind eyes being turned.
I think in all my careers I have had to face tough calls, sometimes about individuals, sometimes about groups, and I have never ducked them.
Q41 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: You are effectively going to be dealing with a complaints process. What do you consider to be the most important factor in dealing with complaints in this new role?
Ian Watmore: I think I have always found with complaints processes that you need four different characteristics. The first is you need empathy with the complainant, and any of us listening to “The Archers” at the moment will know that in abuse cases of that type and rape cases empathy with the victim is huge. You need empathy with the person being complained about because that person is potentially being falsely accused, and we have seen some bad examples of that recently. Having an understanding of both people’s positions, which might require two different people to work, is crucial. But I think in the end it is about getting the evidence and hearing the evidence and then applying it fairly and proportionately to the particular instance, and not looking for grandstanding headlines but looking for the right outcome in that case that both sides can potentially at least understand, even if they do not like the outcome.
Q42 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: I was hoping speed and timing would come into it.
Ian Watmore: One of Gus’s four Ps was pace and I remember somebody saying, “I really like that one, Gus, pace. It means we can pace ourselves a bit better”, meaning he thought he could go a bit slower whereas obviously Gus meant winding the whole thing up in speed. Speed is good when it is not a substitute for shortcuts.
Q43 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Yes. I meant in addressing it, because the complaint about the civil service is you put it into the machine and then the machine takes over and everything grinds so slowly.
Ian Watmore: An a priori then, the system must be on the ball, get going and do things at the right speed relative to the case and resolve issues as fairly and as swiftly as it is possible to do and not leave people hanging around in the wind. I absolutely agree with that.
Q44 Chair: You have talked about the importance of maintaining the Northcote-Trevelyan settlement, Northcote-Trevelyan principles, and the last time you were in front of this Committee you talked about the importance of the transformation of the civil service. How do you think the whole business of external appointments, use of consultants and all this sort of thing can be made compatible with the Northcote-Trevelyan settlement, looking at the particular challenges we have at the moment of bringing in lots of people to deal with the shortage of skills that we are going to have to develop very quickly in the face of Brexit?
Ian Watmore: I use myself as an example. I joined the civil service after a 24-year career in the private sector and part of what motivated me, in fact almost exclusively what motivated me, to do that was because I cared about the business problems of the public sector. I found them more interesting and more important than the things I had been dealing with in the private sector. For me, the transition to being a civil servant was quite straightforward because I came in with a passion for the public services, as indeed most of the people do when they join from the ground up, and I did not have a particular issue with getting to the issues.
When you are brought in for a year to do a specific project it may not be the same. You may be brought in as a lawyer to negotiate a specific agreement. For me, our approach to that recruitment should be that either it is a contract with a firm to deliver a piece of business, in which case it is an external procurement, or if we are bringing an individual inside the tent and asking them to be a civil servant on a specific role, then I think we have to put a lot effort into the recruitment to make sure they are the right sort of people, because I don’t think we should be bringing in people just because they are good at their contract specialism if they lack the values of the civil service. I think we should put extra work into their induction to make them realise that while they are here to do a job, a role, they are part of a much bigger system and everything that they say and do reflects on all of us. It is strength of recruitment and strength of induction, but we must do it quickly and that—
Chair: And independence of appointment?
Ian Watmore: Yes, absolutely, but the independence of appointment I think is a given, and if it is not a given then I would challenge that.
Q45 Chair: What effect do you think the concessions made by the recently departed First Civil Service Commissioner on giving the Prime Minister a choice of permanent secretaries is going to have on what we consider to be the importance of appointment on merit?
Ian Watmore: On that one, I do not think my—
Chair: You are relaxed about that?
Ian Watmore: Yes, I am on that one. I am more worried about the one that you alluded to, which is people being brought in on a temporary basis from the outside to do a trade deal or something.
Q46 Chair: How would you regulate that?
Ian Watmore: As I say, I think we have to insist that either there is an independent appointment process for those people or, as a commission, we have to make absolutely certain that when they are coming in they have been challenged on the values of the civil service and then given strong induction.
Q47 Chair: What do you think about enlarged ministerial offices?
Ian Watmore: Well, they are here, aren’t they? I believe five departments have them. There was not exactly a stampede for them. Nobody has told me they are the answer to a maiden’s prayer, nobody has told me they are terrible and disastrous and thin ends of wedges yet, so I think the jury is out on them.
