THE CIVIL SERVICE-1
After Fulton, the pseudo-revolution
C. H. SISSON
Whether or not new wine is being poured into the Civil Service these days—and it has been habitual ever since the Fulton Report to assert that there is some heady liquor about—it is certain that the old bottles are there to receive it. They stand in rows, many decorated, and those of the largest sizes have never been so numerous.
Or perhaps not since the war. The Civil Service waxes and wanes—but on the whole waxes—and it is a curious consequence of
the fact that it is permanent that the top
posts are always manned, disproportion- ately, by those who have found favour during an expansive epoch. An administra- tion which has in view even a gentle re- pression of this buoyant corps therefore starts with a disadvantage. It takes several years of attrition even to arrive at a point from which they would wish to have started. By then another election is in sight, and that in itself sometimes has liberating consequences, if you regard Whitehall as a genius to be liberated.
The business of filling senior posts is one of the more mysterious processes in this strange world. It centres around what is best conceived of as a sort of Renaissance court maintained by a functionary known as the Head of the Civil Service. It was formerly kept in the Treasury, by Sir Lawrence (now Lord) Helsby. Now it is kept in the Civil Service Department, which of course is half of the Treasury under another name, by Sir William Armstrong who has given it the decency of certain constitutional proprieties—in the form of an advisory committee—without, it may be conjectured, very much changing the nature of the processes which lead to one of the more august appointments. Renais- sance courts are best left to the imagination. If there are vials of poison as well as more pleasant potions in circulation the prince, although immensely powerful, has to watch the game around him, though it would be a clumsy player indeed who was more than occasionally found on the wrong side.
But this court is, of course, encircled by a huge congeries of lesser courts, kept by the Permanent Secretaries of the respec- tive Departments. Each of these—only relatively, of course—petty princelings has his own game to play, and his own domes- tic set of vials and daggers. There are cour- tiers everywhere who, in good times, think - up their own combinations. A Deputy Secre- tary who is able to fix his own Minister may be able to make sure of his next step, and a knighthood, and if he can also fix the Head of the Civil Service he can prob- ably leave his own Permanent Secretary standing. Ability to catch the eye of a Min- ister is something the Head of the Civil Ser- vice will, in any case, properly not ignore, and if the eye caught is exalted enough a very slight thrill of pleasure on both sides may be enough to achieve remarkable re- sults in the way of a career. Generally, how- ever, it may be said that the game, played, with immense discretion as one would ex- pect from so judicious a body of men, is one in which both the Head of the Civil Service and the Departmental Permanent Secre-
taries have things as much their own way as anyone is likely to, in this hard world.
The characteristics of the higher reaches of the Civil Service are, however, mainly determined by the prevalent forces which mould what used to be called the Adminis- trative Class at large. There is a soggy responsiveness to public opinion which over the long years produces, in a typical member of that former class, a compulsive shrinking from any fact not recognised by the fashion of the moment. It is not that these men are unintelligent; rather the re- verse. They lucidly understand the rules of the milieu in which they are allowed to operate, and do not let their understanding interfere with the serious business of earn- ing their livelihoods. The universe of dis- course in which a modern government operates is a very restricted one. There are many subjects in which government meddles, and much is made of that by those who like to dwell on the complexity of affairs— real enough in its kind—but the manner of dealing with them has a certain mono- tony. It is this which accounts for the famous — and now somewhat denigrated versatility of the late Administrative Class, and enabled, say, a backroom Treasury man suddenly to appear before the world in the role of the manager of a vast orgaii- isation. The secret is such that it is hardly possible to state it without appearing to be touched by cynicism. It is that, in spite of the importance of facts, and the collection of facts, in the Whitehall milieu, it is not directly they which, in the end, determine the outcome of any crisis. It is what the public most immediately concerned • will stand for, at the moment. The art of the administrator in Whitehall, therefore, is to make sure that facts do not get the upper hand. He has to learn to use them in a way which will produce answers which are right by quite different criteria, without in the process getting so confused that the actual mechanics of the conjuring trick come to light, for that too would produce a bad effect on opinion and, by the rules of the game, he would be disqualified. There is no doubt that the pressure of what are called— I suppose jokingly—the public media of communication has immensely increased the part played by opinion in the solution of the administrator's problems. Reality can no longer hope to keep up with what is said to be going on. It takes a long time actually to do anything, in a large organisation. The best official, therefore, would be one who could shuffle policies a dozen times while ensuring that reality was left quite intact. While the Fulton Committee could hardly be expected to make revolutionary sugges- tions which would prove, in execution, absolutely anodyne, certain of their recom- mendations are models in this kind. They proposed, for example, that 'all classes should be abolished and replaced by a single, unified grading structure covering all civil servants from top to bottom in the non- industrial part of the Service.' One can see at once the appeal of that 'all classes should be abolished', which for emotive effect hardly needs the rest of the sentence. This happy .revolution is already on the way. From 1 January this year the Administrative, Executive and Clerical Classes disappeared into one huge pot. What a casting down of barriers! What new flexibility! In making this recommendation the Fulton Committee were following the lead given in the evidence of the Treasury, who knew that the barriers had been down effectively fpr some years so that one might safely speculate that the real changes in the five years after Fulton, in this respect, will be no greater than in the five years before. There must be some pro- minent demonstrations, in accordance with the rules, to show that reality is indeed following policy. The staff associations will naturally watch closely and will have fulfilled their mission when they have made the Ser- vice more expensive for the change. Such exercises are not new and some horse- trading, the consequence of which will take some years to work out, is inevitable. The comedy of pseudo-egalitarianism goes so far, in the current exercise, that in order to do away with the shocking associations of the word AdministratiVe the new-style graduate entrants are to be called—illiterately—ad- ministration trainees. There is a big move indeed. There is invention for you. The best one. can say of the new arrangement—anarl from the fact that it won't make much differ- ence, if that is a good point—is that no young graduate will be sure, when he comes in, that it is a career in Whitehall that he is coming for, for he may find himself not less usefully employed in Wigan. Whether that wholesome deprivation will in fact help to man up the crowded corridors of Whitehall —which after all have to be manned, if not necessarily crowded to the extent they now are—is another matter.
The pseudo-revolution of abolishing classes is of interest as exhibiting a response, infinitely devious in its course through the staff associations, the Treasury, the Fulton Committee and at last through the Civil Service Department, not merely to the opinion of an outside public but to the seeth- ing forces of democracy within, which cer- tainly have not less to do with the changes than have the objective needs of the Service. This is an influence which could get out of hand, for the aims of staff associations are not those of management, and should not be, though these enterprising bodies are always ready to take over where they find an inertia or complacency that will allow it.
The right tension between management and associations can—the interests of the staff apart—be instructive to the .management; indeed, it is the indispensable mark of taut control, and the moment too bland a smile of co-operation appears on the faces of the two sides you may be sure that they are up to no good. Naturally, the larger the scale of the co-operation the more inane the smile.
The phenomenon is something that the public should watch for, though it is not very well placed to watch. And the larger the Civil Service is, the nearer it approaches to being an electoral interest in its own right. The simultaneous impingement of mass opinion from outside and inside would make —the use of the conditional implies a hope that we have not yet reached this fatal point,
though assuredly it is not far off—would, then, leave the Civil Service unmanaged and finally unmanageable.
This is the first of three articles dealing with the Civil Service. Mr Sisson, an Under-Sec- retary in the Department of Employment. is author of The Spirit of British Administra- tion. His second article will appear next week.
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