Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: Civil Service effectiveness, HC 497
Tuesday 21 November 2017
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 21 November 2017.
Members present: Mr Bernard Jenkin (Chair); Ronnie Cowan; Paul Flynn; Mrs Cheryl Gillan; Kelvin Hopkins; Mr David Jones; David Morris.
Questions 118-207
Witnesses
I: Dave Penman, General Secretary, FDA, Gareth Hills, President, FDA, Paul O’Connor, Head of Bargaining, Public and Commercial Services, and Garry Graham, Deputy General Secretary, Prospect.
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Dave Penman, Gareth Hills, Paul O’Connor and Garry Graham.
Q118 Chair: May I welcome our four witnesses to this evidence session on the effectiveness of the civil service, and could I ask each of you to identify yourself for the record, please?
Paul O’Connor: Paul O’Connor, Head of Bargaining and Industrial Strategy for the Public and Commercial Services Union.
Garry Graham: Garry Graham, Deputy General Secretary of Prospect.
Gareth Hills: Gareth Hills. I am the President of FDA, but I think it is worth saying at the start that I am a serving civil servant in my 32nd year of what is now HMRC. When I am responding today, I will do so in my capacity as a lay union official.
Dave Penman: I am Dave Penman, General Secretary of the FDA union.
Q119 Chair: Thank you very much. Could you very briefly explain to us what you each represent, in terms of your different constituencies, so that the Committee understands that?
Paul O’Connor: PCS is the largest civil service union representing about 160,000 members across the civil and public services, and they are primarily in the more junior grades.
Garry Graham: Prospect represents 30% of our members who are in the civil service and the wider public sector. The remaining 70% are working in the private sector, and we represent professionals, managers and specialists.
Chair: Scientists and technicians—people like that, yes.
Gareth Hills: For many years the tag line of the FDA has been that we are the union for senior managers and professionals in the civil service. We represent about 18,000 members, a range of jobs including senior tax professionals like myself, but also policy advisers, statisticians, accountants, administrators.
Q120 Chair: Thank you very much for being with us. This inquiry represents three big firsts. First, we are conducting an inquiry into the state of the civil service, with the full co-operation of the civil service and Ministers. Secondly, we are conducting research based on interviews with Ministers, officials, special advisers and people who have retired, to find out what is really going on in Whitehall; and thirdly, we are looking very intensively at the relationship between Ministers and officials, as one of the key fracture points where either things work very well or the friction at that point creates the inefficiency and the problems that people talk about. We will ask very short questions and if you can keep your answers brief that always helps. Thank you very much. How effective is today’s civil service?
Garry Graham: The civil service, given what it has been through since 2007-08, is remarkably effective and resilient and, given what we have seen, in terms of the reduction in the civil service, so much smaller now than since the second world war, with a 25% reduction since 2008-09. A particular concern of ours is about what has happened to pay and reward in the civil service and the ability of the civil service to recruit and retain the staff that it needs.
Against that backdrop and looking at our experience of private sector organisations, which have gone through less significant restructuring and turmoil, I think the civil service of today is doing a good job but there are challenges for the future in terms of its resilience, capacity and skills.
Q121 Chair: Because we have four panellists, you don’t all need to give the same answer. Has anybody got anything they want to add to that?
Paul O’Connor: I have a slightly different perspective.
Chair: Fire away.
Paul O’Connor: I think PCS’s position is that in terms of its public service delivery obligations, the modern-day civil service, particularly in a large Department, is incredibly ineffective. It has suffered from over 100,000 job cuts since 2010. If you try to ring an HM Revenue and Customs call centre these days, or try to get your benefit sorted out in a DWP contact centre, you are going to be in real trouble because they just do not have the resources to meet their public service obligations.
Q122 Chair: Is that view shared across the panel?
Dave Penman: Clearly, there are areas of the civil service, particularly delivering frontline services, where the impact of the resource cuts over a decade—under several Governments—have had a huge impact. The question and how Garry phrased the answer were in the context of the challenge that the Government place on the civil service and the resources they give it. By any measure, looking at those challenges, the civil service has responded incredibly on delivering efficiencies while maintaining public services. That does not mean that there aren’t tensions and there aren’t areas where there are particular difficulties.
Q123 Chair: There is a disconnect between policy commitments and the means to deliver them. That comes through in your evidence. Why do you think this has arisen?
Dave Penman: It seems to me, having looked at this from the perspective of a trade union over the course of many Governments, that when the Government allocate resources to Departments as part of the spending round, there is a clear disconnect between what is expected from the civil service and the resources it is given. You have a situation where, under the current overarching policy around austerity, or under previous Governments increasing resources, there is not a clear connection between what is expected, either in terms of reducing the expectation at times when you are cutting resources or in terms of increasing the expectations at a time when you are increasing resources. That is a real difficulty.
Garry Graham: If you look back to 2010, what you saw was a very crude headcount reduction with regard to the civil service, with little appreciation of the skills and capacity that the organisation needed going forward. While there has been an increase in the level of sophistication out there as to how that is dealt with, it is only an increase. I don’t think we are where we need to be. There has been a crude focus on headcount reduction and I think one of the challenges—not so much for the civil service but for Ministers—is that politicians are very good at identifying things that they want to do for the future, but they are not very good at identifying what we do now, or not very good at identifying what we stop doing now. There is an issue there about prioritisation and an honest and open discussion about the resources that we have and what you expect the civil service to do.
Q124 Chair: Within the civil service, and within the organisations in which your members work, how easy is it to talk about this problem, openly and constructively, in order to get better decisions made about it?
Gareth Hills: Sir Amyas Morse appeared before you on 7 November, Chair, and I think you quoted one of the recommendations from the NAO’s report that said that “the government needs to prioritise its projects, activities and transformation programmes. It should stop work on those it is not confident it has the capability to deliver”, and I think FDA agrees with that. Sir Amyas also said that “the reality or the wisdom on the ground is that if you make a nuisance of yourself, strangely enough your career will not thrive”. The FDA also agrees with that. What Sir Amyas said in giving evidence to you on the 7th—
Q125 Chair: How easy is it for civil servants within their roles to discuss that they have too much to do or that the Department they are in is doing too much?
Paul O’Connor: I think that is taken as read. Everybody right throughout the organisation knows that there are excessive workloads.
Q126 Chair: How do your members talk about it with their bosses?
Paul O’Connor: They talk to their bosses but they also talk to their trade union. By and large, the concerns that all the unions have been raising since 2010 in terms of workloads and resources have been ignored. The reason for that is that in 2010 there was a conscious political choice made to reduce outcomes in order to reduce the deficit.
Q127 Chair: But if you were advising one of your members about how to raise a concern about overload, what advice would you give them about how safe it is to do that?
Paul O’Connor: It is relatively safe. They can raise grievance procedures—all the policies and procedures that a modern employer would offer them—but actually the solution is collective. What the Government of the day need to do is sit down with the trade unions to have a serious discussion about the pressures that people face and the way to alleviate those.
Q128 Chair: Can I put my question to the other members? How safe is it to raise this sort of concern?
Dave Penman: Clearly, in any organisation there is a debate that happens—whether that is a debate with the Minister at the most senior level or going down the management chain—around the resources that are being allocated and what is being expected. I talk to Permanent Secretaries who will talk about the debate they have with Ministers around those issues. Ultimately, there comes a point in time where the civil service probably has an orthodoxy that is about getting on with the job.
At times where that debate goes to is there is a settled political will. Ministers have made a decision. The civil service job is effectively to get on with it, so I think inevitably that discussion comes to an end at some point. Occasionally you have a point where there is a real challenge. There is a ministerial instruction. The Permanent Secretary feels that they cannot effectively deliver what has been asked of them. That happens all too readily. At some point the civil service, probably too often, just gets on with it rather than maintaining that challenge.
Q129 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Can I ask how that fits in with the Civil Service People Survey, which was published on 16 November? The questions on the resources and workload were as follows: “I get the information I need to do my job well; I have clear work objectives; I have the skills I need to do my job effectively; I have the tools I need to do my job effectively; I have an acceptable workload; I achieve a good balance between my work life and my private life”. The score has gone up since 2009 by two points to 72% of people responding to that survey. What empirical evidence and what actual evidence do you have, Mr O’Connor, to justify what you put at the top of your priorities?
Paul O’Connor: I would be curious to know what the turnout on that survey was, as the trade union that represents the overwhelming majority of workers within the civil service.