Q48 Chair: At the time you left the civil service in 2012, there was a sense that there was a lot of challenge to Northcote-Trevelyan going on, albeit Ministers always paid lip service to it.
Ian Watmore: Yes.
Chair: To what extent do you think Northcote-Trevelyan is still at risk?
Ian Watmore: Personally, having had a very thorough session with the new Prime Minister, I think the risk to Northcote-Trevelyan, apart from the accidental risks of importing people short term, is quite low because I think she is very strong about the need to develop a highly professional but independent civil service.
Q49 Chair: How important do you think it is for the senior leadership of the civil service to understand the history of the civil service and its constitutional context?
Ian Watmore: I think it is important for anybody who works for any organisation to understand where that organisation has come from, so very.
Q50 Chair: When did you last read the Northcote-Trevelyan report?
Ian Watmore: Probably about six months ago.
Q51 Chair: How then?
Ian Watmore: When I had the science portfolio. If we mean the Haldane principles about independence of decision-making on science spend and—
Chair: I was thinking about the Haldane 1918 report on the organisation of government.
Ian Watmore: No, I have not read that one, but I have read the Haldane—
Q52 Chair: That was the report that decided that there should be Government Departments. To what extent do you think the departmental structure of Whitehall is the best structure for Whitehall?
Ian Watmore: An interesting discussion, probably way outside my competence as Civil Service Commissioner. However, the departmental structure of Whitehall is one of those things that is a mixture of political issues and organisational issues. Some of the departments could well be brought together but they are not because politicians do not want to have fewer Cabinet seats. Other organisations could get moved around and functions taken from them and shuffled around—
Q53 Chair: But fundamentally a federal structure in Whitehall is an inevitability?
Ian Watmore: I think so. In our system of constitution, the Prime Minister of the day has a lot of power, but Cabinet Government is what drives our system and that means strong Cabinet Ministers and strong departments.
Q54 Chair: How familiar are you with the Workforce Plan?
Ian Watmore: The new one?
Chair: Yes.
Ian Watmore: I had a look at it as preparation for this.
Q55 Chair: How do you rate it?
Ian Watmore: Many reports I have read in Government I have read some things like that before, so what is the new stuff in this, if you see what I mean? Lots of these reports on the civil service workforce are kind of the same each time a report is—
Chair: We are looking for something new as well.
Ian Watmore: But there are some new things in there. With respect to the point I made about the functions, building stronger functions I think is a very good aspect of it. The interesting one will be the—I think they call it—open by default recruitment intended by the end of 2020, meaning that not just major permanent secretary jobs or something might be opened up, it is that all Whitehall jobs are open by default. That is going to be an interesting shift.
Q56 Chair: In developing leadership, which does get a mention in the plan, albeit not as prominently as we would like to see, we have talked about the leadership academy already but there are two other aspects of this. One is about specialisms. You are laying emphasis on the importance of developing specialist skills, but we do not seem to insist that permanent secretaries should be specialists in their departments anymore. We used to. Do you think that has been a positive change?
Ian Watmore: I was the permanent secretary of a department, admittedly it was a new department. It was temporarily known as Innovation, Universities and Skills. It was kind of like BIS was in the last Parliament. Apart from having done a degree, I had no knowledge of how the university system worked. I happened to do a maths degree, but I did not really understand how the science portfolio of the Department worked, and so on. Most of the policy aspects of that Department were new territory to me, but what I was able to bring to that Department was the managerial skills to build it from ground up and scratch. I took the view, and Gus took the view, that it was more important to have a general management type permanent secretary in that Department but then to surround me with policy specialists in higher education, further education, and so on. I think that worked quite well.
In another department, maybe a smaller department or one where the organisation is more stable, I think the permanent secretary should, in an ideal world, be deeply familiar with the brief of that department because that is more of what they will be doing. A good example of that will be Jonathan Slater in Education. The Department is quite small now; it has a big budget but it is a small department. Jonathan has a good background in education and I think that will carry him through to success.
Q57 Chair: What about tenures? You have just told us how important it is that you have a five-year term in order to do your job justice, but in neither permanent secretary role were you there for more than two years.
