'Sir Humphrey' says no to ministerial churn
It’s not just public servants who need to build capability, says former UK Cabinet Secretary Lord Gus O’Donnell in a Victoria University of Wellington public lecture. "How do we improve ministers?"
Lord Gus O'Donnell gave the Sir Frank Holmes Memorial Lecture in Public Policy on 12 March.
Watch a video of his lecture (available until 31 March 2019)
The UK’s former equivalent of Sir Humphrey Appleby doesn’t want government ministers to be hapless fools like Jim Hacker in the TV comedy series Yes, Minister. Lord Gus O’Donnell, Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service for Prime Ministers Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron between 2005 and 2011, wants them to be more like Steve Webb.
“Who?” O’Donnell rightly imagined the audience at Victoria University of Wellington’s Sir Frank Holmes Memorial Lecture in Policy Studies to be asking when he showed them a picture of Webb in a line-up alongside Blair and Cameron.
“This guy is my hero,” said O’Donnell.
That is because Webb, as Pensions Minister throughout Cameron’s Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government between 2010 and 2015, was a minister who remained in the one portfolio, bringing to it existing expertise about pensions and accumulating more while there.
“Bliss,” said O’Donnell, who is currently involved in a capability review of the Australian public service, where “the point I made to them is you can make the Australian public service as wonderful as you like, but government is about what ministers and the civil service do together. And so how do we improve ministers?”
When the Conservative Party was still in Opposition, Cameron had talks with O’Donnell in which “he explained all the things he wanted from me [when they were in government], like a national security committee up and running on day one. He said, ‘What do you want?’ I said, ‘I want ministers to stay around for longer.’ I had nine Pensions Ministers in five years. Pensions!”
Deadpanning, O’Donnell added: “So pensions is actually a short-term policy, so it doesn’t really matter, does it!?”
To illustrate the need for more ministerial experience, he quoted Blair.
“Tony, looking back on his time in office, said, ‘Look, when I arrived [after a landslide victory in 1997], I had 100 percent of my political capital and zero percent idea of what to do with it. When I left, I had zero percent political capital but 100 percent idea of what to do with it.”
O’Donnell also recommended more training for prospective ministers.
“You would think, ‘Okay, I’m an MP. I might be a minister one day and suddenly I’m going to be thrown into the department of defence, let’s say.’ You don’t know which department. ‘But at least I can specialise in understanding how to get the best out of my civil servants. So let me go on a course that teaches me about that.’”
The annual Sir Frank Holmes Memorial Lecture, hosted by the university's School of Government and Institute for Governance and Policy Studies (IGPS), commemorates one of the country's foremost economists and government advisers. Holmes, who died in 2011, was an economics professor at the university and later an emeritus professor in the IGPS, which he helped found.
O’Donnell, whose other public service roles include Permanent Secretary to the Treasury in 2002–2005 and Press Secretary to Prime Minister John Major in 1990–1994, is a Senior Fellow of the UK’s Institute for Government, which works “to make government more effective”.
His lecture, ‘Global problems and national solutions: building better states and better global architecture’, ranged widely and included a robust advocacy for the Westminster model of a permanent public service (on which New Zealand’s is based) over the American one where senior ranks change with a new president.
“The permanent model definitely has its advantages. There’s continuity across regime changes. And when you have three-year electoral cycles [as in New Zealand] you have potential for rapid regime changes. There’s experience at senior levels. You attract staff that want a long career in government and you have the ability of officials to provide objective advice secure in the knowledge their promotion prospects are determined by their colleagues, not their political masters.
“When you get creeping politicisation and that breaks down, then you have problems. This is crucial. If you want people to speak truth unto power, you need to ensure they are not going to be sacked as a result of that. If you break that rule, you will end up with a bunch of yes men and women who are no use to the civil service, no use to ministers and, most important of all, no use to government and the people themselves.”
O’Donnell then came to special advisers.
“‘Spads,’ as they’re known in the UK. If you’re into television, this has gone from the Sir Humphrey world where basically the Sir Humphrey figure, which is what I was, is obviously ‘Yes, minister’, he’s in charge and the minister is a bit of a pathetic person along the way, to The Thick of It, where the officials are just left floundering in the wake, and the minister and his special advisers manage to make chaos all on their own.
“How do we reconcile these things? Well, in my experience, good special advisers are absolutely invaluable. They economise on ministerial time, they give you good guidance, they do the political stuff civil servants shouldn’t be doing.
“On the other hand, bad special advisers are hopeless. They spend their time boosting their particular minister at the expense of everyone else, they brief journalists all the time against anybody who’s against their minister, and they’re not really that interested in evidence or detailed policy analysis. Because they follow their minister around and basically their background is probably in PR.
“The good ones, like I had Ed Balls at Treasury, Ed Balls was an economist, that’s what he was really interested in. You find some of the others, they’ve been employed by their minister, so they hop: one minute they’re in defence, the next they’re in agriculture. Have they become an expert in agriculture overnight? Curiously enough, no, so they revert to what they know, which is talking to journalists.”
O’Donnell questioned the New Zealand system of ministers being based together in the Beehive rather than in their departments.
“What I would say is, is this the right balance between being surrounded by their own special advisers versus being surrounded by their experienced civil servants?”
- This article first appeared on the Newsroom website on 16 November 2018.