Q130 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: 67% was the turnout, which is quite large.
Paul O’Connor: Of the entire workforce?
Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Yes.
Paul O’Connor: I think you might want to check those figures. As the trade union that represents the overwhelming majority of workers who are in the civil service, representing people at all grades and all levels, we are in touch with the workforce—
Q131 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Could I stop you there? There were 294,905 respondents to the 2017 survey, a response rate of 67%. Do you know how many of your members responded to the survey?
Paul O’Connor: We don’t know how many of our members responded. We actually discourage—
Q132 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: This is evidence-based and it is the latest Civil Service People Survey. Those are the questions that were asked, and it has gone up two points since 2009 to 72%. Therefore, that is the evidence that is being delivered to us. If there is contrary evidence I wonder if you would like to provide that to the Committee.
Paul O’Connor: Yes, we certainly can do that.
Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Also, empirical evidence. I would be very grateful.
Paul O’Connor: Yes.
Mrs Cheryl Gillan: It doesn’t fit with what we are being told out of an objective survey to which nearly 300,000 people responded.
Chair: We will come later to the shortage of technical and professional staff, who perhaps have a different workload or a different challenge.
Q133 Mr David Jones: Mr O’Connor started a sentence beginning with the words, “We discourage”, and he didn’t finish it. I was wondering what you were discouraging, Mr O’Connor.
Paul O’Connor: In respect to the civil service surveys and single issue questions that are asked, what we discourage is a survey of that nature and drawing hard and fast conclusions from that. What we encourage is a dialogue with the representatives of the workforce that use the trade unions in a forum where they can raise the issues that matter to the workforce in a safe environment.
Q134 Mr David Jones: Do you mean that you discourage your members from participating in a survey such as that?
Paul O’Connor: We have a different approach across Departments, depending on the state of industrial relations engagement within each Department. In Departments where relations are relatively good, we tend to have people participate in these things. If we are in a parlous state of industrial relations in certain Departments we take the opposite view.
Q135 Mr David Jones: You discourage people in those circumstances from participating?
Paul O’Connor: Yes.
Q136 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Could you list the Departments where you have discouraged people from taking part in this survey?
Paul O’Connor: There are over 240 bargaining units across the—
Q137 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Would you let us have a list of those Departments with which you have poor relations where you have discouraged people from doing the survey?
Paul O’Connor: We certainly can, yes.
Q138 Chair: What do you hope to achieve by discouraging people from taking part in the survey?
Paul O’Connor: What we are hoping to encourage the employer to do is properly engage with the civil service trade unions on the issues that matter to them—
Q139 Chair: To make yourselves more important?
Paul O’Connor: No, not at all. To make our members more important.
Q140 Chair: But your members are having their views taken into account by filling in the survey. They are not having their views taken into account if they don’t fill in the survey. How is that helping your members?
Paul O’Connor: Well, the trade unions collectively represent the people in the workforce. That is our role and we want a proper industrial relations engagement, not just asking single-issue questions but addressing the issues that matter around workloads, stress and pressures that come from 100,000 job cuts since 2010, which is making the civil service incredibly ineffective.
Q141 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Mr O’Connor, I would like the details of this because obviously this is the latest Civil Service People Survey. A lot of our report is going to be based on empirical and actual evidence that comes in from real civil servants directly, without anybody interposing themselves between the employer and the employee, and I think that is important. If your actions have contributed to distorting these results, we would like to know exactly where you have discouraged members, which members, at what grades and how many members you have in those Departments, and we would be grateful if you could provide us with a complete spreadsheet of that evidence.
Paul O’Connor: We would be more than happy to provide it.
Mrs Cheryl Gillan: I think that is really important. I am not making a judgment on your actions. I am just saying I want that evidence from you.
Q142 Chair: Before we move on, do the other representative organisations discourage participation in the annual People Survey?
Gareth Hills: No.
Chair: FDA no.
Garry Graham: Certainly Prospect encourage our members to fill out the survey, engage with the employer on the issue, always taking the view that if you are going to have a disagreement with an employer, at least have absolute clarity as to what it is you are disagreeing on. I have to say that I do take a slightly different take on the survey results, because I think they do point to the fact that there is a problem with groups of staff struggling in terms of work-life balance. That is clear from the statistics. What is also clear from the statistics is that, when you look at pay and reward, I think the numbers have gone up and not down and over three-quarters of staff believe they would be better remunerated working elsewhere, so you need to consider these results in the round.
Mrs Cheryl Gillan: I think we will come to it at the end. You are right but, notwithstanding that, it is important that we know where the basis of this has been distorted by other people’s actions.
Chair: We may come back to the Civil Service People Survey later on.
Q143 Mr David Jones: In the case of each union, I wonder if you could indicate where you think your members see their primary loyalty. Is it to their Minister, their Department, the public or elsewhere? Secondly, where would you say that they see their accountability lies?
Gareth Hills: It depends on the Department. For myself in HMRC, which is probably a non-ministerial Department, I see my loyalty and accountability as to my chief executive and the Second Permanent Secretary, but also to the public. In Departments with a Minister, that will vary, and I would expect DGs and directors to view their primary accountability as being to Ministers. It will vary as we go down through the grades as well. Below SCS I would expect primary accountability to be seen as being probably ultimately to the Permanent Secretary but more closely aligned to local senior leadership teams and local managers.
Garry Graham: I agree with that. When I go out to speak to members about what they do in the civil service, there is a visceral commitment to public service, which is admirable. When you seek to drill down into that, in terms of people’s actual accountabilities, I think Gareth is right that it will vary by the organisation you work for and where you are in the hierarchy, but still against a background of the deep commitment to public service.
Paul O’Connor: In respect of the grades that we represent, people would see their primary loyalty being to the public because they are the front end of public service delivery, and perhaps they don’t come into day-to-day contact with Ministers and senior figures in the way that members in Prospect and FDA would.
Q144 Chair: Where would they see their accountability lie?
Paul O’Connor: Their accountability is by and large today to their local line manager.
Q145 Mr David Jones: In terms of the senior grades, would you say that this affects the advice at all that they give to the Minister?
Gareth Hills: I see nothing to suspect that will in any way affect the work civil servants do, especially with Ministers. That is particularly the case for the hundreds and thousands of civil servants who work outside—forgive me—the Westminster bubble, of which I am one. I think there is a point around going back to the theme about those specific questions that were raised around the People Survey. It is still early days and we have to drill down into the detail of that, but there are lots of heartening responses there.
You mentioned a disconnect between workload and resources and what that means. I think that comes back to the fact that for a long time there has been a mantra of “more with less”. That kind of clashes but also aligns with the public service ethos that Garry just mentioned, so civil servants are so keen to deliver for the UK that they are prepared to absorb the work. That is reflected in some of the surveys that we have done with our members, which perhaps we can come on to later in other questions. There are heartening results in the People Survey, but there is nothing that we have seen to suspect that those different layers of loyalty in any way affect the service that civil servants provide to Ministers.
Q146 Mr David Jones: Have you anything to add, Mr Graham or Mr O’Connor?
Garry Graham: I think it is easy to get caught up on this issue and lose sight of the day-to-day work that civil servants do round the country, in terms of service delivery and a whole range of functions.
I have certainly not come across the problems that you see speculated about in the media about relationships between senior civil servants and Ministers. They are very clear where their accountabilities lie. There are issues of culture around the issue to provide challenge and speak truth to power. That is true of the civil service. I also think that is true of lots of other organisations outside in the private sector as well. Certainly, in my experience, any leaders worth their salt are ones who are prepared to be challenged and want to be challenged in terms of delivering what they deliver on a daily basis.
Q147 Mr David Jones: Why would you say that some Ministers regard the civil service as unresponsive and resistant to change?
Dave Penman: Ministers have political careers. They are ultimately in power for a finite period of time and dependent upon the Government. In the Labour years the average lifespan of a Minister was something like 14 months. Most politicians, in my experience, come into politics to make a difference, and Ministers are quite often impatient to make a difference. The reality of running big bits of the state and large organisations is that change happens very slowly. It is probably not a bad thing that at times Ministers are impatient around some of that. At times there is a lack of understanding of what it takes to make a thing happen, particularly when you are talking about the civil service as a disparate organisation—the delegated authority getting different bits in the machine to work together coherently to deliver a change for the public, which is what everyone wants. I don’t think it is any surprise that at times Ministers feel that that feels unresponsive—that they have got to the position of being a Secretary of State, have their hands on the levers of power and feel that they are pulling those levers and nothing is happening. That is a natural state of things when you are talking about government and the difficulty of making changes to large-scale public services. I think it is a healthy tension at times.
