Fulton: the cart before the horse
CIVIL SERVICE F. A. BISHOP
F. A. Bishop retired from the Civil Service in 1965. having served as Principal Private Secre- tary to two Prime Ministers. as Deputy-Secre- tary to the Cabinet and ultimately as a Per- manent Secretary.
Lord Fulton and his colleagues ought not to be blamed for failing to prescribe for problems which their terms of reference precluded them from studying. They have concentrated, as they were bound to do, on 'the Home Civil Service.' on a body of men and women, their recruitment, training and organisation. The machinery of government was deliberately left outside. The committee recognised that this exclusion imposed many limits on their work, and they admit that the problems of machinery 'bear closely' on work and organisation. This, it may be thought, is something of an under- statement; put more frankly, it could be that the service organisation cannot profitably be studied at all until the machinery has been reformed. Thus, we now have a set of recom- mendations for improving the recruitment and operation of a work force to man a creaking machine which has outgrown the tasks of yes- terday, and which may, as many of us think, be largely irrelevant to the requirements of to- morrow's government.
The defects from which the central govern- ment in Whitehall is at present suffering—slow- ness of decision, inconsistency, duplication of effort and waste of resources, and so on—are pretty clear. They arise mainly from the pro- liferation of departments and other attendant
agencies, from the deliberately created ten- sion between departments with overlapping re- sponsibilities and the consequent extension of interdepartmental consultation, and above all from the sheer size of the total machine and the increasing number of Civil Servants. Pro- posals breed committees, and committees bring forth reports, but all too rarely decisions. The Fulton Committee recognise that the time the system now takes to reach a decision and carry it out has lengthened; they ascribe this to ad- vancing technological complexity, but a more common cause is the impossibility of ex- tracting an answer from too large a pro- liferation of contributors. Nowhere is this more evident than in the economic field, where the creation of additional depart- ments and successive changes in their responsi- bilities plus the infiltration of so many addi- tional professional advisers has led to much unprofitable confusion. Similarly, there is an urgent need for simplification in the machinery for overseas policy making, including the mili- tary and economic aspects; nor has any real progress been made in reorganising the machinery of government for the social ser- vices.
This persistently frustrating situation—what Professor Max Beloff has called the incoherence of the executive—is unlikely to be much im- proved by the findings and recommendations of Fulton. Indeed the danger is that, exhausted by the effort of controlling the activities of this committee and perhaps regretting their boldness in having procured its establishment, the Government—with which one must include its permanent advisers, and perhaps even its counterpart in the Conservative party—will continue to avoid concentrating its attention on the urgent and vital job of reforming the central machinery of government. A great opportunity has not yet been grasped. The years go by, the machine runs down, despite all the work of so many devoted servants.
Even within the limits of its terms of reference, the Report at first reading is not all that exciting (though there may indeed be much of value to be learned when there has been time to scrutinise the mass of material that is published in addition to the Report itself). The proposals now made are for the most part neither controversial nor original. So far from constituting the beginning of a revolution, they are little more (though this of course is of con- siderable value) than generally recognised means of assisting trends that are already in evolution.
The creation of a new Civil Service depart- ment, separating the management and control of the Service from the rest of the Treasury, has been advocated by many for a long time. But how far such a step would in practice be an improvement must in the end depend on how far a Prime Minister will be prepared and able to give his direct and wholehearted supervision to it, or at least to the ruthlessly efficient control of the machinery of government, as is recommended in the report. Nor is there any- thing particularly revolutionary about the pro- posal to develop greater professionalism among scientists, engineers, managers and policy ad- visers; nor, nowadays, would many object to the proposal that there should be greater mobility between the Service and other employments, including the world of business. These, after all, are trends that are already clearly discernible though much may be done to encourage and accelerate them. The recom- mendation that departments should establish what are called 'planning units,' headed by the senior policy advisers, is something of a curiosity; it would seem to mean little more than that departments should indulge more deliberately in long term planning, as many of them indeed already do in one way or another. And the recommendation is in any case tem- pered by the sntirely appropriate recognition that only one man—the Permanent Secretary— should have overall responsibility for the department to his Minister.
There is, though, one rec,ommendation which strikes me as very odd—that all departmental classes should be abolished and replaced by a single non-industrial grade. How can this make the inevitable procedure of selection easier? How can this assist what the committee realise is the key to the problem—the correct analysis of the job to be done? The old barriers between the existing classes have over recent decades been much eroded, and given the in- evitably necessary modicum of luck, ability has not often been frustrated. Is there really a better process of selection which can be applied in practice to the enormous body of people who would be lumped together in this classless ser- vice of the future? One cannot help suspecting that the arguments in this chapter of the report are a rationalisation of the notion that the ad- ministrative Civil Service is socially superior— a notion that was prevalent among several academic observers, but for which any justifi- cation has been steadily diminishing for at least fifty years. Or perhaps the committee realised the desperate need for reforming the governmental machine, accepted the limitations of their terms of reference, and then seized upon at least one superficially revolutionary proposal. It is a change which, they think, will have 'massive repercussions'!
The limitation of the Report's scope through the exclusion of the problem of machinery, and through its consequent concentration on aspects such as those mentioned above, has the unfor- tunate effect of appearing to criticise the higher Civil Service as a group of individuals. The Service is not perfect, but it is by no means as defective as the generalisations and exaggera- tions in the Report suggest. The impression given by the Report, that the administrative Civil Service has so quickly deteriorated from generally acknowledged supremacy to virtual obsolescence, is hardly credible. My own ex- perience, in and out of the Service, would lead rue to agree very much with the dissent which Lord Simey forcefully expresses on this point. What is wrong is not the quality or aptitude of Civil Servants, or the fact that their training and experience has usually been 'general' or 'non-specialist'; in this they mostly sustain favourable comparison with their opposite numbers in the world of business. What is wrong is expecting them to run efficiently the Heath Robinson contraption that successive administrations have made of the delicate machine of central government.
The Report also propounds a guiding prin. 'ciple—lhe Service must continuously review the tasks it is called on to perform; it should then think out what new skills and kinds of men are needed.' Again this omits the essential step of devising the best machinery for perform- ing the tasks. Whose function is it, or should it be, to reconstruct, nurture and adjust the central machinery of government? Traditionally, it has been part of the responsibilities of the manage- ment side of the Treasury. But is it now thought to be too delicate a subject for permanent ad- visers to tackle? It is, of course, difficult for any new government, of whatever political party, to restrain its policy initiatives and its patronage so as to leave unencumbered a viable governmental machine. But the country cannot afford the expense and inefficiency of the exist- ing machine, and some discipline—a new Haldane Committee, or inter-party agreement on the basic structure of government, or what- ever—must be found to bring about radical simplifications. The fact that this has not so far been done, or apparentlyeven contemplated, is a more serious default than the errors for which the committee blames the Treasury.
It is, indeed, ironical that the Fulton Report
is yet another slinptom of our chronic ailmen: —devoting too much of our scarce and valuable resources to the.wrong task. Right priorities are the lifeblood of good administration. Here, alas, the cart is put before the horse.
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