The Civil Service -power without accountability
Forty-five years ago a quarter of the net United Kingdom National Product was organised by bureaucrats or, as they are more usually called in this country nowadays, civil servants. By the time of the 1970 general election the percentage had grown to more than fifty; by the time of the next, assuming the present Parliament runs fairly nearly to its full course, the proportion of the National Product in the hands of, and for disposal by, salaried officials virtually undisrnissable, secure in their inflation-proof pensions, and responsible to no public scrutineers, will reach seventy-five per cent. The growth of the bureaucracy has not, clearly, been affected by the political colour or inclination of Whichever party has been in power. Yet, throughout this long period the quality of services provided by the machine of state has, from the point of view of the citizen, declined, while the intervention of the state in the affairs of the citizen — the imposition of burdens, restrictions and petty obligations — has increased. The moment has come When a reduction in the power Of — and that means a reduction in the number of — the bureaucracy is a worthy political cause in itself, quite apart from, and quite above, the necessity of creating whatever machinery is required to implement the policies of any government.
The defence of the British bureaucrat against either criticism or attack is simple, if neither clear nor sufficient. Broadly, civil servants say that if they appear overmighty, or if they are too intrusive in the de of the nation, this is because they are striving to meet the will of their political Masters. There is some truth in this, for Party manifestoes often set targets the achievement of which is beyond any bureaucracy. Likewise, civil servants complain when they are criticised or attacked because convention prevents them, as it does the Monarchy, from replying But the countervailing advantages of the individual civil servant are enormous. He is secure in his job: unless he is grossly incompetent, or guilty of turpitlide, he cannot be dismissed. As he rises in trie ranks he becomes more and more assured of a pension proof against inflati.en; a pension which, as inflation itself rises, requires a larger and larger capital surn to fund, and thus a greater and greater call on public funds. More: the retiring senior civil servant can call on business to subvent his pension with a large salary. Tliere was once a convention that civil servants should not take salaried posts until some time had elapsed after their cleParture from Whitehall; but Mr Heath and Mr Wilson alike agreed to breach that convention for Lord Armstrong once head a the Treasury and of the Home Civil Service, as it has been breached for others -is so much so that it can scarcely any onger be regarded as operating. It is nothing less than a national scandal that, hereas ordinary pensioners who continue working after their formal retire Suffer a reduction in their state-pro1/, ided income thereby, the higher mandarins of the Civil Service actually enjoy a lisu.allY considerable increase in income on tetirement, whether their advice to eg°Vernment has been good or bad. The ' ,aPital cost of doing away with the 0-called earnings rule for state pensioners Would be not much more than £100 million, or enough to fund the pensions of two higher civil servants.
Moreover, British bureaucrats enjoy sheltered lives throughout their careers: their first contact with the real world of business and industry usually occurs on retirement. Nor is serious political criticism of their activities often taken very far. Temperamentally, as the Crossman diaries show, the Labour Party is disposed to be critical of the kind of advice offered to governments in the higher reaches of the Civil Service; but that party invariably ' favours legislation designed to increase rather than reduce the number of — in the strictest sense of the word — irresponsible bureaucrats. The Conservative Party is more hostile to the growth of bureaucracy as such. But even its professions have been, heretofore, muted. In the 1970 general election campaign the Tories were committed to reducing the number of civil servants — a task to which Mr Kenneth Baker subsequently applied himself with a will, but without much success. But Mr lain Macleod, apparently most daring and radical of Tories, deliberately toned down that commitment in mid-campaign, because he thought it unfair to the selflessness of our bureaucrats, and in breach of the British doctrine of ministerial responsibility, whereby ministers take the blame for mistakes in their departments.
But when bureaucracy is of the size it now is the doctrine of ministerial responsibility is, in practice, void. To go back some years the infamous Crichel Down affair was evidently the result of Civil Service mistakes. More recently, the collapse of Vehicle and General Insurance, in the most embarrassing of circumstances, was clearly the result of bureaucratic errors within the Department of Trade and Industry. In both cases ,ministers were, initially and unfairly, blamed. What must be made clear in the future is that civil servants cannot expect to enjoy exceptional privileges if at the same time they are not to be punished for their gross errors. Had, for example, Treasury civil servants, been punished as they would in private industry for the manifold erroneous forecasts of economic performance they offered to governments over the last generation — from which policy conclusions were drawn — the top brass at Great George Street would have been fired many times.
But the Civil Service is adept at defending itself. When the Sunday Times appointed a Whitehall correspondent to monitor its activities he had to be withdrawn, because all sources of information dried up — through senior civil servants did not, as we know from his diaries, abandon converse with Mr Cecil King. The Parliamentary Commissioner, supposedly a regular check on bureaucratic abuse, has been almost totally ineffective; and was recently reduced to finding against a plaintiff because the relevant Minister — Mr Roy Hattersley — backed by his department, gave his word that the complaint was unfounded. The Treasury has consistently opposed — successfully — the introduction of the principle of hypothecated revenue, according to which the taxpayer would know precisely to what purpose specific taxes were applied. When, in his Hobart Paper, Bureaucracy: Servant or Master Professor Niskanson gave detailed and irrefutable objections to the present system he was effectivly ignore0 by Whitehall.
Reform is overdue, and there are many possibilities for making the managers of more than half the National Product responsible to the public, apart altogether from reduction in their numbers. For one thing, as in France, civil servants might be required to prove their capacity by spending some time in private industry before senior promotion. For another, pay and allowances and pensions could be made dependent of the performance of a specific civil servant and his section. Again, gross abuse of authority affecting the individual — which normally occurs in the non-economic departments — could be punished by exposure and, perhaps, dismissal. Whatever happens the myth of a selfless, apolitical, gifted bureaucracy must be exposed. For every bureaucracy has the same policy, and the British more than most: it is a policy of survival and self-extension; and it has little to do with the national interest.
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