That does not mean that the civil service gets everything right or that there aren’t times when it could improve and that some of those elements of frustration could not be solved, but I think it is inherent in the nature of delivering government. The private sector does not deliver anything like what Government delivers, and I think, therefore, that that results in this sort of frustration and those sorts of comments.
Q148 Mr David Jones: Clearly, senior civil servants are aware of this because you have just given that comprehensive analysis of what the problem is. Do senior civil servants communicate to Ministers sufficiently the problems with effecting change as quickly as the Ministers would like?
Dave Penman: I can’t speak for all civil servants or Ministers, but when I talk to senior civil servants and Permanent Secretaries, they almost entirely have a good, healthy relationship with Ministers who understand the difficulties in delivering public services. They understand the frustrations. They also understand the limitations, particularly around resource. That is a tension that is there at the heart of government. It is part of what delivering government is about, so I think that civil servants are in the main honest and open in the dialogue that they have with Ministers. We tend to concentrate on where that is not working well, when a Minister will say something about their frustrations to the point that they think it isn’t working properly, rather than on the majority of cases where I think that relationship works well.
Paul O'Connor: When there is a change of Minister, I think it is important for that Minister to be clear about what their vision is for the civil service and what they want that public service to do. If that is communicated in a proper way to the workforce and it gets them engaged, they will buy into that delivery model. I also think it has to run hand in hand with a dividend for the workforce. There has to be job security. There has to be decent pay. There has to be decent terms and conditions of employment. If you don’t get that buy-in from people at the start, you are going to run up against obstacles during the course of time to implement whatever change it is you want to implement.
Q149 Mr David Jones: The recent survey indicated 30% satisfaction over pay and benefits, which is extremely low, but in fact that is down from 37% in 2009. The issues that you have just identified would seem to have always been a source of grievance or concern to the workforce. Would you say that is right?
Paul O'Connor: Many years ago—we are talking 30 to 40 years ago—there was a perception within the public sector that you would end up with a degree of job security and, on that basis, you didn’t look comparatively at the private sector. What has happened, after the seven years of pay restraints, is that things have got progressively worse. PCS has just balloted its members on a nearly 50% turnout: 99% of them said the pay cap should be lifted and funding should be provided for an above inflation pay rise, and 80% of them said they were prepared to take industrial action if there is no change following the Budget.
Q150 Mr David Jones: The point I was making, though, was that at 37%, back in 2009, things were still fairly low, but the satisfaction in that respect was still pretty low, wasn’t it?
Paul O'Connor: Yes. Ever since 1979, successive Governments have implemented, in various guises, a policy of pay restraint across the public sector, and that is why it is getting progressively worse.
Garry Graham: If I could pick up on those figures. From recollection, around three quarters said that they believed that they would be remunerated better working elsewhere. I can’t remember the most recent figures, but certainly the last figures asked people about employment intentions and I think around one quarter said that they wished to leave employment either now or within the next year. You know I have a slightly different take with regard to the figures on workload. If I was putting those figures to a chief exec or HR director in a reputable private sector company, those would be figures that they would have concerns about for the future, in terms of resilience and future service delivery and taking action to address it. The real concern among our members is that we have seen these concerns repeatedly raised through the People Survey with regard both to pay areas and to the alignment with the employer, and their perception is certainly that no positive action has been taken to address these issues, leading to a level of frustration.
Q151 Kelvin Hopkins: On the relationship between Ministers and their Departments, I want to go back to Lord Maude, who was the Minister for the Cabinet Office until recently. He reflected on his time in Government. He said he was frustrated that the civil servants did not provide sufficient challenge, and he thought that the habit of giving very robust, candid advice to Ministers had deteriorated a lot in those intervening years of Labour Governments. He was a Conservative, so we will put that to one side. There has been a deterioration in the candid advice given. Is there a sense in which civil servants have been cowered by wilful Ministers over a period?
Dave Penman: I have to say I don’t recognise the picture that Lord Maude paints. I think he has made a few disappointing interventions of late, and I think we have a cadre of very robust Permanent Secretaries and senior civil servants who speak truth unto power. That does not mean there aren’t individual challenges, either with Permanent Secretaries or with Ministers. It will not always be a happy ship. I don’t recognise a picture of the civil service cowered into not giving some harsh truths to Ministers. It is not something I would give credence to, the picture that he paints.
Q152 Kelvin Hopkins: What are the factors that influence the success of the relationship between the Minister and his Department, and what are the challenges for civil servants in establishing and maintaining a successful relationship with Ministers?
Dave Penman: Lord Maude’s role was at the centre. There is a real frustration at the centre when you are dealing with delegated authority, but trying to get the civil service to work coherently has been a feature of this Committee’s work over many years, in terms of what the delegated nature of the civil service means. I had a joke with Lord Maude about this when he was Minister for the Cabinet Office. I said, “Well, look, it was your Government in the 1990s that started this, in terms of really delegating and providing that delegated authority”. He was joking that he thought he had gone too far, so I think he had the particular frustration of trying to get the civil service to work and co-ordinate together.
If you talk to a Permanent Secretary in one of the operational Departments about the relationship with the Minister, the level of challenge and the nature of that relationship, I think you will find, by and large, that it is a very different relationship. It is a robust relationship and a constructive one. It is not perfect and there will be individual examples where it won’t work. I don’t think the system is broken. I don’t think it doesn’t work systematically across the piece, but the nature of Government and the nature of politics is that may be very different in different Departments at different times.
Q153 Kelvin Hopkins: It seems to me to be healthy that a senior Minister wants strong advice and wants robust civil servants, which is good.
This is to Paul O’Connor, if I may: how do civil servants who work on the frontline see their relationship with Ministers, and how much is this determined by what they see in the media? How does this affect their work?
Paul O'Connor: I am not sure the media has that much of an effect on the way in which they carry out their roles. I think there are specific Departments where there is an unwelcome spotlight at times. I am thinking specifically of the Home Office where immigration, in particular, has been used as a political football down the years, and the staff did feel the pressure of that. By and large, our members don’t have that much day-to-day engagement with senior figures within Departments or with Ministers of State, so it does not really affect how they do their day-to-day jobs.
I would like to comment on the issue of Lord Maude’s statement, because I think he is speaking with an element of forked tongue on that. During his tenure, the Public and Commercial Services Union was a very vociferous opponent of much of what he tried to impose on the civil service. Rather than welcome that discourse, his response was to try to bankrupt our union by withdrawing the check-off facility through which members pay their subscriptions. Far from welcoming a loud voice in opposition to his plans to engineer a decent debate about where things are heading, it was most unwelcome to him actually.
Garry Graham: I want to pick up on the issue of Lord Maude, because I am not sure he has been entirely consistent with regard to the views that he expresses on civil servants. The proposition you have put to us is the suggestion that he did not believe he was challenged enough by the civil servants. In the most recent public statements he has made, which are unhelpful because civil servants cannot speak up on their own behalf, he was putting forward the proposition that when he was challenged he regarded this as unnecessary complexity, obfuscation and foot dragging by civil servants. On the one hand he is saying that he values challenge, but then when challenge is provided he seems to take a slightly different view with regard to that.
Q154 Chair: We will be taking evidence from Francis Maude. I am sure he will want to respond to that point. Can I put it to you that I think what he resented more than anything was perhaps people not challenging him when he pushed back against challenge and, rather, the challenge came surreptitiously or organisationally rather than openly? How would you advise one of your members to deal with a situation like that?
Dave Penman: That has certainly been the theme of his criticism, yes. That reflects, as I said, the challenge that perhaps individual Secretaries of State and Departments had around resistance to some of the changes that he was driving from the centre, rather than simply being around individual civil servants. There was a conflict with some of the reforms he was trying to introduce and how Departments, particularly the bigger ones, saw those and how they felt they fitted into it. There was a bit of that resistance between the centre and Departments, rather than simply the civil servants going off and doing their own thing and not challenging him face to face. It is rather unfortunate that we are characterising some of that just now.
