Civil Service (United Kingdom)
In the United Kingdom, the Civil Service is the permanent bureaucracy or secretariat of Crown employees which supports His Majesty's Government, which is led by a cabinet of ministers chosen by the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
As in other states that employ the Westminster political system, the Civil Service – often known by the metonym of Whitehall – forms an inseparable part of the British government. The executive decisions of government ministers are implemented by the Civil Service. Civil servants are employees of the Crown and not of the British parliament. Civil servants also have some traditional and statutory responsibilities which to some extent protect them from being used for the political advantage of the party in power. Senior civil servants may be called to account to Parliament.
In general use, the term civil servant in the United Kingdom does not include all public sector employees. Although there is no fixed legal definition, the term is usually defined as a "servant of the Crown working in a civil capacity who is not the holder of a political office; the holder of certain other offices in respect of whose tenure of office special provision has been made; a servant of the Crown in a personal capacity paid from the Civil List". As such, the civil service does not include government ministers ; members of the British Armed Forces; police officers; officers of local government authorities; employees of some non-departmental public bodies; officers or staff of either of the Houses of Parliament; employees of the National Health Service ; or staff of the Royal Household. As of the end of March 2021 there were 484,880 civil servants in the Civil Service, an increase of 6.23 per cent on the previous year.
History
Establishment
The Offices of State grew in England, and later the United Kingdom centred around the street Whitehall, hence the metonym. Initially, they were little more than secretariats for their leaders, who held positions at court. They were chosen by the king on the advice of a patron, and typically replaced when their patron lost influence. In the 18th century, in response to the growth of the British Empire and economic changes, institutions such as the Office of Works and the Navy Board grew large. Each had its own system and staff were appointed by purchase or patronage. By the 19th century, it became increasingly clear that these arrangements were not working.Under Charles Grant, the East India Company established the East India Company College at Haileybury near London, to train administrators, in 1806. The college was established on recommendation of officials in China who had seen the imperial examination system. In government, a civil service, replacing patronage with examination, similar to the Chinese system, was advocated a number of times over the next several decades.
William Ewart Gladstone, in 1850, an opposition member, sought a more efficient system based on expertise rather than favouritism. The East India Company provided a model for Stafford Northcote, private Secretary to Gladstone who, with Charles Trevelyan, drafted the key report in 1854. The Northcote–Trevelyan Report recommended a permanent, unified, politically neutral civil service, with appointments made on merit, and a clear division between staff responsible for routine and those engaged in policy formulation and implementation work. The report was not implemented, but it came as the bureaucratic chaos in the Crimean War demonstrated that the military was as backward as the civil service. A Civil Service Commission was set up in 1855 to oversee open recruitment and end patronage as Parliament passed an Act "to relieve the East India Company from the obligation to maintain the College at Haileybury". Prime Minister Gladstone took the decisive step in 1870 with his Order in Council to implement the Northcote-Trevelyan proposals. This system was broadly endorsed by commissions chaired by Playfair, Ridley, MacDonnell, Tomlin and Priestley.
The Northcote–Trevelyan model remained essentially stable for a hundred years. This was attributed to its success in removing corruption, delivering public services, even under stress of war, and responding effectively to political change. Patrick Diamond argues:
The Irish Civil Service was separate from the British Civil Service. Whilst the Acts of Union 1800 abolished the Parliament of Ireland, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland was retained in formal charge of the Irish executive based at Dublin Castle. The Irish Office in Whitehall liaised with Dublin Castle. Some British departments' area of operation extended to Ireland, while in other fields the Dublin department was separate from the Whitehall equivalent.
Lord Fulton's committee report
Following the Second World War demands for change grew again. There was a concern that technical and scientific expertise was mushrooming, to a point at which the "good all-rounder" culture of the administrative civil servant with a classics or other arts degree could no longer properly engage with it: as late as 1963, for example, the Treasury had just 19 trained economists. The times were, moreover, ones of keen respect for technocracy, with the mass mobilisation of war having worked effectively, and the French National Plan apparently delivering economic success. And there was also a feeling which would not go away, following the war and the radical social reforms of the 1945 Labour government, that the so-called "mandarins" of the higher civil service were too remote from the people. Indeed, between 1948 and 1963 only three per cent of the recruits to the administrative class came from the working classes, and in 1966 more than half of the administrators at undersecretary level and above had been privately educated.Lord Fulton's committee reported in 1968. He found that administrators were not professional enough, and in particular lacked management skills; that the position of technical and scientific experts needed to be rationalised and enhanced; and that the service was indeed too remote. His 158 recommendations included the introduction of a unified grading system for all categories of staff, a Civil Service College and a central policy planning unit. He also said that control of the service should be taken from the Treasury, and given to a new department, and that the "fast stream" recruitment process for accessing the upper echelons should be made more flexible, to encourage candidates from less privileged backgrounds. The new department was set up by Prime Minister Harold Wilson's Labour Government in 1968 and named the Civil Service Department, known as CSD. Wilson himself took on the role of Minister for the Civil Service, while the first Minister in Charge of the Civil Service Department was Cabinet Minister Lord Shackleton, also Leader of the House of Lords and Lord Privy Seal. The first Permanent Secretary was Sir William Armstrong, who moved over from his post as Permanent Secretary at the Treasury. After the 1970 General Election, new Conservative Prime Minister Ted Heath appointed Lord Jellicoe in Lord Shackleton's place.
