Running a Whitehall department
There are lots of criticisms of how government departments are run, but little agreement on solutions; what are some of the possibilities?
Introduction: The big day
You’ve finally made it. You’re a politician, you’ve dreamed of this day since childhood, and you’ve been appointed a secretary of state, in charge of your very own department. It’s likely you’ve spent some years as a junior minister, whether in charge of international trade tariffs and disputes, or local authority decarbonisation (both genuine ministerial responsibilities). You may also have done a stint in the Whips’ Office, and you’ve probably had a spell as a parliamentary private secretary, a ministerial bag-carrier, your boss’s eyes and ears in the Commons. But now you’re the boss, the big cheese, the numero uno (fans of Airplane! can fill in the rest).
The size of your department can vary. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has a little under 2,000 personnel, while the Home Office comes in just over 43,000. But those are not always a reliable indicator of power and influence: HM Treasury, which is often the lynchpin of a government, only has 2,700 civil servants in its Whitehall base, but its decisions affect everyone. You will also have oversight of a number of non-ministerial departments, executive agencies and non-departmental public bodies: for example, DCMS covers the Charity Commission (a non-ministerial department) and the British Film Institute (a non-departmental public body), among others, while the Treasury supervises the National Infrastructure Commission, an executive agency).
Your place in the pecking order depends on perspective. There is an official order of precedence for the cabinet, determined by the prime minister, but it is largely a formality. It can determine who would take the chair at cabinet or in a cabinet committee, but since we now seem to have developed a practice of having a nominated deputy prime minister more often than not (currently Oliver Dowden, after the resignation of Dominic Raab), that may already be predetermined. (This is separate from the ceremonial order of precedence, which covers the Royal Household, the peerage and various other categories as well as ministers of the crown.)
The “great offices of state” are the chancellor of the Exchequer (who is also second lord of the Treasury and master of the Mint), the secretary of state for the Home Department and the secretary of state for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs. These have no special status but will likely be occupied by very senior members of the administration; however, the public may regard other cabinet posts, like health and social care secretary or education secretary, as of greater immediate importance and relevance to their daily lives. Some ministers will also derive status from their standing in the party, or their personal relationship with the prime minister. And in the present government, the website Conservative Home also maintains monthly rankings of cabinet ministers by popularity among party mmebers. So in fact there are many different rankings at work simultaneously, and nothing is ever absolutely certain.
Senior leadership
The top official in the department in the permanent secretary. He or she will be a career civil servant, though increasingly some are brought into the civil service from parallel professions: the late Lord Kerslake, for example, became permanent secretary at the Department for Communities, Housing and Local Government after two years as chief executive of the Homes and Communities Agency, before which he had been chief executive of Sheffield City Council; Lord Bichard became permanent secretary of the Department for Employment after running Gloucestershire County Council and then the Benefits Agency.
Permanent secretaries are formally appointed by the prime minister is his capacity as minister for the Civil Service, but the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 requires that appointments are made “on merit on the basis of fair and open competition”. The first civil service commissioner, with assistance from senior permanent secretaries, the cabinet secretary and sometimes non-executive directors of departments manage the process, which determines which candidates are appropriate to be appointed (“over the line”, in Whitehall terms), and the prime minister will then choose from those candidates. The competition may have been “internal” or “external”, and sometimes appointments are made as “managed moves”, where there is no promotion in grade but a candidate moves across from a comparable position without competition.
The permanent secretary has a number of functions: he or she is the principal policy adviser to the secretary of state, responsible for the management of the department and its budget, and provides overall leadership for the department and its agencies and bodies. He or she is also usually accounting officer for the department.
The important point in this context is that ministers do not appoint their permanent secretaries, nor, in general, do they have the ability to dismiss them. There was considerable controversy in the first days of the Truss ministry when the highly respected permanent secretary to the Treasury, Sir Tom Scholar, was removed from his post two days after the new chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, took office. Scholar had held the job since 2016, but Liz Truss in her leadership campaign had made repeated complaints about “Treasury orthodoxy” and wanted “new leadership” on the official side of the department; former civil servants were highly critical, his predecessor Lord Macpherson of Earl’s Court taking to Twitter to fulminate:
Tom Scholar is the best civil servant of his generation. Sacking him makes no sense. His experience would have been invaluable in the coming months as government policy places massive upward pressure on the cost of funding. As Gordon Brown used to say “they’re not thinking”.