Q155 Kelvin Hopkins: My last question is about the implications of policies. There has been some suggestion from NAO and elsewhere that policies are decided but the implications are not spelt out. There is not sufficient feedback from civil servants saying, “You cannot do this, Minister because—” It is every level, of course, because often the problems are on the frontline, where Mr O’Connor’s members work. But feeding back possible implications might cause difficulty. There is not enough of that. Is that fair?
Dave Penman: First, we all have members that work on the frontline of delivering services, just in different parts of the public sector. There is always an issue around when Government is introducing policy and public services. What is the reality of its impact, which is often unintentional in relation to policy development, and how do you have an iterative process that learns around some of that feedback? That is a challenge for lots of organisations, and it is a very big challenge when you are talking about big policy and tens of thousands of staff delivering vital and complex public services.
I don’t think that is necessarily about a resistance to give difficult messages back to Ministers. It is part of the complex nature and difficulties of delivering public services. That does not mean there are no examples of that, but in the main that is the issue at hand: how big, complex public services are delivered and learn from the mistakes, rather than there being a resistance in the civil service to give bad messages.
Garry Graham: It is a broader issue and it is not solely linked to public services, because I see it in lots of other organisations as well. Part of it is about speaking truth to power, and part of it is about how information travels upwards in an organisation. So it is not just about dealing with a Minister; it is about an appraisal and good news often travels upwards in organisations very rapidly. Less good news is often swallowed and sometimes filtered by the organisation, and there is a cultural issue here because I think that there was evidence previously presented about challenge and the question as to—it may not be absolutely draconian but, if you are an individual who consistently challenges in the organisation, is that going to assist your career within that organisation?
Q156 Chair: How should that be addressed?
Garry Graham: I think it is a broader cultural issue.
Q157 Chair: How do you readdress the cultural issues? How do Ministers or senior civil servants address the cultural issues? Wasn’t that what Francis Maude was trying to do?
Garry Graham: I don’t think it is simply limited to Ministers and senior civil servants. It is about openness within organisations and your ability to challenge upwards and, where problems are identified, having a level of confidence that those issues will get to the top of the shop and be considered.
Q158 Chair: That is the problem, so how do we change it?
Dave Penman: There are no easy solutions. I certainly don’t have them. I had to wait five months to get my broadband installed, and that is a private sector organisation that is failing to deliver an effective service in a commercial sense. I am sure anyone trying to get broadband installed will tell you these tales of woe and frustration and about bits of the organisation not talking to each other, so I think most large organisations struggle with this as an issue.
Q159 Chair: We all blame the Government for bad broadband.
Dave Penman: It is not who I would blame, but that is probably not for the record. There are those broader cultural issues around management, open management and how you deal with those issues. Politicians can play a positive and a negative role in all of this. Politicians are frustrated. They are there for a long period of time. Perhaps some of the sub-text around how they deal with these issues does not encourage negative responses. Rather than point the finger at politicians, I think it is more around just large complex organisations getting this right. Some of them do, some of them don’t.
Chair: Please place your answers to how we fix this in a stamped addressed envelope. This is what the inquiry is about.
Q160 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Can I follow on from Kelvin on what you have been saying, because when you join a commercial operation you know what the company does. You know it delivers broadband. You know roughly who the head of the company is. What you have as civil servants is very difficult, because you come in as a civil servant under one leadership and suddenly—hey presto—after an election it changes direction, so of course the policy changes and the emphasis changes. How much is performance in the civil service affected these days by civil servants’ personal views on matters?
Gareth Hills: That is not something I recognise at all. There is an interesting point there about Government projects starting while politicians are still debating policy. That lack of a clear gateway can lead to some tensions between Ministers and civil servants, but I don’t see civil servants’ private views in any way impacting on policy. That is certainly not anything I recognise.
Q161 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: You think that civil service impartiality—the integrity of that—is paramount?
Gareth Hills: Civil service impartiality, along with the civil service code of conduct, is something that every civil servant—myself as well—lives every day. It is of prime importance to me.
Q162 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: I suppose I am checking back in from my experience and my family’s experience, to make sure of that impartiality. Do you all agree with that?
Garry Graham: I agree fundamentally with that. There has been some criticism from the right and some criticism from the far left as to the impartiality of parts of the civil service. Certainly, in all my experience, the civil service is impartial. Having read some of the interviews with ex-Ministers, I think there is sometimes a frustration there. Certainly, one of them was saying, “I wish that civil servants had given me their opinion more regularly”. From “their opinion”, I take that to mean their view of what was going on not in a party political partisan view, but having the freedom and the confidence to say, “This is what is happening, Minister”, or, “These are the implications, Minister. I am here to serve you, but I think you should be aware that these are the concerns I have”.
Paul O'Connor: I don’t think people’s individual political viewpoints, in terms of members we represent at the coalface, affect the way they do the—
Q163 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: I was not asking about the politics. I was asking about their personal views about policies. I was not trying to make it political, sorry.
Paul O'Connor: The two things are intrinsically linked, though. I think our members understand that different Governments have different views on how things should be delivered. What has a more detrimental impact on performance is the day-to-day struggles that our members have. Years of pay restraints mean that we now have members going to food banks on a weekly basis just trying to survive. If you are engaged in that struggle you are not coming to work in a condition to give your all, and that is much more of an important issue.
Q164 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Sorry, I have not heard what you are saying. Could you repeat what you have just said to me? Sorry, I did not quite catch what you said.
Paul O'Connor: We have members visiting food banks on a weekly basis, and when you are engaged in a day-to-day struggle for survival you are not in a position to come into work and give your all in terms of your performance. That has a much more detrimental effect on people’s working lives than Ministers’ views on service delivery.
Q165 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: I am very concerned to hear that you have members visiting food banks. Do you have some qualitative and quantitative analysis of that?
Paul O'Connor: Yes.
Q166 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Could you provide that information to us?
Paul O'Connor: Yes.
Mrs Cheryl Gillan: That would be really good. That was an aside. Mr Penman, did you have anything to add to that?
Chair: I will just give you the Chair for a second. We must press on. We have a lot more questions. We have four panellists. We must have short questions and short answers. I am going to start cutting people off now.
Q167 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Mr Graham, do people with specialist knowledge and skills have sufficient status within the civil service to be able to give frank advice early enough in the policy process?
Garry Graham: I have concerns about that as to where specialists fit, in terms of the pecking order, with regard to policy formulation, policy delivery and policy analysis. That is also linked into broader issues that might be raised later on in terms of the questioning with regard to the development of skills within the civil service, whether it should be on a departmental silo basis, if you characterise it that way, or a cross-cutting, civil service-wide basis. We all talk and we all espouse evidence-based policy development and delivery. In order to do that, you have to have the specialist skills that support that.
Q168 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Do you think implementation issues are fully taken into account when people are designing policy?
Garry Graham: There are a number of challenges, one of which is about pace. Partly that is about the political context. Our members in the Ministry Defence deal with hugely complex issues on procurement decisions, for example, and the Minister will want advice on making a decision today about a change in policy—carrier build is a good example of that. An answer could be given on the day, but was that an answer that was robust and had the depth that was necessary to come to a truly informed view? There is a question mark in my head around that. It is about linking your capacity in terms of specialist skills into the policy forum and ensuring that Ministers understand on what basis they are being advised.
Q169 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: We know what the problem is. What are the implications from that?
Garry Graham: Part of the implications is that we have the workforce plan in terms of upskilling the civil service. It talks about the specialists and certainly Prospect has long championed the notion that people, whether they are an engineer, a scientist or another specialist working in the civil service, should be regarded as a civil service-wide resource, and it should be cross-cutting across the civil service with career plans, career support and pay and reward strategies that sit alongside that. While this was mentioned in the workforce plan, I have to say that pace and work on that from the centre has been limited.
Q170 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Do you have further and better particulars on the various projects across Government?
Garry Graham: Yes, we can give you those.
Q171 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Could you provide those to the Committee?
Garry Graham: Yes, we can.
Mrs Cheryl Gillan: One that springs to mind for me, as a personal issue, is HS2 and the implications of what has been happening there.
Q172 Chair: Can I just chip in with something else? Amyas Morse has been very clear that he rarely sees just enough to meet the capability. It is always a case of the best is the enemy of the good or adequate. Why does this happen? This is something that comes from civil servants.
Garry Graham: Is that a question posed to me?
Chair: Yes.
Garry Graham: I think it happens because people take a great pride in their work and they want to serve the Minister and they want to provide the Minister with the best advice that they can.
