The Rise of Managerial Bureaucracy

Reforming the British Civil Service

Lorenzo Castellani

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319900315
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319900322
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The book provides detailed analysis of the structure and operation of the British Civil Service along with a historically grounded account of its development in the period from Margaret Thatcher to the Tony Blair premiership. It assesses continuity and change in the civil service during a period of deep transformation using new archive files, government and parliament reports, primary and secondary legislation. The author takes the evolutionary change of the civil service as a central theme and examines the friction between new managerial practices introduced by government in the 80s and 90s and the administrative traditions rooted in the history of this institution. In particular the author assesses the impact of the New Public Management agenda of the Thatcher and Major years its enhanced continuity during the Blair years. Further changes that involved ministerial responsibility, codification, performance management, special advisers and constitutional conventions are analyzed in theconclusions.

© The Author(s) 2018

Lorenzo CastellaniThe Rise of Managerial Bureaucracy https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90032-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Civil Service: Definition, Organisation and Historical Background

Lorenzo Castellani¹

(1)

LUISS Guido Carli, Rome, Italy

End Abstract

In order to better understand the subject of the book, it would be useful to give a definition of the British Civil Service. The most widely used definition of a civil servant is the one proposed by the Tomlin Commission in 1931: “Servants of the Crown , other than holders of political and judicial offices, who are employed in a civil capacity and whose remuneration is paid wholly and directly out of moneys voted by Parliament” (Cmnd 3909, 1931). The term was first used in the late eighteenth century to distinguish the covenanted civilian employees of the East India Company (through which India was governed until 1858) from military personnel. This use of the adjective “civil” to connote “not military” carried over into the context of the early nineteenth-century British Civil Service, but was gradually adopted to convey the crucial distinction between holders of permanent posts and those whose jobs changed hands when there was a change of government (Parris 1969) .

However, it was not until well into the nineteenth century that political and permanent officials clearly emerged as two separate and distinct species of public servant . Departments remained autonomous and differentiated in their structures and practices. In such circumstances, the term “civil servant” and any notion of a coherent entity called a “civil service” had and could have had no useful meaning. Even after the major reforms in central administration that took place in the middle of the nineteenth century, the expression only gradually became common currency. Until 1870, as Chapman and Greenaway point out, “statesmen and leading administrators were reluctant to talk of the ‘Civil Service’; they used instead such terms as the ‘public offices’ or the ‘public establishments’” (Chapman and Greenaway 1980).

Hence, the terminology is of quite recent origin. And, even in the hundred years or so that “civil servant” has been part of the day-to-day vocabulary of public affairs, the precise content of the term has never been defined. This situation was created too by the fact that the civil servant of late Victorian Britain was a very different animal from his modern counterpart; he was the product of a very different social and political order. The state that employed him has changed greatly in size, shape and nature. Similar problems arise when we try to draw international comparisons by using the traditional vocabulary of British civil servants to refer to the central bureaucracies of France, the USA or Germany.

The neutral ideal type of bureaucracy designed by Max Weber gives some guidelines for undertaking basic comparison across time and space. The problem in defining the British Civil Service was that other concepts like “Crown ” or “departments of government” were themselves slippery concepts. This was underlined by Mackenzie and Grove in their authoritative account of British Central Government , which pointed out that “we are met at the outset by the fact that there are no precise criteria, either legal or historical, by which to determine the scope of the Civil Service. There is a central core which is unmistakable, but at the margin no sharp line divides those public servants who are within the Civil Service from those who are not” (Mackenzie and Grove 1957). Some 20 years later the Expenditure Committee of the House of Commons reached much the same conclusion.

Defining civil servants became of considerable importance once patronage was reduced in 1870. It is no good preventing politicians from nominating their own candidates if they can still insert their nominees under a different traditional guise (Craig 1955). This problem has re-emerged with the continuing debate about the appointment of temporary special advisers into the twenty-first century. The absence of firm definition is the expression of the reluctance of British administrative reformers to place central bureaucracies within a coherent framework of public law . The Superannuation Acts, dating from the early nineteenth century, and providing a rare example of statutory intrusion into the operation of the Civil Service, are often taken as a basis for an official definition of the scope of the Civil Service for statistical and other purposes, though in fact the definition they provide is somewhat tautological.

Despite these difficulties, the definition from the Tomlin Report is still the most useful. In the absence of the sort of neat definition that can be found in other countries with Civil Service Acts, the definition stood the test of time, until comparatively recently. We have to consider that the British Civil Service was a peculiar institution for a number of reasons. Officials did not normally have written contracts, presumably because they were servants of the Crown , though they had implied contracts. Defining the Civil Service became a useful example of how the British unwritten constitution worked in practice. Civil servants were known to have modest privileges, or benefits, as a result of being servants of the Crown ; for example, they had a non-contributory pension scheme and they held a job “for life.” As the texts on bureaucracy put it, following Max Weber’s definition of the ideal type bureaucracy , employment in such Civil Service was “based on technical qualification and … protected against arbitrary dismissal” (Blau 1956: 30). The British Civil Service in the early and middle years of the twentieth century built upon the advantages that resulted from these characteristics. No one contributed more to this process than Sir Warren Fisher , who regarded the Civil Service as a fourth service of the Crown , after the armed services. Fisher did much to encourage a sense of belonging to the service and emphasised the need to maintain the highest possible standards. His approach was continued by Sir Edward Bridges , who, when he was the Head of the Home Civil Service , also tried to develop a sense of belonging and loyalty to a distinctive service.

