UNITY OF THE CIVIL SERVICE.
To ATTEMPT to carry out at once any complete or thorough unity of the staff of the Civil Service would be highly injudicious ; it may commend itself to those who for the sake of the "effect" of what could be called a simple and comprehensive plan would sacrifice the vigour of individual departments and the due dis- charge of peculiar duties. In this as in all other questions con- nected with the Civil Service, the one guiding motive should be the desire to get the work of the State done in the best and cheapest way. Neither the carrying out of consistent theories, nor the mere love of change, nor obstinate Conservatism, should be allowed to overrule the obvious necessity of retaining where they exist, or introducing where required, the most efficient and the most economical methods of working the Civil Service of the Crown. That this is no mere truism is evident to those who re- mark how in the controversies of the day the duty of restricting political patronage and of encouraging education (two good things in their way) are often put forward as superior con- siderations to the more common sense and obvious duty of getting the Government work well done at reasonable cost.
We advocate Unity of the Civil Service inasmuch as it will faci-
litate the work of each department, but no further. We should not wish to encourage the migrations of clerks from one depart- ment to another ; any temporary advantage in one office may be dearly purchased by confusion and discontent in others. But any organization which would bring the whole staff of the Civil Service under one inspection would, we think, be of considerable service. The Civil Service Commission is the only office in the State which touches in its work the whole of the Civil Service ; it regulates the entrance of all the individuals who in different departments form the staff of the Service. Its operations have been remarkably beneficial not only on account of the strictness and honesty with which the examinations for particular departments are enforced, but that on account of their communication with various offices, the Commissioners are able to suggest to the chiefs in one office the initiation of reforms as to tests and entrance rules which they have carried out on the re- commendation of other departments. The correspondence of the Commissioners is full of instances of this kind : we may mention the fair and useful rule that temporary clerks should be allowed an extension of the limits of age at which they could be nominated for situations on the establishment; department after department having no correspondence with each other, adopted this reform on the advice of the Commissioners, who thus judiciously enabled isolated offices to profit by the experience of each other. We propose that what the Civil Service Com- missioners effect as regards the entrance and the qualifications of junior clerks should be effected as regards the efficiency and general discipline of the Civil Servants actually at work by the appointment of a new official, subordinate to the Trea- sury, and included in the Treasury staff at Whitehall. His duties should mainly consist of a general inspection of the per- sonnel, mode of working, cost of working, and official dis- cipline of each department of the Civil Service. At present the Treasury in its control over all expenditure has a general cognisance of these questions, and it directs occasional inquiries which from time to time have effected considerable reforms. But the work is done piecemeal, and in a desultory intermittent way. Some years ago the Marquis of Chandos and Sir Richard M. Bromley conducted an inquiry of this kind, and suggested some very proper and economical reforms in the Irish Office ; on many subsequent occasions, Sir Richard Bromley was associated with Sir Charles Trevelyan in the inspection of many offices, and the two acquired a minute and most useful knowledge of many de- partments, enabling them not alone to draw up the usual Report, but to act afterwards as confidential advisers to the Trea- sury whenever any question as to changes, promotion, or increase of salary came before the Treasury connected with those depart- ments. Sir Staftbrd Northcote was also associated in several of those commissions of inquiry. The personal confidential know- ledge acquired by those four men of high standing is now, as it were, lost ; the Marquis of Chandos is Chairman of the London and North Western Railway ; Sir Charles Trevelyan has gone to India ; Sir Stafford Northcote has joined one of our great political parties, and could not be sent for by the Treasury as if he still held aloof from party politics ; and Sir Richard Bromley is high in the service of the Admiralty, and according to etiquette his ser- vices or time are no longer available for the Treasury. There is thus scattered a mass of useful knowledge collected at expense and with care. We therefore think it would be more useful to entrust such inspections of the service (making them of course more frequent) to one permanent official. Associate with him, if you will, independent gentlemen such as Lord Chandos or Sir Stafford Northcote, but for the permanent preservation of the knowledge which such commissions collect there should be an official who would be always at hand to aid the Treasury with confidential information. Many persons are not aware how an inspection of this kind, well carried out, thoroughly searches the weaknesses and defects of an office ; how faults and short- comings that may be plausibly excused by reports and cor- respondence, come out indefensibly glaring before overseers on the spot ; how little pet excrescences (common enough in nearly all offices) are found to need immediate excision restoring the health and efficiency they had tended to impair. But one.of the most striking advantages of these Commissions has been where the same Commissioners are appointed to