Q173 Chair: No, it is not about best advice. It is about the best project. The project is always over-specified and too high tech, when a simple job would have been just as good. It would have been cheaper and quicker. Why are projects so often over-specified and made too complicated?
Garry Graham: I would need to look at particular examples with regard to that.
Q174 Chair: Why do you think Amyas Morse says, “I very rarely see programmes and major projects in the civil service that are just enough to meet capability”?
Garry Graham: I would have to reflect on that and what I think about specific—
Q175 Chair: Mr Penman?
Dave Penman: I think it is the ambition of Ministers. If you compare delivering a project for Government with delivering something for the private sector, the breadth of what Ministers necessarily want and the influence on what they are looking to achieve is partly about politics, not simply about delivering just good enough. Is that what the Minister wants to say for re-election: “We delivered something that was just good enough?” Around that they are always overly ambitious, so I think there is a nature of Government in politics.
Q176 Chair: They are using political pressure.
Dave Penman: It is part of that. I am not suggesting in any way that the civil service is immune from some of this, but, on political pressure, if you are a Minister do you want a big project or a small project? Do you want to do a big change or a small change? It is a culture of trying to be seen, as a politician, to be able to exert influence over people’s lives when we live in a global world and it looks frustratingly like the Government seems to be able to do less to impact people’s lives at times. That is part of the influence around some of those projects.
Chair: I have it.
Q177 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: That is a sequitur, because this is really for the FDA. We all know that special advisers often come in for a great deal of criticism, but surely a good one can prevent that politicisation of your members. Do you have some examples of good special advisers and also examples of where the relationships have gone wrong, and how can we learn from those?
Dave Penman: I don’t particularly want to name special advisers, either in a positive or negative capacity. The general point is that civil servants value special advisers, so they recognise the role that they provide. Ministers need good political advice as well as good policy advice and, on the vast majority of occasions, special advisers do the job well, work effectively with the rest of the civil service and provide a role that isolates civil servants from that overt kind of political advice. We find out about it when it goes wrong and—
Q178 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Without naming names, do you have some examples of relationships that have gone wrong and what we can learn from them?
Dave Penman: Yes. The difficulties we as a union have experienced with special advisers in a Department have come, in the main, when Ministers have let them off the leash. They have operated with the power of the Minister, as they should constitutionally, and in effect they are exerting a control and a power disproportionate to the role. That is the point where it starts to create problems and conflict, around where special advisers move beyond what should be the normal reach and Ministers, effectively, are giving them consent to do that.
Q179 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: I probably know the answer to this, but how would you remedy it?
Dave Penman: There are checks and balances in the system, both in Departments and across the civil service. For example, where we have seen that in a Department, at times the centre has taken a role, whether politically or in terms of management of the civil servants, and it is mainly about a power dynamic. It is about a Minister and the power of a Minister in Cabinet. If a Minister has a strong position and is untouchable, then it is going to be very difficult for either the Prime Minister or the head of the civil service to intervene and deal with something. There is inevitably always a difficulty around that.
We have on other matters suggested that, where there are difficulties around Ministers, politicians or political appointments, there should be an opportunity for civil servants to have an external route to raise concerns about behaviour. That clearly is a broad brush around the issues that we are encountering just now, but that could be one of them where it is felt that the power dynamic in a Department is not an effective check and balance on that sort of behaviour and there would be a route outside where people could complain.
Q180 Paul Flynn: You said a long time ago that the overarching ethos of the civil service was the unimportance of being right. This was said so long ago about two projects and an illustration was given. One was the building of the steam-generating, heavy water nuclear reactor that never worked, and the other one, which is a contemporary one, was the building of Concorde, which was described by wise people at the time as a virility symbol to the nation that could never be a commercial success. The people that were wrong won both of those arguments and the careers of those who warned against them withered.
We could take it to a more recent one. There were those who warned against the futility of Britain’s involvement in the second Iraq war and the futility of going into Helmand province in the belief that not a shot would be fired, but it resulted in the deaths of 650 British soldiers, so these matters have grave consequences. Politicians can use our votes on this but isn’t it inhibiting for civil servants who are convinced they are right, and are proved by events to be right, that they have to be forced into silence? We have made no progress since we were planning to build the useless virility symbol of Concorde.
Chair: That was a question.
Paul Flynn: Mr Hills said something along those lines.
Chair: Let them answer.
Gareth Hills: I am not sure I understand what the question is, but I think—
Paul Flynn: The question is: do these civil servants, as we are being told, have to bury their best ideas and their power to challenge authority and to speak truth to power because of their job prospects—the fact that they will be punished if they challenge what is the ruling nonsense of the day, whether it is Conservative nonsense or Labour nonsense that happens to be current—or should they speak truth to power?
Gareth Hills: They should definitely speak truth unto power. I quoted earlier what Sir Amyas said when he was before you on the 7th. This is kind of aligned to the question we had earlier about over-delivering in terms of projects, or looking for the best of class. I think that is because of the scale of projects that the Government undertakes, which, quite frankly, no private sector organisation would often go near.
Civil servants are also under tremendous scrutiny from informed and ill- informed commentators and politicians—yourselves excluded of course. All that feeds into a tension around what civil servants feel they can do and how far they can go in speaking truth unto power. But, certainly, I think it is imbued in the very DNA of FDA members and the core of the way they operate as civil servants.
Q181 Paul Flynn: This Government has treated civil servants with a reduction in their numbers of 20%: it is the smallest civil service we have had since the War. Now they have had Brexit dumped on them. Is this reasonable? Are the numbers of civil servants now—this greatly reduced force of civil servants—equipped to deal with Brexit and all its demands?
Gareth Hills: I go back again to the quote from the NAO: the Government needs to prioritise and reorganise its priorities. That is something for Ministers to do, obviously with advice from civil servants.
I know that in my own Department, HMRC, we have about 250 projects, seven of which I understand are priority projects. I know conversations are going on in HMRC, but it is difficult to have those conversations with that added pressure of Brexit. Inevitably, it is the lens through which all policy discussions are currently looked at.
Garry Graham: Do we have the job numbers and skills that we need to plan both for Brexit, in terms of supporting the negotiations taking place, and, equally—if not more importantly—for supporting the UK post-Brexit and whatever that may look like? Do we have the jobs and the skills in the civil service that we need in the capacity? If that is the question, then the answer is an emphatic no. If you look at areas such as DEFRA, areas of border control and a whole swathe of other areas, whether you are planning for a hard Brexit or a soft Brexit, do we have the numbers and the capacity that we will need for the future? The answer to that is no. The issue is going to be about gaining clarity as to what that looks like and how you set your priorities and cut your cloth in terms of policy formulation and implementation.
Q182 Paul Flynn: So what do we do? We have a civil service that has been cut to the bone. I represent many civil servants and I greatly admire their fortitude, their integrity and the fact that they put up with what seem to be very low wages and have done so for a long time. Would you not agree that the treatment by Government has been such that we are facing grave problems with Brexit? A sinkhole will appear in the road. I sit on three Select Committees, and each time I hear of possible improvements that might come from Brexit, there are at least a dozen certain disasters that will result from Brexit.
Chair: Can you ask the question, please?
Paul Flynn: Who will get the blame for this? Do you think it will be the Government, or will they dump it on the civil service, as Francis Maude is doing now to account for all his failures?
Dave Penman: Yes, they are all looking at me. There is no doubt that Brexit is an enormous challenge for the civil service. There are questions over whether the Government is providing sufficient resources to deliver whatever outcome. The biggest challenge I think for the civil service—and if you look at even the session that PAC had yesterday, talking about borders—is the lack of clarity about what they are being asked to deliver. They don’t know what resource they are being asked for, because they don’t know what they are expected to deliver yet, so, unlike any other area of policy, the civil service is struggling with the clarity of purpose of Government so that it can at least make its demand around resource and capability in terms of limits. I think there is no doubt about that.
Your point at the beginning seemed to be around bad decisions. Ultimately, civil servants advise and, whether it is a policy on Brexit or whether it is Concorde or Helmand, Ministers decide, and that is as it should be. Ministers at times will make the wrong decision, as judged by history or whoever but, ultimately, that is right. That is the job of politicians.