It was an unusual but not isolated incident. Lord Sedwill was cabinet secretary and national security adviser under Theresa May, and was closely identified with her (not least as he had been her permanent secretary at the Home Office between 2013 and 2016). But he did not gel with Boris Johnson after the later became prime minister in July 2019, and in the summer of 2020 it was announced that he would retire that September. Downing Street sources told the media that he was “too much of a Europhile and establishment figure”.
That same summer, Jonathan Slater, permanent secretary at the Department for Education, was eased out after a row over calculating examination grades during the Covid-19 pandemic, the prime minister saying there was “a need for fresh official leadership”. He followed Sir Richard Heaton (Ministry of Justice), Sir Philip Rutnam (Home Office) and Sir Simon McDonald (Foreign and Commonwealth Office), all of whom had left their posts earlier than expected at the behest of the prime minister.
The traditional justification for ministers not hiring and firing their top officials is that the civil service is impartial and non-partisan, a vital part of our system which is, with or without justification, coming under pressure at the moment. Some have adduced the appointment of former permanent secretary Sue Gray as the chief of staff to the leader of the opposition as evidence that the senior civil service is no longer adhering to impartiality. My own view is that it is under much less strain than is made out: I wrote on the matter of Sue Gray and think we underestimate the extent to which civil servants are able to compartmentalise—I had to do it as a clerk in the House of Commons, and it is perfectly possible if you are professional and take seriously the proprieties of administration—but it is a fact that significant numbers of politicians now regard senior civil servants with suspicion, and that in itself is an issue.
It is not helped by particularly sharp contrasts: Dr Emma Haddad, former director-general for asylum and protection at the Home Office, is shortly to become a trustee of Amnesty International UK, which has been outspoken in its criticism of the government’s asylum policy. The Advisory Committee on Business Appointments declared there was no conflict of interest in Haddad’s appointment, and her full-time post is chief executive of the homeless charity St Mungo’s, but the optics are unhelpful to those defending the civil service’s impartiality.
It is clear that, as things currently stand, the prime minister can dismiss permanent secretaries for what we might call political or policy reasons. Both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss have done this, but they have done so by pushing up against the edges of convention and accepted practice. (Martin Stanley, the veteran observer of Whitehall, offers some detailed commentary here.) The House of Lords Constitution Committee is currently undertaking an inquiry into the appointment and dismissal of permanent secretaries; Jeremy Quin, paymaster-general in the Cabinet Office, told the committee that the current system “works well” and that he “not had any intimation from colleagues of a requirement or a desire to change that process”. Dr Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, added that “When it comes to Permanent Secretary appointments, I will always make sure that I have an early discussion with the Secretary of State about how they will get involved”.
However, Lord Maude of Horsham, the former Cabinet Office minister, is currently undertaking a review of civil service governance. In a previous review in 2013, Maude had been thought to support the ability of ministers to choose their permanent secretaries, though that had not emerged as a substantive recommendation, but it is still a live question: should Whitehall be more like the US system, in which the senior administrative as well as political ranks of government departments are chosen on a partisan basis and change with the government of the day? Or is there a halfway house, by which departmental heads could have a greater input into permanent secretary-level appointments?
A compromise would seem to represent the worst of all possible worlds. Ministerial tenure has been growing shorter and shorter: Grant Shapps, the new defence secretary, is now in his fifth post in a year, and the average tenure of cabinet ministers, which was more than three years under the Attlee government of 1945-51, has now been well under two years since 1997. It would clearly be a recipe for confusion and loss of institutional memory if permanent secretaries moved at a simlar rate and in conjunction with the secretary of state. To recruit officials on a more partisan basis, so that, for example, a new cadre would have come in 2010 and in 1997, would be less disruptive.