make suc- cessive inspections of different offices. The experience they have acquired in one inspection can be happily applied in the next; reforms they have seen working well, or im- provements that undeniably economise labour, are intro- duced from one office to another, and an abuse becomes the more easy of detection when the Commissioners recognize its family likeness to an abuse just suppressed in the last depart- ment they inspected. All these advantages become increased if, as we have suggested, the work of inspection were always regu- lated and recorded by one official to whom would always fall this special duty. In a few years he would acquire a thorough know- ledge of the whole Civil Service. He would know the actual amount of work done by every man in the Service—from the Commissioner at 12001. a year to the clerk of 90/. a year. He could tell which offices were undermanned and which were under- worked : in which offices there were some ancient sinecures to be abolished at the death or retirement of the present holders ; in which existed a needless duplication of offices to be fused ata favourable opportunity ; in which a needless and peculiar expendi- ture should be retrenched as occasion served. In his records would be entered the name and services of all those charged with
the general duties of the Service ; and his general survey would enable him to compare with • • • effect how a certain quantity of work was done well in one o ins by five clerks, while in another office ten clerks were apparently very busy doing half the work. From such an official, suggestions for retrenchment and hints as to how it might be done would most fittingly come. Cases con- tinually occur where the Treasury sanction superannuation of really efficient men, because they do not possess the information
requisite to enable them to reject the recommendation of depart- mental chiefs having some interest of their own to serve. In other ways ignorance at the Treasury of the wants of a special office lead to needless expenditure quite independent of any de- partmental jobbery. We know one case where an office con- siderably overmanned intended on the next vacancy for a junior clerk to intimate to the Treasury that there need be no new ap- pointment as the remaining officials could easily do the work. Unfortunately for these good intentions the next vacancy was caused by the success in a competitive examination of a junior clerk in this very office, and as the result of the examination came immediately under the eye of the Treasury, it at once pre- sumed that there was a vacancy, and a new clerk was appointed before the departmental chiefs had even heard of the vacancy I The permanent Inspector of the Civil Service, suggested above, would certainly prevent such a fault. From actual inspection of the particular office he would have known that it was overmanned, and he would have been watching the first vacancy to suggest a reduction.
The first step, then, towards the Unity of the Service should be the simple and efficacious one of charging one officer with collect- ing. a mass of information about it. One difficulty in collecting this information at present is the hesitation some younger clerks naturally feel to confess the whole truth as to the small amount of their work ; they fear that if they confess to the entry of only two letters a day, or if they say anything which may indirectly reflect on their superiors, they may find the office reduced and themselves sent adrift, or they may incur the displeasure of their departmental superiors. To prevent this, and to facilitate reforms, it should be declared that as members of the general Civil Service all clerks at present employed may consider themselves permanent, although the necessities of the State may compel their removal to other offices, but without reduction of pay or injury to their prospects. By this means you give to the whole Civil Ser- vice a stir of life ; every department would be conscious of being inspected by a person comparing. it with other departments, and a good clerk who through some mismanagement finds himself with- out work half the day will not be afraid to confess the truth. Take for instance some secretarial offices where some copying clerks who by better organization might be at work from ten o'clock, find themselves not set to work till two o'clock because the Commissioner or Secretary does not commence his work until twelve, and has no letters ready for entry until half-past one or two. Such details could not escape a judicious inspector; but what chance is there of their reform in a department left to itself ? We should not wish to make the proposed Inspector of the Civil Ser- vice an instigator of changes in the personnel of an office ; such changes are as difficult to effect with equity as they are often doubtful in result ; but there are no doubt peculiar extreme cases where an excellent clerk is unfortunately placed—in a lethargic demoralised office, or with uncongenial colleagues, or under a superior who has taken a personal dislike to -him—and in such eases there is no doubt that an official knowing the peculiarities of the whole Service could effect a removal that would be useful to the individual, useful to the office from which he was removed, and beneficial to the whole Service in giving him a fitting sphere for his abilities. Equally useful might be the agency of such an inspector-general in acquainting the Treasury, as he could from actual eye-witnessing, how the work of a special official had been largely augmented and admirably done, and how much more suitably that civil servant could be rewarded by a special and personal increase of salary than by the foolish custom that now sometimes obtains of removing a man from his office where he has done very good work that he may be rewarded by thrusting him into another office with higher pay.
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