There is a danger around Brexit. It has been one of the most polarising political issues that we have faced as a country, and so we are increasingly seeing finger-pointing. We are seeing civil servants singled out by either politicians or those around politicians, or by commentators that are looking to make accusations around civil servants. The nature of that sort of debate has been rather unedifying, both in the run-up to the referendum and since then and that is a real danger for Government, where politicians or those around them continually look to point the finger when we all know it is going to be a complex and difficult job to deliver and we are looking for scapegoats around that. Or, as we saw, interestingly, around who would be the next International Development Secretary, all of the speculation was around the Cabinet balance between Remainers and Brexiteers, not who would actually make a good International Development Secretary. That is one example of the tainting of Brexit around so many areas of public service and politics just now.
Chair: That was a long question and a long answer. Mr Graham?
Garry Graham: A brief point with regard to this. Dave is right about concerns about civil servants being scapegoated. There is a broader issue here, and it is highlighted in the evidence. Two of the key referendums that the UK has had in its recent history are about potential independence for Scotland and the referendum about the European Union. In both those cases politicians precluded civil servants in Westminster from doing preparatory work with regard to the different scenarios that might arise out of those referendums. That was a political decision. I think it was wrong, because I think the job of the civil service is to make contingencies for all the permutations and scenarios that might arise. It is not to express a partial view or a preference one way or the other and that was a deep failing, in my view.
Chair: Mr O’Connor, briefly.
Paul O'Connor: A quick one, with a helpful suggestion. It is clear, as Garry said, that there was no contingency plan across the civil service for Brexit and now people are responding to events. Jon Thompson, Chief Executive of HMRC, appeared before the Public Accounts Committee and said that HMRC is going to need thousands more staff, yet at the same time his own Department is continuing with its office closure programme, closing 160 offices with thousands of job cuts. What needs to happen is there needs to be a pause on the office closure programme across HMRC, DWP and all the big Departments of State while the civil service gets to grips with what Brexit means and what we need in terms of public service delivery in the aftermath of it.
Chair: Ronnie Cowan.
Paul Flynn: I really have not—this is the Brexit part of the Committee.
Chair: Ronnie Cowan caught my eye.
Q183 Ronnie Cowan: We seem to have veered into this topic just now, I have sat very patiently and I am going to jump in now. The Civil Service People Survey has suggested that 42% of civil servants did not consider their workload to be acceptable, one third thought their work-life balance was unacceptable, and one quarter wanted to leave their organisation. Pay has been cut by between 15% and 20% in real terms since 2010. I am looking at the response to the survey. DWP and HMRC are among the lowest scores in response to this survey. I am not putting words into your mouth, but is there a feeling that the pressure they are under is restricting how they do their jobs?
We have also heard today that the civil service are experiencing in-work poverty, so what is in place for those particular individuals in the civil service to ensure their mental health in the workplace?
Garry Graham: If I could start on that. I attended a conference yesterday speaking about the Farmer review on mental health in the workplace across the public and the private sector. The unions are going to be engaging with the Cabinet Office and PSEC on the issue of mental health, and lots of work has been done already on this, but there is lots of work to be taken forward.
I have a particular view with regard to mental health in the civil service and I do not think that you can see it in isolation from issues such as stress and workload, and you have to look at the other issues impacting upon staff. One is about the nature of performance management that we have in the civil service. An invention of Francis Maude was a very aggressive approach towards performance management, which effectively introduced a ranking and quota system, whereby even if you had met all your objectives you could still be marked down as not achieving, because allegedly, compared with your colleagues, you were not within that hierarchy, so there is lots of work for us to do around mental health in the civil service.
I think it is important that the civil service looks at the other processes of support and mental wellbeing within the civil service. I see a fundamental tension between aggressive attendance management systems and encouraging people to share with their employer that they may have a mental health issue within the workplace and they need support. I see a tension between aggressive performance management systems and encouraging people to be open in that context, and I think one of the issues that the civil service struggles with, along with many other employers, is encouraging and giving people the confidence to disclose that they have mental health issues and to seek support where that is appropriate, but making the employer aware.
Gareth Hills: Yes. The FDA has done some surveys that are separate from the Civil Service People Survey. In a pay survey this year, 86% of respondents—over 1,400 of our members responded—said they do not believe their organisation is sufficiently resourced to meet the challenge that they face in the year ahead. Two-thirds of our SCS members say they do not have enough resource to deal with challenges. We are inching ever closer to a decade of pay restraint. I think that is reflected by a decade of low engagement, particularly among those bigger organisations that were mentioned.
We are doing a lot of work in FDA to look at work-life balance and the impact that has on health and wellbeing, but I am afraid the reality is that lots of Departments don’t monitor or record the hours that their staff work, so there is a disconnect there. We are collecting those details and we will not be afraid to name and shame Departments that do that.
Pay is a particular concern for us. I have just mentioned that decade of pay restraint. We have recently launched a pay campaign and included a pay calculator where people can put in details and check how worse off they are. I looked at my own details this morning: I am 12.4% worse off since 2010 and my take-home pay, if you look in line with inflation, shows that I have lost £8,500 on my annual salary. That is before the increase in pension contributions. All those are factors leading to what I am afraid remain low engagement scores. I do acknowledge some heartening results, particularly around how the civil service handles change; views of leadership and management; and—as always, I think—the pride that people take in their work.
We mentioned ill-informed commentators earlier, and again I am not talking about this Committee. I think that does have an impact on FDA members. It is important to remember that we are not faceless bureaucrats, and I hope you have seen that from me today. I am somebody who for 30 years has gone into work every day to strive to deliver for the nation. I describe myself often as a builder, although I am a tax inspector, because the money that I bring in builds schools, hospitals, nurseries, libraries and playgrounds, and every time I see the work of not just HMRC members but FDA members criticised in the press I know that it affects those people as the individuals they are rather than faceless bureaucrats.
Q184 Ronnie Cowan: Given the pressures that you have outlined there what is morale like among your membership?
Gareth Hills: I think the People Survey reflects the nature of the morale. One of the joys I have in my job as an FDA official is going round the country visiting members in other Departments and speaking to them and people in the workplace, and I think the People Survey results are a fair reflection of where we are.
Paul O'Connor: I touched on the issue of the pressures that our members are facing day-to-day just to survive because of the policy of pay restraint, so I will not labour that point again. But just to give you an indication of some of the problems that are inherent within the system in the civil service, we have over 200 pay bargaining units across the civil and public service. That means 200 sets of pay negotiations going on every single year, and what our union would like to see is a return to national civil service pay bargaining at Cabinet Office level. We believe that would be the route to address the inequities that are inherent within the system, particularly in respect of women, who are much lower paid than men in many Departments.
We also think there is a benefit for the civil service in that, because it provides a more flexible workforce and makes it easier to move people across Departments to deal with pressure points in workloads.
Garry Graham: I think when we look across pay—and I mentioned pay at the beginning—there has to be a fundamental step-change with regards to pay. The Scottish Government has signalled that it is going to take a different approach towards pay next year. It was interesting hearing the Prime Minister the one time she did appear on TV prior to the election and talked with a member of the audience about pay in the public sector. It was a nurse. The nurse raised the issue of the 1% cap, and the Prime Minister responded by saying, “Well, you also benefit from pay progression”. Well, that will come as news to the vast majority of our members working in the civil service, where Francis Maude withdrew pay progression, and I think civil servants, if you look at statistics, have been most harshly hit by Government pay policy.
Now that is not just the attitude or the view of the unions. The Cabinet Office has commissioned independent work by Korn Ferry Hay looking at pay and reward for the civil service public sector compared with the private sector. I wish I could share that information with you, but the Cabinet Office is not allowing us to do that. What that points to is that pay in the civil service is lagging behind the private sector at all grades now, but it is not just pay. When you look at total reward, including pensions, total reward in the civil service is lagging significantly behind the private sector at all levels now. That is simply not a sustainable approach for the future.
Chair: I think that point is well made.
Q185 Ronnie Cowan: What was the impact on the civil service’s effectiveness?
Garry Graham: I look at pay policy and how it has been implemented, and it is a credit to our members in terms of what they are delivering and what they continue to deliver. The issue for me is it is not a sustainable policy for the future, and I have said publicly elsewhere that somebody who believes it is sustainable is either a liar or a fool. Occasionally in this job you get to meet people who are both—obviously nobody on this Committee—but it is simply not sustainable in the future. Ministers often laud the private sector. No reputable employer that I deal with in the private sector would see this as a coherent HR and reward strategy that paves the way to corporate success for their organisation.