Into Heath's Downing Street came the Central Policy Review Staff, and they were in particular given charge of a series of Programme Analysis and Review studies of policy efficiency and effectiveness.
But, whether through lack of political will, or through passive resistance by a mandarinate which the report had suggested were "amateurs", Fulton failed. The Civil Service College equipped generalists with additional skills, but did not turn them into qualified professionals as ENA did in France. Recruits to the fast stream self-selected, with the universities of Oxford and Cambridge still producing a large majority of successful English candidates, since the system continued to favour the tutorial system at Oxbridge while to an extent the Scottish Ancient universities educated a good proportion of recruits from north of the border. The younger mandarins found excuses to avoid managerial jobs in favour of the more prestigious postings. The generalists remained on top, and the specialists on tap.
Margaret Thatcher's government
came to office in 1979 believing in free markets as a better social system in many areas than the state: government should be small but active. Many of her ministers were suspicious of the civil service, in light of public choice research that suggested public servants tend to act in ways that seek to increase their own power and budgets.She immediately set about reducing the size of the civil service, cutting numbers from 732,000 to 594,000 over her first seven years in office. Derek Rayner, the former chief executive of Marks & Spencer, was appointed as an efficiency expert with the Prime Minister's personal backing; he identified numerous problems with the Civil Service, arguing that only three billion of the eight billion pounds a year spent at that time by the Civil Service consisted of essential services, and that the "mandarins" needed to focus on efficiency and management rather than on policy advice. In late 1981 the Prime Minister announced the abolition of the Civil Service Department, transferring power over the Civil Service to the Prime Minister's Office and Cabinet Office. The Priestley Commission principle of pay comparability with the private sector was abandoned in February 1982.
Meanwhile, Michael Heseltine was introducing a comprehensive system of corporate and business planning first in the Department of the Environment and then in the Ministry of Defence. This led to the Financial Management Initiative, launched in September 1982 as an umbrella for the efficiency scrutiny programme and with a wider focus on corporate planning, efficiency and objective-setting. Progress initially was sluggish, but in due course MINIS-style business planning became standard, and delegated budgets were introduced, so that individual managers were held much more accountable for meeting objectives, and for the first time for the resources they used to do so. Performance-related pay began in December 1984, was built on thereafter, and continues to this day, though the sums involved have always been small compared to the private sector, and the effectiveness of PRP as a genuine motivator has often been questioned.
In February 1988 Robin Ibbs, who had been recruited from ICI in July 1983 to run the Efficiency Unit, published his report Improving Management in Government: The Next Steps. This envisaged a new approach to delivery featuring clear targets and personal responsibility. Without any statutory change, the managerial functions of Ministries would be hived off into Executive Agencies, with clear Framework Documents setting out their objectives, and whose chief executives would be made accountable directly for performance. Agencies were to, as far as possible, take a commercial approach to their tasks. However, the Government conceded that agency staff would remain civil servants, which diluted the radicalism of the reform. The approach seems somewhat similar to the Swedish model, though no influence from Sweden has ever been acknowledged.
The Next Steps Initiative took some years to get off the ground, and progress was patchy. Significant change was achieved, although agencies never really achieved the level of autonomy envisaged at the start. By 5 April 1993, 89 agencies had been established, and contained over 260,000 civil servants, some 49 per cent of the total.
The focus on smaller, more accountable, units revived the keenness of Ministerial interest in the perceived efficiencies of the private sector. Already in the late 1980s, some common services once set up to capture economies of scale, such as the Property Services Agency and the Crown Suppliers, were being dismantled or sold off. Next, shortly after Thatcher left office, in July 1991, a new programme of market-testing of central government services began, with the White Paper Competing for Quality. Five-yearly or three-yearly policy and finance reviews of all agencies and other public bodies were instituted, where the first question to be answered was why the function should not be abolished or privatised. In November 1991 the private finance initiative was launched, and by November 1994 the chancellor of the exchequer had referred to it as 'the funding mechanism of choice for most public sector projects'. In 1995 the decision was taken to privatise the Chessington Computer Centre, HMSO, the Occupational Health & Safety Agency and Recruitment & Assessment Services.