Ian Watmore: There is too much churn in the top-level roles.
Q58 Chair: How are you going to address that?
Ian Watmore: I would expect to ask some quite difficult questions of the civil service about that because it is undoubtedly true that apart from major shifts as we have just had over the summer, the previous Prime Minister put people in post for quite a long time as Cabinet Ministers. The old excuse that a Cabinet Minister rotates every five minutes, therefore the permanent secretary must, has been largely despatched. I think it is important that we get teams at the top that stick together, and that probably means if you are going to appoint the Cabinet Minister for four or five years, then you should expect that permanent secretary to stay with them for that period of time.
Q59 Chair: Finally, how controversial do you think your appointment would be?
Ian Watmore: Judging by the relatively small but nevertheless welcome texts, tweets and other things about my appearing today, which is the signal of it is public, it is all very positive.
Q60 Chair: Why do you think your appointment has taken so long, or getting us to this stage anyway?
Ian Watmore: You would have to ask others, but I saw the new Prime Minister almost as soon as she was appointed in August. She took it very seriously and very quickly. I think the referendum just got in the way. Having seen the previous Prime Minister, the referendum swamped him. He then disappeared. The new Prime Minister came in.
Q61 Chair: So you did meet the previous Prime Minister?
Ian Watmore: Yes, I met both but not together.
Chair: I do not think I have any further questions.
Q62 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: What do you consider to be your biggest failure in a civil service role?
Ian Watmore: Oh, in civil service terms. I thought we were going to have a discussion about football.
Mrs Cheryl Gillan: No, that is too easy.
Ian Watmore: It was probably leaving the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills to go to the Football Association because I was building a really good Department there. Back to the point we were just making, I was about halfway through the job and I knew from Peter Mandelson that it was likely that our Department and the Business Department were to be merged. He wanted me to be his person to bring that merged Department together and I probably should have stayed and seen that job through and then been ready for whatever, as it turned out, the coalition Government wanted. Unfortunately, I got seduced by the so-called dream job, which turned out to be not such a dream. That is probably my biggest mistake in an office.
Q63 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Of all the recommendations you have ever made, which one being overturned by a successor has, in your view, been the most disappointing?
Ian Watmore: That is a very good question. I had not thought about that one. It would probably be this one. I will give two related ones; they are part of the same thing. I thought the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit under Blair was a really powerful force for good in that it allowed the Prime Minister of the day to have non-political people, core project manager/civil service types, go out into the wider Whitehall system and help that wider system deliver on the key objectives. For example, MRSA rates were going like that under Health and we were despatched by Blair to go and look at that as a team. We found all sorts of examples of best practice that could be applied as to how you could change that and within a year the rates were on the down curve. I felt that was a good example of a Prime Minister’s team being used to good effect. However, it got abolished and I thought—
Chair: We could have a long conversation about that particular subject.
Ian Watmore: Yes, I realise it got abolished for different reasons. It got abolished because the system of government had been seen to be one that had become run by targets. This unit looked to be like the centrepiece of the targetry and, therefore, it became a bit—I understand that. It has kind of been recreated as the Implementation Unit and as part of that one of the things that we did for the Prime Minister and for the Cabinet Secretary of the day was the capability reviews of Whitehall, which made a difference, definitely made a difference. People were shocked by some of the hard-hitting reports that we put out, the Home Office being the most notable one. It had an effect of improvement, as we were talking earlier about some of the areas, but then that lapsed and it has not really been replaced. They would probably be the two things that I would say.
Q64 Chair: We must leave it there, but thank you very much. I appreciate you have been involved with this appointment for a very long time, since you were interviewed in December. This must have been very trying for you, and now you have to put up with this and you have to put up with us making a decision. We are, nevertheless, extremely grateful for your patience and thank you very much for appearing before us today.
Ian Watmore: Thank you, Chair. Just to react to your last words, no, it has not been trying. I have understood. I have had a very good summer of watching Wimbledon and the Olympics, so do not feel too hard about my delays. I have always enjoyed our interactions because, as I said earlier, you are on the right topics, in my opinion, on a lot of issues around the management of the civil service and Government generally. If I get the chance to do this job, I would hope to work very constructively with you, your Committee generally and your investigations and so on and learn from them. Thank you for your time.
Chair: Thank you.