The feeling is that the edge of Niagara is out there and we can’t tell you exactly where it is, but it is certainly not sustainable for the future. As I said, I wish we could share that independent evidence commissioned by the Cabinet Office with you, but we have been told that it is commercially in confidence and cannot be shared more widely. That does stand in sharp contrast to some of the statements that Ministers have made about public sector pay and total reward in the public sector compared with the private sector. My concern is they are either being poorly advised or economically without challenge, shall we say.
Q186 Paul Flynn: The civil service in my constituency went on strike for a day about an outsourcing proposal and it turned out to be absolutely right, because the proposal was a disaster and it failed and lost a large amount of money. This was in the area of shared services. Do you think that the way that you have been beaten up by the Government and treated as a soft target for the last seven years, by robbing you of jobs and now shaking the money tree and finding half a billion pounds in a panic to employ new civil servants is one that should make you rather more belligerent than you have been in the past? Could you be accused of being docile? As I say, those civil servants who went on strike for that one single day made a very eloquent point, but again there is no advantage, no recognition that the Government has used the civil service as a soft target for all these years. Will you be more belligerent in future?
Chair: Yes or no.
Dave Penman: I would not limit it to 2010. This started under the Labour Government. The civil service has been the whipping boy of a succession of Governments of different colours.
Q187 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: There are some enormous salaries being paid to people in public sector projects. I am looking at HS2 and the fact that it has reported massive six-figure sums to the people at the top of that. Are those people considered to be civil servants? For example, do they join the FDA? Are they part of your organisation, Mr Graham? I would be very interested to know what the status of these individuals is, because they are absolutely astronomical and eye-watering salaries, as are the redundancy payments, whether they are authorised or not.
Dave Penman: It is not a broad brush answer or question. It is dependent on the project they are working on. What I would say generally is again—
Q188 Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Can I ask specifically about HS2?
Dave Penman: Again, we conclude in our evidence that academics elsewhere will talk about big infrastructure projects and say there is no comparison in the private sector. Nowhere in the private sector does anyone do this kind of stuff, so if you are going to have someone running a project that runs into tens of billions of pounds and you want that to run effectively, you want to try to get the best person for the job. Inevitably the civil service, at different points in the civil service, run up against a very commercial market. It raises huge tensions around public servants receiving the sort of salaries that you are talking about where it feels instinctively like, “Why should public servants be paid those six-figure sums?” but in any other organisation, if you were asking anyone to run a project such as that, you would recognise you have to operate in a commercial market and you need to pay to some degree a going rate.
Chair: This is taking too long. Hurry up, please.
Mrs Cheryl Gillan: Could I ask you to come back to me with some clarity as to on what projects people are considered to still be civil servants and are members of your organisations and so on, so that we have some clear idea? These arm’s length bodies are unclear on this.
Q189 David Morris: I will make it back to a question. Previously highlighted in this session was the lack of proper workforce planning in the civil service. How far is that still the case, would you say?
Garry Graham: It is a big issue in terms of workforce planning, and the devil is in the detail here. So while I might sit here and berate the Cabinet Office on occasion for a lack of vim and vigour in regards to workforce planning, sometimes when I go down to departmental level and look at employers, the MoD cannot tell me how many engineers they have working. You would think that was a fairly fundamental issue that they should have as part of their workforce plan.
As I have said, our aspiration—and I think it sits well in terms of the workforce strategy—is that specialist civil servants, scientists and engineers who work in the commercial professions and functions should be regarded as a civil service-wide resource, and that is just not happening at the moment. We recently did a survey of our members in terms of how much engagement there was between them and their professional grouping, and 72% said that there was little or no engagement. 70% said that they had no clear career paths across Government. There are clear examples of areas where learning development budgets have been cut within organisations. I think one of the real challenges for the civil service is that, if we want to develop our people, and if we want individuals to flourish in the workplace, we need to give them the support in terms of developing the skills and in how they plan and develop their career across the civil service. Quite simply, that infrastructure is not there for them at the moment.
On top of that, I would bolt on that there needs to be a coherent pay and reward strategy for these different professional groups, which there is not at the moment.
Dave Penman: I think the civil service probably recognises that it does not do this as well as it should. The workforce strategy that the Cabinet Office launched last year is part of that recognition of the support they give Departments to deal with this. It is difficult when you are in an era of austerity. When you are a big Government Department, you have to lose tens of thousands of jobs and you have to incentivise people to co-operate with that—encourage people to go because the numbers are the clear priority for the Department. Therefore what you get at the end of that is the question: have the right people gone? Have you encouraged people with experience to go, because they tend to be older and more likely to leave an organisation and accept redundancy on a voluntary basis? I think Departments have struggled with this as they have worn down in such a significant way in a relatively short period of time, and that is one of the areas that Departments really need to improve on.
We recognise this as unions and we try to work with Departments on improving it. It comes back to that point where you are asked and tasked with delivering a reduction in workforce, cuts in budgets and a big Government challenge of priorities for the future, even before Brexit. Finding out whether you have the right people at any one point in time to deliver those demands is a very difficult job, when you are trying to manage all of those competing priorities. I do not think Departments have got that right up until now. I think it is improving a little bit. Interestingly, around Brexit, I think Departments are recognising that they have to reprioritise. HMRC have been talking about that very point, about building a future programme versus the challenge around Brexit and whether it is to be paused or changed as a result of that. There has been a lot of good co-ordination around Brexit, if you look at the work that has been done around pooling resources to support DExEU. There has been better co-ordination around Government Departments, so I think it is an improving picture.
Paul O'Connor: I think what has happened with successive Governments is that they have implemented job cut programmes that have been numbers-based. They have not been based on any practical workforce planning or based on any reality. We think that the Government of the day should be engaged in a discussion with the workforce itself about what resources it needs. To take HMRC as an example, in any one year a tax inspector would yield, on a conservative estimate, £600,000 for the Treasury in tax collection. You pay them £30,000 in salary, so instead of laying those people off we should be recruiting more people to that tax collection Department.
Q190 David Morris: Do you think that the civil service relies on filling the skills gap by recruiting from the private sector, and if that is the case, how well do you think the civil service integrate external hiring?
Dave Penman: I think it is a mixed picture. At times the civil service needs to go to the market, effectively. It is probably good for most organisations to have a balance between growing your own talent and bringing people from outside. That creates its own tensions, because quite often people come in with a higher salary level than existing civil servants. If a civil servant competes for an externally advertised post at the advertised salary, they do not get the salary that has been advertised if they are successful and they beat external competition. They only get 5% or 10% on promotion, so it is rather galling at times for civil servants to see this difference between what external hires are paid. Because of the difference in salary levels between the private sector and the rest of the public sector, to be honest, in the civil service, it quite often creates a two-tier workforce.
You took evidence before on this issue of external hires and how successfully they are implemented, and I think there is a real issue there. I thought that evidence was very good about some of those issues around embedding people culturally, making a success of their expertise and thinking about that as a departmental resource and whether the Department supports those individuals enough.
Q191 David Morris: That leads nicely on to what I was going to ask next. What provision for helping your members is there in the civil service for shifting between sectors? In layman’s terms, if you are saying that somebody is being hired externally for, to make it simple, £40,000, but somebody internally gets the job and only gets paid £35,000, why is that? Is that because of grading? Please explain.
Dave Penman: The example I gave is external. So all SCS appointments are now advertised externally because there is a pay range with a minimum and a maximum of about £60,000-wide, so it goes from about £60,000 up to £120,000. They may pitch that job to the market at about £90,000. So they advertise and an internal person applies for that job and is successful. They see off competition from outside, but they do not get the £90,000. They get 5% or 10% of whatever their salary was on promotion.
Q192 David Morris: So why do you think they advertise it at £90,000 and then give the—
Dave Penman: Because they will have taken some advice about what the market rate is for that job.
Q193 David Morris: Basically it is just a figure plucked out of thin air that would be at the highest rate in the private sector? Is that what it is?
Dave Penman: No, I do not think it is that. I would not say the highest rate. It is about what they think is the salary level they need. Depending on the role, how market facing it is, and what evidence there is about recruitment, that will influence whether it is £90,000, £80,000 or whatever. It is not just a figure picked out of the air, but it is what they expect, so if you are looking for someone experienced you may have to pay more. You make all of those judgments about what you think the market pays.
Q194 David Morris: So in effect it is just a hook to entice somebody to apply for the job and so when they get there, say, “Oh, no, it is not £90,000. It is £60,000”?
