The Ideal of Public Service

Reflections on the Higher Civil Service in Britain

Barry O'Toole

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781135770990
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A close examination of the ethics of higher civil servants in Britain and how they have been undermined by recent developments in public administration.

Barry O'Toole tackles key questions such as:

• how should public servants behave?
• how should they be encouraged to think ethically?
• how should they be motivated to do so?

Focusing on the role of public service, public duty and the public interest in the twenty-first century, O'Toole answers these important questions and looks at the emergence of 'new public management', the increasingly important role of 'special advisers' and the decline of the public service ethos under New Labour.

The Ideal of Public Service explores some of the key contributions to the development of ideas about public service in the context of British central administration and provides a discussion of recent trends in administrative practice in the UK. Combining political theory and an analysis of the history and development of the civil service, this timely book will be of strong interest to those researching British Politics, Governance and Public Policy.

1 The ideal of public service

This book is not intended to be the definitive history of the idea of public service. Neither is it a social science investigation into whether current public servants are motivated by that idea. Rather, it is a personal exploration of the idea by way both of an examination of some of the key contributors to the development of ideas of public service as understood in the context of the higher civil service in Britain and a discussion of some recent trends in administrative practice in the United Kingdom. It is not an exhaustive literature survey, nor is it an objective assessment. It is intended both to be controversial and stimulating and add to our understanding of public administration in Britain. In part it may be regarded as polemical, in the same way as was Brian Chapman’s excellent but maligned book British Government Observed (1963). The book eschews the jargon that mars so much contemporary social science writing and in the sense that it presents no new ‘scientific’ theories, or typologies or models or other heuristic devices, it is in part a contribution to the literature from what Jeroen Maesschalk refers to as the ‘Traditional Public Administration’ perspective (Maesschalk, 2004, p. 466). As the title of the book suggests, it simply presents some reflections on the skills, approaches and values of senior civil servants in Britain.

Public service is a much-denigrated idea. Yet it has been a fundamental element of the writings of most major political philosophers. It was central both to the thoughts of the ancients and their mediaeval commentators and to those of more recent writers, from Rousseau and Kant onwards. Despite this honourable pedigree, however, contemporary political science sneers at it. Those who demand hard facts, preferably in the form of statistical evidence, seem almost inclined to say that if it cannot be measured then it must not exist. In this sense ideas of public service, and a motivation to act in the public interest or out of public duty, are much like many of the finer and nobler aspects of human existence. As with love, or happiness, or friendship, the existence of a motivation to act out of public duty cannot be vouchsafed by a social survey. As with religious faith, such a motivation may be seen in the words of T. H. Green, the great English idealist philosopher who inspired so many public servants, as a ‘primary formative principle, which cannot be deduced or derived from anything else’ (Green, 1900, p. 263). This book is simply an attempt at defining the ideal of public service, defending it as an ideal and decrying the perceived decline of such an ideal in Britain.

There will be those who will say upon reading this book, that it harks back to a non-existent ‘Golden Age’ when imaginary altruistic public servants were meant to set aside their own interests and make decisions on the basis of an elusive public interest. They will point to the work of the public choice theorists and the other arid pessimists of the social sciences who lay claim to have ‘proved’ the non-existence of such a golden age – or rather to have ‘proved’ that public servants are self-interested and will act in the interests of their class. So what? There is no doubt that past officials, who have been lionised as high minded, nobly motivated public servants, often acted in self-interest or class-interest, even if they genuinely believed that they were acting in the public interest. There is no doubt too they were often unaccountable or that they were elitist. None of this can be denied. Indeed, those who have done empirical research on such past leaders of the civil service have presented evidence that this is indeed the case (see for example, Barberis, 1996; Chapman, 1984, 1988, 2004; O’Halpin, 1989; Theakston, 1999). The reason is this: there never has been a golden age of public administration in the sense of a pure concern with acting out of public duty. Human nature is deeply flawed in this sense, as in all others. Nevertheless, there was an ideal of public service; and, however imperfect from the perspective of the actual world, this acted as a guide to public servants. It is an ideal which is now, if not derided, simply ignored; and the guide to public activity is now something rather vaguely – if narrowly – called ‘efficiency’. Efficiency, defined in a narrow utilitarian way, means the two are not compatible. The purpose of this book is to argue – not to ‘prove’ – that the ideal of public service can help to motivate public servants to act efficiently – defined in a wider and more relevant sense.