Following the creation of the Civil Service Department (CSD) in 1968, the publication Civil Service Statistics also at first accepted the Tomlin definition, though from 1972 the wording was modified. In 1972 it read, “A civil servant is a servant of the Crown (not being the holder of political or judicial office) who is paid wholly and directly out of money voted by Parliament and who works in a civil capacity in a department of government” (Civil Service Department 1972: 12). This was further modified in 1976 by adding the sentence: “However, some civil servants work for Crown bodies which are not government departments, such as the Manpower Services Commission and its two agencies or the Health and Safety Executive, and are paid out of grants-in-aid to these bodies” (Civil Service Department 1976: 12). By 1994, the definition as it appeared in Civil Service Statistics had been changed again, this time presumably to adjust to the creation of Next Steps agencies , especially those with trading fund status. This, the 1994 definition, omits all reference to what had previously been regarded as the key financial clause; there is no longer any reference to pay being drawn wholly and directly out of money voted by Parliament. It stated that “a Civil Servant is a servant of the Crown working in a civil capacity who is not: the holder of a political (or judicial) 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” (HM Treasury 1994: 18).

This is, on the face of it, comprehensive, though much less specific than earlier definitions. All officials working in the central administration come within its sphere, but recent explanations and changes have tried to clarify what it means in practice. Since the creation of Next Steps agencies , following the publication of the Ibbs Report (Efficiency Unit 1988) , there has been discussion about whether a Civil Service as such can still be said to exist as a recognisable and discrete service, distinct from an aggregation of employees of particular government departments and agencies. This process was stimulated by characteristics of work in agencies, which operated on business-like lines, where staff increasingly began to have contracts with pay and conditions of service that vary from agency to agency, and where staff were given targets to achieve, with incentives including pay related to the achievement of their targets. Sir Robin Butler , Head of the Home Civil Service , said he was quite clear that the Civil Service as a distinct entity still existed, though it is a service that was “unified but not uniform” (Butler 1993). The 1994 White Paper, The Civil Service: Continuity and Change, was also confident on this point. It argued that “the importance of the Civil Service as a coherent entity, rather than simply the sum of the staff of individual departments performing specific roles, has been recognised for more than 150 years,” and it goes on to quote Butler’s key principles. These are “integrity, impartiality, objectivity, selection and promotion on merit, and accountability through ministers to Parliament” (Cabinet Office 1994, para. 2.7).

Other recent publications have also focused on this issue. Sir Peter Kemp , known as “the architect of Next Steps,” wrote about “moving away from the model of a single service monolith to one where a loose federation of many smaller agencies, units, and cores predominates” (Kemp 1993: 8). However, he believed there was “no such thing as a single public service ethos” (Kemp 1993: 33) and that “there has never been any real unity” (ibidem: 44). Instead, the “unity of the Civil Service rests on its being a body of professionals, like doctors and lawyers, rather than on any harder commonality” (ibidem). Similar sentiments were expressed in the report by Sylvie Trosa , Next Steps: Moving On. Recognising that agencies were semi-autonomous bodies, she stated that “financial, management , and personnel rules will become more and more different; the only element of unity which will be left, besides ethical standards, will be the uniform tag of being a civil servant” (Trosa 1994, para. 2.17). One of her conclusions on the agencies was that “typically, the main protagonists either want to maintain a complete uniformity of rules or alternatively argue that unity of the Civil Service is an obsolete preoccupation, contradictory to the requirements of good management practice … [however] it seems that the solution can neither be uniformity nor complete diversity, but a mixture of both” (para. 4.5.4).

William Waldegrave , the then minister responsible for the Office of Public Service and Science , explained how he saw the future of public service in the context of reforming Britain’s bureaucracies . He did not define the Civil Service, nor did he discuss the problems associated with various definitions, but he explained recent changes as he perceived them. Agencification , he said, “involves the separation of the Civil Service into a number of smaller, increasingly specialised units known as Next Steps agencies ” (Waldegrave 1993: 18). This, the result of recent reforms, “will leave us with a smaller … public service … consist[ing] of a comparatively small core, and a series of devolved delivery organisations” (ibidem: 23). Furthermore, he saw the new ethos of public service as based on the principles to be found in the Citizen’s Charter (1991), as being grafted onto “unshaken, unchanging, unchallenged incorruptibility and political impartiality.” These principles were: explicit standards of service that were set, published and prominently displayed at the point of delivery; full, accurate and up-to-date information about how public services are run, what they cost and how well they perform; value for money ; regular and systematic consultation with service users; accountability ; and well-published and readily available complaints procedures (Waldegrave 1993: 19–24). These principles listed by the Citizen’s Charter were very similar to Butler’s list of key principles, except for the reference about accountability between Parliament and ministers made by the latter, and both hardly differentiated the Civil Service from good management practices. Even on that criterion, however, there must be some doubts if we consider the second period of this research (1990–2007), because ministers were differentiating between policy, for which they saw themselves as responsible, and “operational matters,” which were apparently the direct responsibility of officials from parliamentary committees, the media and the public.

Therefore, to summarise and to have a clearer perspective about a definition for “civil servant,” we need to find a way to better define who is a civil servant. In the end, the best method is the use of exclus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Civil Service: Definition, Organisation and Historical Background
• 2. The Rise of Managerialism in the Civil Service: The Thatcher Years
• 3. Focus on Policy Implementation, Consumer Service and Marketisation: Civil Service Reform in the Major Government (1990–1997)
• 4. 1997–2007: Coordination, Consolidation and Delivery in Blair’s Government
• 5. Management and Tradition in the British Civil Service: Assessing Institutional Development—Issues and Conclusions
• Back Matter