Dave Penman: No, if someone is brought in from outside they will get the £90,000. If someone is recruited internally they will not get the £90,000. That is effectively how the system works. Civil servants do not get the advertised salary for the job. They get 5% or 10% on promotion, for example.
Garry Graham: If you look at the evidence and the conclusions of the Senior Salaries Review Body, that pointed to the fact that the majority of people coming in from the private sector took a pay cut to come into the civil service, but they were still, if memory serves me right, 18% ahead of their internal comparators. Clearly, that is going to create an element of friction, particularly as there is no coherent pay progression mechanism, so an individual cannot see how they might catch that individual up in the future if they have been brought in.
Q195 David Morris: To round this question off, would you like to see a figure stipulated and kept to, whether that would be for an external or an internal applicant? Would that be a fair methodology and best practice?
Dave Penman: Yes.
Garry Graham: I would go slightly further than that. I think we say in our evidence that we want a proper, independent review of pay in the civil service because it has been a political football for too long. There are increasing disparities that are not sustainable and we need to come to a position where hopefully you would have a cross-party consensus as to how we remunerate our civil servants fairly.
Q196 David Morris: How long has this been going on? Has it been going on forever and a day between Governments? Is this something that has been standard practice for generations? How long has it been like this?
Dave Penman: David Normington did a report in 2008 on reform of the senior civil service pay structure and highlighted all of these issues. In effect what has happened since then is we have pressed the pause button with austerity. All the same issues had been accumulating over years up to 2008—just fast-forward to 2017-18 and they are all still there.
Paul O'Connor: We should probably mention as well that it is not just a public sector versus private sector problem. Within the internal civil service itself there is competition between Departments, because you have people doing broadly the same work, broadly the same grades but massive disparities in terms of pay, which is the point I was making earlier: the civil service needs a more coherent pay structure so that it paves the way for the job right across the service itself.
Garry Graham: Finally on this point, on the private sector people coming in, I know the Committee was considering how it felt for the individuals and the level of disgruntlement. One of the things that we have been encouraging the Cabinet Office or the SSRB to ensure happens is proper exit interviews with people when they are leaving the civil service. The experience that I have had of people coming in from the private sector is they will come into this long salary range, they will come up higher than existing staff and they will have a maximum that may look attractive, but then they realise that they are not going to be able to attain that, and there is a level of disgruntlement that comes alongside that. They believe from their experience of the private sector elsewhere that if that is the pay range maximum there has to be some way that they are going to attain that over a period of time, and that simply has not happened for them. They then decide to move on out.
Q197 Chair: All points well made and well taken. Thank you. Briefly, on training and development and civil service learning, it is suggested in your evidence that skills development is not a priority and that training of your members is more about filling skills gaps than genuine professional development of individuals. What do you have to say about that?
Garry Graham: In terms of professional development I think there is an issue that the Committee will want to consider, and we are seeking to discuss elsewhere, which is how you develop a culture and a pay and reward strategy that sits alongside it that encourages people to become deep subject specialists in what they do. Some of our members, whether they are scientists or engineers or working in defence, will be world-renowned experts. They will not necessarily want to move into a management job, because that is not their forte, but when you look at the pay and reward strategy that sits alongside it, the only way that they can get a pay increase often is by moving into a management job that may not be appropriate for them or indeed for the organisation in which they sit.
As I have touched on, our experience has been that learning and development budgets have been cut and people’s ability to have time to attend courses has reduced as a result of increases in workload. Part of this goes back to the reform plan and workforce strategy for the civil service. If you want to enhance functional and professional capacity for the civil service you have to have a clear vision and set out what that looks like for individuals. Our experience is that, in terms of links between individuals and the professional groupings, that is simply not happening.
Q198 Chair: What about the deficit in leadership, which is one of the worst scores in the engagement survey at only 47%, although it has got much better? What do you think of the Civil Service Leadership Academy?
Gareth Hills: I think it has a different focus, following the demise of the National School of Government. The Leadership Academy gives greater access to people below SCS for leadership training, but I do think it lacks the focus that there was on leadership skills and training in the National School of Government. The demise of the NSG maybe something that is worth revisiting.
Q199 Chair: Mr Graham, on the Leadership Academy?
Garry Graham: I do not have a response in terms of the Leadership Academy.
Q200 Chair: Mr O’Connor, do you feel the Leadership Academy is addressing leadership as it affects your members?
Paul O'Connor: I think really the problem is there is a lack of investment in development in terms of the jobs that our members do. They will get on-the-job training that is specific to the role itself but they get very little opportunity to branch out and develop other skills, because of a lack of investment.
Q201 Chair: How true is it that the Leadership Academy is concentrating more on the development of future DGs and Permanent Secretaries rather than on the leadership deficit throughout the depth of the organisations?
Gareth Hills: In my experience it is looking at the deficit throughout the organisation. I think there is a need to consider functional leadership and skills leadership through all those levels, but I think it may be that the channels that the Leadership Academy is using do not provide the same focus as the National School of Government.
Q202 Chair: How important do you think it is to maintain the position that something needs to replace the National School of Government?
Gareth Hills: I think that is very important. It could be through the Leadership Academy with more focus. Certainly the civil service is doing a lot in freeing up people’s time and continuous professional development, including specific days of training for leadership roles every year.
Q203 Chair: The Leadership Academy is tiny compared with what the National School of Government was.
Gareth Hills: Yes.
Q204 Chair: How confident are you that it can be a seed for something much greater?
Dave Penman: There is growing recognition across the civil service that the decision that was taken around the National School of Government is one that they regret and that they are striving to find ways to replace it, both in its capacity and in the breadth of what it delivered for the civil service. I think that is something the civil service recognises, but the National School of Government was not cheap. Development is not cheap, so if you are going to invest in that, particularly if you are going to try to replace something that is not there, you have to make a positive choice about spending money. That is very difficult in the current climate.
Kelvin Hopkins: Chair, should we just say publicly that we ought to have the National School of Government reinstated and a Leadership Academy built into it?
Chair: We are asking questions.
Kelvin Hopkins: Yes, I know, but is that a good idea?
Chair: I guess there is unanimity on that front. I feel we have covered the waterfront. We are very grateful for everything that you have talked about today. Are there any other questions from colleagues?
Q205 Paul Flynn: Do you think there should be an award given to those civil servants who have spoken truth to power? I think it was someone like Carne Ross who destroyed what was a promising career and went off and formed his own charity—a very successful one—because he disagreed with the decision to join Bush’s war in Iraq and gave evidence of that. Do you think we should elevate as the prime service of a civil servant the ability to say no to Government, even if it destroys their career?
Chair: Do you mean a civil service award at the awards ceremony?
Paul Flynn: A civil service award, yes.
Chair: On Thursday, for the most strident disempowerment award?
Paul Flynn: It would not help your job security. You would have an award in heaven.
Q206 Kelvin Hopkins: Some 10 years ago, probably about the time of Sir David Normington’s report, this Committee, of which I was a member, concluded that a lot of those recruited from outside the civil service were not successful or were not good value for money. Training internally, recruiting people and training them as permanent civil servants was better value for money and you got better quality service out of them as well. It is not in all cases, no doubt, but is that a view that is familiar to the unions?
Garry Graham: If I could start off on that, one of my concerns when I saw the workforce plan was the phrase “external by default”, because it seemed to me to be ideologically driven. There is no private sector organisation of repute that I deal with who has this approach. To use management consultant phrases, they grow their own timber and upon occasion they ventilate their structure as well and they get people in from outside. Taking that kind of proportionate view seems to me to be the sensible way to go.
The Cabinet Office has subsequently told me that when they used the phrase “external by default” they were really surprised that people have read that as meaning “external by default” and it is not their intention that there will be a broader mixed economy in terms of recruitment, which would seem to me to be the sensible way forward. You grow and develop your own people. If there are particular gaps, or for whatever reason, you recruit from outside.
Q207 Chair: Mr Graham, do you have evidence that “external by default” is the wrong policy and that there ought to be a policy of, as you put it, growing your own timber? What evidence do you have to support that? We would very much like it.
Garry Graham: Okay. Let me see what I can do on that. I can’t promise anything definitive, but let me see what I can do.
Chair: Thank you very much indeed. Can I thank each of you and your organisations for, in your own way, your tremendous commitment to the efficiency and effectiveness of Government and to the wellbeing of your members and your service to the country in the job you do? Thank you very much indeed.