The method, or rather the approach, is straightforward. First, there will be a description and discussion of some of the works of some of the important writers on this subject, chosen on the basis of the judgement that their contributions are significant contributions. It is not an exhaustive survey. Second, there will be a discussion of why the ideas of these thinkers have played an important part both in the study and in the practice of public administration in Britain. Third, there will be an assessment of recent trends away from ideas of public service and a discussion of public service in the twenty-first century. There will not be any quantitative material. Little existed when the non-existent golden age of administration was alleged to be at its zenith, during the period from about 1919 until the 1980s, and so it is simply not possible to talk about a ‘decline’ in a narrow ‘scientific’ sense. Attempts at creating a ‘data-base’ now would be futile. Despite the increasing sophistication of quantitative methods, there would be the problem that public servants would probably deny that they were not acting out of a sense of public service or in the public interest. The recent Guardian attempt at this was interesting and uplifting, given its revelations about the motivations of public servants, but from a scientific perspective it was a pointless exercise (The Guardian, 2001). Moreover, that survey was primarily about what are described as ‘front line’ public servants, for example, teachers, nurses, social workers and firemen, whose motivation may be described as vocational. It was not about the ideal of public service defined in the more abstract sense of a concern with ‘the public interest’. This book is about senior civil servants, those whose function it is to advise ministers about how best to govern society. It is informed scholarship about that aspect of public service that is the basis of this discussion.

Of course, there is a danger of ‘reading history backwards’, to use an Oakeshottian phrase. More precisely, there is the danger of projecting the ideas of Plato and Aristotle or Rousseau and Kant or even Bradley and Green into a world, the world of twentieth-and twenty-first-century Britain, which would be completely unrecognisable to them. The ancients, their mediaeval commentators and the early moderns lived in small communities, and, of course, their experiences framed their thoughts. As time has marched on societies have grown, and Aristotle’s view that a state’s territory should be of a size ‘which can be easily surveyed’ (1946 edn, VII.v.3) and its population ‘the greatest surveyable number for requiring self-sufficiency’ (VII.iv.14) is no longer tenable – though modern technology has perhaps brought such an ideal back within our grasp! Instead, as James Bryce noted at the beginning of the twentieth century, elites have emerged who control the activities of the modern state (1921, Vol. II, p. 542). It is with elites that this book is concerned, and the ideas of those past philosophers are as relevant in this context as ever.

What, then, is the ideal of public service? Put simply, the idea is that those in official positions of public authority regard the interests of the whole society as being the guiding influence over all public decision-making, that their personal or class or group interests are to be set aside when making decisions, and that they are public servants purely out of a perceived duty to serve the public. It is an idea which has permeated the history of political philosophy, with its most noble expression appearing in the works of Plato, particularly in the Republic. His ‘philosopher rulers’, the holders of public office, ‘will be those who, when we look at the whole course of their lives, are found to be full of zeal to do whatever they believe to be the good of the commonwealth and never willing to act against its interests’ (1941 edn, p. 101).

This idea of a ‘common good’, what might be loosely likened to ‘the public interest’, was developed by Aristotle in his Politics. That work is more prosaic than Plato’s Republic, but Aristotle, too, recognised that those citizens called upon to rule in a given city state must set aside their personal interests. As the scale of society has grown it has become more difficult to ascertain what the common good or public interest is, and, of course, while the opportunities for holding to account those charged with public office have declined, the mechanisms by which the public interest can be achieved have become infinitely more complex, and perhaps less reliable (see for example, Bovens, 1998; Flinders, 2001, 2004; Newman, 2004; Pyper, 1996). Society has become increasingly heterogeneous and class and group interests have come to dominate the political landscape in the contemporary world. This does not mean, however, that there is no such thing as the common good, unless, of course, there is no such thing as society itself.

