What kind of bureaucracy?
The Fulton Committee was prevented by its terms of reference from examining the machinery of government, and in particular the way in which this has developed in recent years. or from relating the strain on a grossly swollen bureaucracy to the nature of the demands made on it by the govern- ment of the day and to the quality of the Ministers making those demands. This limitation was doubly unfortunate. In the first place, as F. A. Bishop points out on page 883, until the machinery of govern- ment has been reformed (which it badly needs) it is difficult to be dogmatic about the sort of civil service which is needed to man it. And in the second place, concen- ieation on the failings of the civil service us the total exclusion of the weaknesses of government makes it all too easy for an un- successful administration to blame all its follies and errors on the ineptitude of its full-time administrators and advisers.
We can expect to hear a good deal in *is vein over the next few days, weeks and months, 'supported' by the indictment of the civil service as untrained, obsolete, amateurish and unchanged since the nine- teenth century taken from the astonishing first chapter of the Fulton Report. This indictment is not only grossly exaggerated —the English civil service, for all its faults. would hardly be as much admired through- out the world as it is if it were true—but it is belied by the committee's own recom- mendations, which are worlds away from the root and branch treatment such a diag- nosis would suggest.
Of the main reforms proposed, the first— the setting up of a new civil service depart- ment to take over from the Treasury the running of the civil service—is at once the most canvassed and (in practice) the least revolutionary. While obviously sensible, the main interest here lies in whether the Trea- sury, deprived of its 'establishment' side to leave it a straightforward economics minis- try, should then take the opportunity to absorb the DEA and so become the sole economics ministry. This, however, is (of course) outside the committee's terms of reference.
More immediately fruitful in its potential is the proposal to set up in each department a 'planning unit' headed by a 'senior policy adviser' to undertake long-term thinking and to relate it to day-to-day decisions. Per- manent Secretaries today simply do not have the time, even if they have the inclination (which is by no means common), to think about the long-term development of policy, while Ministers have just as little time with the additional disadvantages that they are seldom in a department long enough to grasp the nature of the long-term work that needs to be done. The result is that it is not done at all. Moreover, the planning department should provide useful and worthwhile jobs for all the young 'high flyers' of the service; while the role of 'senior policy adviser,' with direct access to the Minister, which is to be given to a man in his forties (the average age of Permanent Secretaries is fifty-six), should not only act as an incen- tive to able younger men to remain in the service by enabling them to reach a key job ten years younger than they are likely to at present, but should also ensure that Ministers can benefit from the advice of a permanent official still in the creative period of his life and less hidebound by the rigidities of what- ever happens to be the official departmental view on any issue.
It is over the committee's central recom- mendation that the most serious doubts are justified. The committee wants to make the civil service more professional, which is un- doubtedly right; but far too often it seems to equate professionalism with egalitarianism and a distrust of sheer intellectual ability. That this is nonsense is shown by the French civil service,, which is explicitly admired by the committee for its thoroughgoing prn- fessionalism, and which is, at the same time, in the report's own words, 'extremely elitist.' Thus Fulton is plainly right to insist that civil servants undergo a thoroughly pro- fessional five-year training programme after entry, including a period at a new Civil Ser- vice College (inspired, no doubt, by France's Ecole Nationale d'Adminbrration); but it is nonsense then to say, as the majority of the committee do, that recruits should be chosen on the basis of the 'relevance' of their univer- sity studies to civil service work and not on grounds of ability alone. They will do their 'relevant studies' once they are in: what mat- ters is to get the best men in (which does not always happen even now).
Again, it is sensible to abolish the prolifera- tion 4f civil service classes, with the high bar- riers between them, the rigid connection between particular jobs and particular classes, and the waste of talent involved. But it makes no sense whatever to go on from this to the egalitarianism implicit in the com- ment that 'the direct recruitment of "crown princes" would perpetuate some of the re- strictions and frustrations that a classless ser- vice is designed to remove,' and in the absurd' recommendation that outstanding new en-, trants may be paid more, but should on no account be placed in a higher grade.
The quality of the civil service depends above all on the quality of its top men, and to this end nothing is more important than the recruitment, training and rapid promotion of the minority of 'high flyers' so that they may reach positions of responsibility at an early age. The Fulton Committee pays lip-service to this, but its positive recommendations, in- formed as they are by a belief in specialisa-, lion and egalitarianism rather than intellec- tual ability and elitism, point most (although, happily, not all) of the time in the opposite direction.
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