What are we seeking to achieve by allowing more “political” input into permanent secretary appointments? It seems to me there are two distinct ambitions. The first, and I think the weaker of the arguments, is so that ministers have officials who are more sympathetic to them and more in alignment in policy terms. This seems to me unnecessary and undesirable: firstly, it dismisses one of the foundations of the UK civil service, which is its impartiality. If that has been brought into doubt, then better to try to fix the problem than simply do away with the concept altogether. Secondly, it removes a potential source of challenge in practical terms which I think ministers need and good ministers should relish. We cannot imagine with a straight face that every cabinet minister arrives in his or her department with a deep and well-researched view on all policies, and some may have expectations which are simply not realistic. A good senior team will advise on what can and can’t be done, and will represent a wealth of institutional memory, hopefully saving departments from vain pursuits of the impractical or the unworkable.
A stronger argument, I think, is that giving ministers more power would allow them to bring in people from the outside, candidates with different skill sets and experience, disruptors who would challenge the Whitehall method and might achieve considerable results with a different perspective. But that, it seems to me, is not completely incompatible with the current system. It would surely not be impossible for ministers’ favoured candidates to be added to the normal lists and subjected to the same tests as others, then appearing (or not) on the list of those who were “over the line”. It would then be for the prime minister to decide whether or not the outside candidate was worthy of appointment. Some degree of change in this direction was hinted at in a Declaration on Government Reform made in June 2021 and attempting to absorb some of the lessons of the pandemic.
My view is that the arrangements currently in place are appropriate and flexible while preserving the impartiality of the civil service. Such problems as exist are in implementation and adherence to the existing standards. Sue Gray was cleared by ACOBA to take on her role with Sir Keir Starmer but was indeed found to have made a prima facie breach of the Civil Service Code. If anything, this is a demonstration that the rules do work; you will never eliminate behaviour which is in breach of the code but this demonstrates that such breaches are detected. However, one weakness is that the code is governed ultimately the Civil Service Commission, which has no powers to apply sanctions to those found to be in breach of it. A sensible reform would be to give the commission the ability to impose a variety of sanctions, up to and including dismissal.
Ministers
If the new secretary of state does not already feel somewhat powerless, he or she will also discover that a departmental head does not have control over the ministerial team. This is a matter of more nuance: a senior minister may be able to exert some influence on the prime minister, who ultimately makes all ministerial appointments. For example, when John Major reshuffled his cabinet in July 1995, he intended to make the rising star William Hague, then 34 and a minister of state at the Department of Social Security, chief secretary to the Treasury, while William Waldegrave, who had had a rather turbulent year as minister of agriculture, fisheries and food in the midst of the BSE crisis, was marked as secretary of state for Wales (perhaps Major thought his Bristol West constituency was all but in the principality). But the chancellor, Kenneth Clarke, regarded Hague as too right-wing and vetoed the appointment, so Major swapped their roles, with Waldegrave, despite having run his own departments for nearly five years, became Clarke’s deputy, while Hague went off to Gwydyr House.
In general, though, reshuffles are already a very difficult jigsaw to complete, and prime ministers cannot give too much weight to the wishes of departmental heads. Usually they will try to head off any catastrophic clashes—Rory Stewart came to loathe Boris Johnson during his brief stint as minister for Africa when Johnson was foreign secretary—but they may also place junior ministers for ideological reasons. Michael Portillo, then the darling of the Thatcherite right was made minister for local government at the Department of the Environment under Chris Patten, to inject some rigour into the notoriously “wet” secretary of state and to champion the Community Charge.
In making these appointments, prime ministers will often lean heavily on their chief whip, and sometimes other advisers; the leader may not know some of the more junior candidates for office well, if at all, while the chief whip will be able to draw on then meticulous records of his office. (There is always a whip on the government bench when the House of Commons is sitting, and they keep careful notes of the performance of all their MPs, both ministers and backbenchers.) It is said that Liz Truss left many of the junior appointments to her ill-fated government to her new chief whip, Wendy Morton, though she quickly came to dislike her second choice (Thérèse Coffey had been asked to do the job but wanted her own department and ended up both health and social care secretary and deputy prime minister).
This state of affairs is unlikely to change, as no prime minister will willingly give up the vast patronage which ministerial appointments represent. Even if depertmental heads were to be given some input into their ministerial teams, it would be necessary to slow down the current pace of reshuffles, which tend to completed over a couple of days (and which can be badly derailed even by one candidate refusing a job). It would be possible for prime ministers to appoint their cabinets and then pause while consulting with them about junior positions, but it is hard to see an advantage for a leader even in sharing that kind of power, except, perhaps, for better governance, which is rarely near the top of the agenda.
