The neutrality of civil servants and
the civil service
In
Episode 5 of Season 5 of The West Wing, Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman
realises that a recent laudatory newspaper article was written using quotes
from ex-girlfriend Amy Gardner as a birthday present to him. Josh is not pleased, and argues with
Amy as follows:
JOSH I'm talking about a code, an ethos you don't
understand.
AMY Josh, I was just...
JOSH The Post profile, the "legislative
juggernaut," all those anecdotes, all those quotes
came from you.
AMY Happy birthday.
JOSH We don't glorify ourselves. We don't advertise. It's not the code.
AMY It's not the code to
look strong to your constituents?
JOSH The only constituency that matters in this
building is the constituency of one - the guy in the round room [Oval Office],
and that's who you and I work for.
AMY I came here to work on
issues, not to be part of a messianic cult.
JOSH You serve the issue by serving the man.
Of
course, Josh Lyman’s character is a political appointee, serving at the request
of a democratically elected president.
His loyalty is therefore intensely (and personally) political. It is a theme that The West Wing
returns to on several occasions: the main characters serve at the pleasure of
the president.
But
the same issue – the role of advisors and politicians - has resurfaced in a UK
context with the recent public profiles of civil servant Olly Robbins, seen as
trying to minimise the impact of Brexit, and the criticisms of HM Treasury
staff over gloomy economic predictions under various Brexit scenarios (see
links below).
Civil
servants (with the exception of special advisors) are not political appointees,
and serve the government regardless of its political make up. As Sir Jeremy Heywood, head of the
civil service, stated after Lord Lawson’s accusation that the civil service
might attempt to frustrate Brexit:
The civil service has always prided
itself on supporting the elected government of the day in carrying out its
mandate.
But
in some ways this neutrality has amplified the criticism of civil
servants. It is precisely because
they are not political that they are open to criticism that they are, in fact,
acting politically. This seems to
be the substance of the criticism of HM Treasury’s forecasts.
Lord
Lawson himself was actually making a slightly different point. He argued that Brexit represents a
radical change, and that civil servants do not like radical change. He qualified this by saying that
although civil servants might try to frustrate Brexit, ultimately they would
see the policy through.
In
other words, Lawson’s point was about the civil service as an institution that
does not like change. This is not
an unfamiliar criticism of institutions: that they are slow to change, and face
difficulties when faced with changing to radically different paths from the
established one. Indeed, reforming
the civil service itself has been likened to changing the direction of an oil
tanker, whereby you make an adjustment and it’s only some time later that you
notice the ship changing direction.
So
if we separate out the issue of political persuasion of civil servants, and
look at the way the civil service might work as an institution, some
interesting questions start to form:
· Does the civil
service have an institutional view of policy issues? If so, is it consistent across departments (e.g. always
intervene, never intervene), or over time (has the civil service become more or
less ambitious in its role?)
· How might that
affect its neutrality in advising on, and then implementing, policy?
· How in practice
does the civil service carry out a policy it does not believe is supported by
the evidence at hand? Is there any
institutional reluctance to pursue a particular policy, or to shape it to
minimise the impact (the Brexit issue)?
That
there is an ‘institutional’ view is clear from issues like whistle-blowing,
where civil servants have publicly revealed what they believe to be problems in
the neutrality of policy process and implementation. Such problems are often a clash between the perspective of
the civil service itself, and the policies of those they are elected to serve,
and were the subject of a Public Accounts Committee report in July 2014. A more startling example was reported
in the Guardian in September 2014, where a whistle-blower alleged that a policy
was presented as excessively risky because civil servants did not like it.
Some
of the examples referred to above might indicate a risk that civil servants try
to influence a policy, or dilute it, to serve the ends of the institution. But there is equally a risk in the
other direction: that civil servants see the promotion of political aims as a
means of career progression. In
other words, where civil servants should be cautious, they are in fact the
opposite, and could see being at the forefront of a particular change or reform
as a way of developing a career.
This
risk is more likely in scenarios where radical change is planned – indeed,
radical change could produce both reactions described here, both institutional
caution and career-inspired enthusiasm.
The civil service likes an evidence base as much as anyone, so the issue
here is not about the dogmatic promotion of a policy (the lack of evidence would see to that), but more of how might
evidence be presented and interpreted to support a particular viewpoint. So our questions of civil service
neutrality reflect this issue:
·
How does the
civil service recognise, and prevent, the over-enthusiastic promotion of a
policy where that is driven by a personal, career, agenda?
·
How might the
personal, or political, viewpoints of individual civil servants be managed
within the promotion of policy?
·
How can the
success in meeting a ministerial agenda be judged in terms of the appraisal of
an individual’s performance? Is it
a good thing, or not?
On
a broader scale, we might also want to look at the career aspirations of whole
departments. Just as individuals
might wish to promote a view that suits them, so a whole department might wish
to promote a particular position as it strengthens their institutional position
within the civil service as a whole.
For example, a broad policy position that was positive about the impact
of an interventionist government might increase the power of public spending
departments, and decrease that of tax-raising ones. Conversely, a view that the state should be as small as
possible would shift power in the opposite way. So, how does the civil service also manage the institutional
ambitions of departments when it comes to policy advocacy?
All
of this is a way of saying that ‘neutrality’ is a complicated thing to define,
and may not really exist. The
views and aspirations of individuals, combined with the views and aspirations
of institutions, probably see to that.
So maybe neutrality is not what the civil service should be
offering. And if it isn’t, that
will change the way in which politicians should view their advice. That is not arguing for a fundamentally
different way of running government; but perhaps a more honest and open one.
Disclosure
I
am a former civil servant, having worked in HM Treasury from 2001-04. I was also a colleague of David Owen,
referred to in The Guardian article below.
Sources:
Lord
Lawson: Civil servants want to ‘frustrate Brexit’, BBC News, 22 January 2018
Is
Olly Robbins the ‘real’ Brexit secretary?
BBC News, 23 January 2018
Brexit
minister Steve Baker in civil service row apology, BBC News, 2 February 2018
Jacob
Rees-Mogg says Treasury ‘fiddling figures’ on Brexit, BBC News, 3 February 2018
Whistleblowing:
Ninth Report of Session 2014-15, House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts:
Treasury
ordered to pay £142,000 to ‘whistleblower’ former civil servant, 28 September
2014:
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