The conviction that there is no such thing as society was most famously articulated by Margaret (now Baroness) Thatcher. Of course, her words are usually only partly reported, and the addendum that there are only individuals and families is rarely referred to. Nevertheless, the statement does reflect her dislike of notions such as the common good or the public interest, which she would probably regard as having socialist undertones. A more coherent, if rather implied, criticism of these notions comes from the so-called ‘Group Theorists’, particularly in the seminal works of Arthur Bentley and David Truman. For these and other writers, all societies are merely aggregates of groups. These groups represent interests and vie with each other in attempts to ensure that their interests are both represented in public policy making and at least partially satisfied. Everybody belongs to these groups, even if they do not know that they belong, and the groups have overlapping memberships. Even political decision-makers belong to groups, and these political groups, for example political parties and government agencies, whilst being highly differentiated, nevertheless represent the interests of those who belong to them and not the national or public interest. The reason, at least for Bentley, is clear: for him there is no such thing as the ‘social whole’, just groups ‘pressing one another, forming one another, and pushing out new groups . . . to mediate the adjustments’ (1908, 1955 edn p. 269). Truman is less dogmatic, but is largely in agreement with his predecessor (1951). Later writers have refined some of the ideas of Bentley and Truman, and there is now a vast American, and more latterly British and European, literature on pluralism, with seminal works by Dahl and Lindblom, and on public choice, networks and more latterly ‘partnership’ (see for example, Beer, 1965, 1982; Dahl, 1961; Jordan and Richardson, 1987; Lindblom, 1965, 1968, 1977; Rhodes, 1992, 1996, 1997; Richardson and Jordan, 1979). The common theme in all this work, a theme shared to some extent with Marxist interpretations of the state, is that governments and public officials accommodate the various interests and groups of society. In this pessimistic view of the world, governments and public officials have no concept of an overall common good. Public choice writers go further and develop the ideas of the Group Theorists to their ultimate conclusion: that public officials will maximise their own interests and those of the agencies and groups they represent (see for example, Buchanan, 1954, 1975; Downs, 1957; Dunleavy, 1985, 1986, 1989, 1991; Niskannen, 1971; Olsen, 1971).

This positivist approach does have some strengths. Indeed, it sits easily with a view that to expect public officials to set aside their own interests is unnatural. In that sense the empiricists share certain assumptions with some of those who are to be held up in the pages that follow as defenders of the idea of public service, most notably Aristotle and Rousseau. However, unlike Aristotle and Rousseau, and certainly unlike the British Idealists, some of whose ideas are also to be discussed in this book, the more recent writers seem to imply that their pessimistic view is of a world either as it should be or at least that there is nothing that can be done to prevent it so being. If we take the first implication, it might almost be argued that it is in the public interest that there is no public interest! If we take the second, then we are condemning ourselves to a corrupt future. At any event, even if it is accepted that some people will not set aside their personal interests, it is the contention here that some will, and that they should be so encouraged.

It may be argued that this is precisely what happened in British public life in the latter part of the nineteenth century and for most of the twentieth century. Corruption, which some see as being part of the natural human condition, was endemic in the public service of mid-nineteenth century Britain, and it often manifested itself as indolence, stupidity and incompetence. This led to national disasters, national introspection, and the establishment of public enquiries. It was an example of the latter, the Northcote–Trevelyan Report, which laid the foundations for a famously meritorious and apparently incorruptible civil service. These foundations were built upon by the creation of the Civil Service Commission, which established standards for new entrants to civil service departments, and by the gradual unification of those departments into a civil service, what, for Sir Warren Fisher was the fourth service of the Crown. These structural changes were accompanied by changes in the spirit of administration and by the emergence of an ethos of public service as embodied in numerous public officials, most notably, but most certainly not exclusively, Fisher and his distinguished successor Sir Edward Bridges. Both the structure and the ethos remained largely intact until the 1980s. Since then, following precepts first laid down in the Fulton Report of 1968, the structure has largely been dismantled and the ethos has all but disap...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The Ideal of Public Service
• 2. Philosophy, Politics and Administration: The Ideal of Public Service
• 3. British Public Administration and the Ideal of Public Service: 1855–1968
• 4. Morals, Markets and Modernisation: Public Administration Post-Fulton
• 5. The Ideal of Public Service: Some Reflections On the Higher Civil Service In Britain