THE CIVIL SERVICE-2
The great management hoax
C. H. SISSON
It is the pretension, precisely, of the elements now most influential in the Civil Service that that body is being managed with close- ness and efficiency as never before. This pretension is quite without foundation though it has, certainly, superstructure. The suggestion is that a new managerial ay., proach, instigated of course from the top, shows itself in the furthest reaches of em- ployment exchanges and typing pools, as if local offices and other places where the more useful work is done were now for the first time sensible of the need for such control. The exact opposite is in fact the case. Employment exchanges were producing, long before the war, a race of civil servants as tough and as aware as any now to be found in Whitehall—I understate the case— of the need to pack work into procedures and to see that it is done. The characteristic of the last few years is a growth of the mythology of management. There has been a deliberate and persistent propagation of the idea that management is a new con- ception in the Civil Service, and an attempt to persuade people, in and outside the ser- vice, that analytical procedures of a kind which have always held an important place at middle executive levels have now been introduced as a startling novelty from the top, and that this is about to produce a new golden age of efficiency. One can only compare the untiring vein of talk on these lines which emerges from influential quarters with the effusions of those, in other fields, whose pronouncements seem to suggest that sex is a novelty or that fornication has just been discovered. In both worlds, of course, there are some queer habits about and there has even been some technical change.
If there has been a new emphasis on management, as opposed to the more politi- cal side of Civil Service activity, it may be traced to a realisation by some of the more astute persons among those on whom falls the duty of justifying the Civil Service to Ministers that their own role as policy- makers was a somewhat elusive and supect one and that a publicly-acceptable alibi had better be found. The transition is not as diffl., cult as you might think, for these men are, by profession, the pickers-up of second-hand ideas whose careers have been spent in selecting from the garbage heap what they think might be acceptable to their masters of the moment or, more accurately expres. sed, the masters on whom for the moment the future of their careers largely depends. It is, of course, not necessary for these men to practise management, in any serious way, in order to acquire the reputation of people who care for such things. All they have to do is to persuade politicians and public—. who are of course gasping to be persuaded of exactly that—that this is what is mainly on their minds. The actual work they need not touch; and certainly they touch it no more than their predecessors—some of them much less so, for the business of apologetics is apt to become a full-time job. It is possible to occupy a top position in a major department in Whitehall without having the capacity to run a tobacco shop, whatever skill., of a political and apologetic kind one may have acquired in thirty years in the service, or been born with.
The sleight of hand has undoubtedly been made the easier by the prevalence, since Keynes, of the notion that the primary duty of governments is the management of the economy, and it is easy to confuse this wider sense of management—what the government des, or purports to do, to the economy as a whole—with the specific control of the operations of its own staff and the execu- tion of functions which it has precise and explicit responsibilities for carrying out. The more tangible functions are no doubt, in some respects, simpler, but they have one great drawback. Their success or unsuccess can often be plainly seen, while the man- agement of the economy gives almost un- limited play to the arts of apologetics in which the best civil servants are most highly trained, and prizes are likely to go to the quickest seekers after alibis, always able to move to the next point at the first sight of a crack in the current theory. It is at what pass for the most crucial points of the White- hall control system that the development of apologetics is fastest and where, in any case, the chronic pressure for the urgent, as against the important, is most acutely felt.
Nowhere has the overlaying of the Civil Service with talk of management, for reasons of public relations rather than out of regard for efficiency, been more evident than in the field of staff training. The Treasury evidence to Fulton included the report of a com- mittee, among the members of which were experts of a fashionable kind, to give it a respectability which a mere Civil Service committee would not have had. The com- mittee was supposed to study the place of management training in the Service, in fact it did not concern itself with such trivia as whether management training, `as ordin- arily understood in business schools and elsewhere', was what the Service most needed, and it is enigmatically reported that `not all members of the working party would regard the term' as covering what was wanted. The committee did not examine the relevance of the training to be given to the work actually done; the object was to give the impression that the Treasury was in accord with fashion rather than to improve efficiency'. A great superstructure was built on this non-foundation, and this in turn was used to justify the setting up of the Civil Service College, the opening of which was the first public engagement of the Prime Minister, who had inherited it from his pre- decessor. It is not that the training given in business schools is not appropriate for some people in the service, or that there is not a case for a Civil Service College. But there is no doubt that a less hasty and dogmatic approach would not only have been very much cheaper to the taxpayer but would have helped more people to do their work better. It need hardly be said that, in this hasty escalation, the numerate techniques which were to save the Service in the future played virtually no part. Cost benefit, ha I ha It is of course a consequence of centralisa:- tion, in so huge an organisation as the Civil Service, that it enables mistakes to be per- petrated on an immense scale. The Fulton Committee, some at least of the members of which should have known better, en- couraged the notion of a managerial brain which would operate in disjunction from the main policy departments. The second recommendation of the committee ran: `The extended and unified central management of the Service should be made the responsibility of a new department created specifically for that purpose.' Creation is a strong expression for what actually happened. `The role of the central management of the Service needs to be enlarged'—that was the Fulton doctrine, and with it went a desire, which cannot be said yet to have been realised, of imparting new hope to civil servants. 'There is today', the report says, 'a lack of confi- dence in the Treasury as the centre of Civil Service management'. The Civil Service Department was intended to inspire that confidence, no doubt. 'In our judgment the Treasury has contributed' to this lack of confidence 'by employing too few staff on this work.' That at least has been put right.
Of course the Fulton Committee was not unaware that there are objections to the en- croachment of central management. 'The expanded rOle' of the Civil Service Depart- ment was not to be 'allowed to develop into a takeover by central management of re- sponsibilities that properly belong to other departments.' Still, it was to have 'a special' part to play in assisting reorganisation at the higher levels of departments; and in the last analysis it should be in a position both to call all departments to account for failure to ' use the recommended techniques, and to put in its own men to investigate any depart- mental organisation and to recommend im- provements'. Such a role is not negligible, and is the more unlikely to be neglected because with it goes a special influence over the careers of the more ambitious. The oddity, to put it no higher, of endowing with this power a department which has no exper- tise in the departmental policies which the respective organisations are meant to serve seems to have escaped notice. In practice, what Permanent Secretaries have to do, to look well at the centre, is to show an appro- priate sensitivity to the need for the most 'modern' techniques, and whether or not a department is well organised is something which the Civil Service Department is not likely to know. Or if it does know, graver charges than ignorance would lie against it.
There was perhaps a false analogy at the back of the minds of the proponents of this system. They were perhaps thinking of the relationship of a company with its subsi- diaries, but the lnutanda are so many that no comparison holds. Apart from the fact that nothing like the standardisation here prac- tised would be dreamed of by any companY not already far gone on the road to bureau- cratisation and decay, there is the fact that, however varied their activities and interests, companies are in the last analysis judged bY the immensely simplified criterion of finan- cial results. Those are the replts, par excel- lence. That they may be achieved by chance or an easy market as well as by skill is beside the point. Number, in the form of money, has a final validity in business which it can never have in government, which rests on consent, aided more or less, according to the regime, by other means. The ambitious civil servant, therefore, has not so much to do well as to live plausibly. And this plausibilitY can be more stringently judged on the de' partmental scene than at the centre.
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