One must remember, if also lamenting, the random nature of reshuffles. When Chloe Smith was appointed a Treasury minister in October 2011, replacing Justine Greening who had been promoted to cabinet, David Cameron, then prime minister, is said to have chosen her in the mistaken belief she was a trained accountant. In fact, Smith had read English at university and had then been a management consultant at Deloitte.
Ministerial advisers
The new secretary of state will also have a ministerial private office, headed by the principal private secretary, and a number of special advisers, temporary civil servants appointed to carry out partisan functions which the mainstream civil service cannot undertake. The private office will deal with ministerial business, including diary commitments and correspondence, and the principal private secretary will usually become a close adviser to the secretary of state. Cabinet ministers do not appoint their own teams, but may, up to a point, shuffle them after appointment to suit their needs, and will have input into appointments once they are in office.
Special advisers (SpAds) are more personal appointments. They tend to serve only as long as their minister does, and may move between departments with them, though they are formally appointed (and therefore approved) by the prime minister, or at least by Downing Street. SpAds have developed a rather poor reputation since the Blair government, when they were seen as aggressively partisan, sometimes high-handed functionaries, and they tend to be young, the average age being in the low 30s. That is one factor which diminishes their status with others, as their expertise can often be questioned.
This is in part unfair and in part a problem of understanding. A large number of SpAds are now, effectively, media advisers, relying less on expertise than energy, nous and contacts. In Whitehall departments, they much less often have subject expertise, as can be seen when they follow their minister between departments. They are not freebooters: they are civil servants, albeit in a special category, and they are governed by their own code of conduct. They generally work long hours and have little security of tenure, and good ones will understand that their job will done most effectively by co-operating with officials (to whom they may not give instructions). Equally, sensible civil servants will see SpAds as a useful conduit to the minister and an effective way of gauging what the minister thinks.
One result of Francis Maude’s 2013 civil service reforms was the introduction of extended ministerial offices (EMOs), which brought together the private office civil servants, special advisers and outside appointees for specific policy or other purposes. These were appointed by the relevant minister, and were required to have someone responsible for implementation, reporting to the Cabinet Office Implementation Unit. EMOs were in effect an analogue of the cabinet system used by European ministers and members of the European Commission among others (see the cabinet of the president of the Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, here). These bodies had long been a proposal of Whitehall reformers who wished to give ministers more clout; Roy Jenkins had been particularly impressed by his cabinet when he was president of the Commission from 1977 to 1981, headed by British diplomat Crispin Tickell.
EMOs seemed like a very sensible reform, but they did not prove popular. Perhaps the need for sign-off from the permanent secretary and Downing Street made them seem like too much work; during the Coalition, the approval mechanisms were particularly tortuous. But even after the 2015 election, only five departments began the process of establishing EMOs: the Cabinet Office, the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Department for Education, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Scotland Office. Although Liz Truss, at DEFRA, was an outspoken advocate of the system, they were wound up at the end of 2016.
I think that was an opportunity lost. It was reform in the best British tradition: gradualist, evolutionary, needs-based and incorporating the virtues of the existing arrangements. But there is no point in forcing change on unwilling ministers. Perhaps a new government will revive the idea in the future.
Conclusion
It will not surprise some of you that I think Whitehall works reasonably well in institutional terms (there is much to be done in terms of personnel). For that reason I have left alone for the moment issues like training for civil servants (and for ministers), and the use of different skills and specialisms.
There will be people who think the system should be overturned completely: political appointees instead of career civil servants, outside experts instead of ministers drawn from Parliament, different decision-making mechanisms. Very well; the revolutionaries can have their visions of another world. But I think we are in a brown study as a nation, disconsolate, sour, critical. We will come out of it, because nations and societies always do, but until we get there, there are things we can do, small, achievable steps to make things incrementally better. And we should always remember that systems are only as good as those that operate them, and we have perhaps fallen short there of late. So instead of scrapping the rules and regulations, let’s try imposing them strictly and fairly, let’s be scrupulous and exacting, and I think we can make the machinery of government work better than it has been. If not, well, there’s always time for a revolution tomorrow.