Civil Service
The civil service refers to the body of government employees who are responsible for implementing and administering public policies and programs. Civil servants are typically non-elected officials who work in various government agencies and departments. They are expected to be politically neutral and provide continuity in governance regardless of changes in political leadership.
7 Key excerpts on "Civil Service"
eBook - ePub- Joanne Sellick(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...8 The Civil Service and Open Government 8.1 The Civil Service 8.1.1 The Definition of a Civil Servant 1. A civil servant is a servant of the Crown but not holder of political or judicial office, who is employed in a civil capacity and whose remuneration is paid wholly and directly from monies voted by Parliament. 2. It is extremely difficult to assess the number of civil servants, primarily because of problems in defining whether particular roles are within the public service. The size of a Civil Service staff for a department will depend on its relative size. 3. The terms and conditions of a civil servant’s employment are regulated under the prerogative (see Chapter 7). 8.1.2 Constitutional Principles and the Civil Service Traditionally, under constitutional principles, the Civil Service displays three characteristics: 1. Permanency Civil servants hold permanent posts. This is justified on the basis that expertise can develop and be maintained from one government to the next. This is in contrast to other constitutions where the Civil Service is semi-permanent and senior posts change with a change of government, such as in the USA. 2. Political neutrality The Civil Service must be loyal to the government of the day, regardless of which political party it is comprised of. This is justified on the basis of ensuring a lack of political bias. There has though been constant criticism of whether the Civil Service is indeed politically neutral. 3. Anonymity The Civil Service is traditionally anonymous and protected from public enquiry – instead the Minister should be seen to be responsible and accountable...
eBook - ePubThe regulation of standards in British public life
Doing the right thing?
- David Hine, Gillian Peele(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Manchester University Press(Publisher)
...So changes to the public service that threaten it should be most visible at this level. Secondly, in the UK constitutional narrative public-service values are generally presented as a safeguard against the rampant partisanship of elected politicians. The United Kingdom does not subscribe explicitly to theories of checks and balances, but the permanence of a professional, meritocratic, non-partisan Civil Service is frequently seen as the embodiment of an implicit separation of powers between partisanship and procedural integrity. If this is true, a change in that relationship would potentially have consequences for public ethics. Beyond the departmental Civil Service, ministerial patronage has always been present, in the sense that, as we shall see, a very large number of appointments have historically been ministerial appointments. So here too any change, either because ministers are making more partisan use of ministerial patronage, or because a greater range of appointments is available, will be of significance. The interface between politics and administration The relationship between the partisan and the non-partisan parts of the executive lies at the heart of the Westminster/Whitehall model of parliamentary government. Its essence is that the political impartiality, centralised recruitment, training and inter-departmental mobility found in the Civil Service, and its strong sense of professionalism and public service, are important counter-weights to the partisanship of politicians. These features also offer important protections for civil servants themselves. Through them, civil servants exchange constitutional anonymity for managerial and career autonomy, and freedom from reprisal when they speak truth (or what they see as truth) to the power of elected politicians...
eBook - ePubA New Public Management in Mexico
Towards a Government that Produces Results
- Esteban Moctezuma Barragán, Andrés Roemer(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...better government The desire to have a professional public service is not a new one. 2 For quite a while, the career Civil Service has emerged as a reaction of governments to the crisis in the public administration caused by political immobility, corruption and lack of professionalism of public servants. 3 That is to say, the career Civil Service arises as an answer to three administrative challenges: 1) the demand for personnel highly qualified to confront the new challenges taken on by the public function; 2) the new, prevailing conditions in the world environment, and 3) the deep discredit of public officials due to cases of corruption, abuse of functions and impunity in the exercise of their functions. 4 To solve these problems, the career Civil Service proposed creating an efficient public administration that is based on merit, defends the public interest, is service-oriented and has institutional memory. This is achieved by means of a system that regulates the entry by means of a rigorous selection, one that encourages prior training and satisfactory performance evaluations, and that dismisses an employee from his position for unsatisfactory performance evaluations. In addition, the system demands neutrality from the Civil Service in partisan questions. To reach these objectives is a complex, hazardous task that involves costs and benefits. The main advantages and disadvantages that the career Civil Service presents are examined below in order to evaluate later the dilemma facing the governments that consider establishing a system of this type in administering public servants. Advantages and disadvantages of the career Civil Service 5 The career Civil Service, of course, is not the solution to all the problems of government...
eBook - ePubThe Rise of Managerial Bureaucracy
Reforming the British Civil Service
- Lorenzo Castellani(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...© The Author(s) 2018 Lorenzo Castellani The 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 Castellani 1 (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...
eBook - ePub- William Robson, William A. Robson(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...CHAPTER 8 THE EXPERT IN THE Civil Service By F. A. A. MENZLER, B. SC., F. I. A. Sometime of the Government Actuary's Department; sometime Chairman of Council, Institution of Professional Civil Servants DOI 10.4324/9781003254669-8 FOR a variety of reasons the Home Civil Service has attracted increasing public attention in recent years. The unreserved acceptance by the government, after the war, of the principle of collective negotiation in its dealings with the non-industrial staffs, and the correlative growth of the staff organizations, have had the effect of converting the major Civil Service controversies about conditions of employment from parochial to national questions. Since the war, governments have been embarrassed and even defeated in the House of Commons on purely Civil Service issues. Again, although in pre-war days the Civil Service was an accredited source of popular amusement, to-day we find not only that the quality of the Civil Service is the envy of less fortunate administrations, but that Civil Service methods are being studied by those both at home and abroad who have discovered by experience that haphazard methods of staff recruitment and administrative organization may lead not merely to inefficiency but often to ineffectiveness. In the United States, for example, the fructification of the vast schemes of social amelioration associated with the New Deal has been impeded inter alia by the absence of a trained, adaptable, incorruptible Civil Service such as we in this country have come to regard as part of the natural order of things...
eBook - ePubA History of Public Administration
Volume II: From the Eleventh Century to the Present Day
- E.N. Gladden(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...A similar situation was reflected in the Party bureaucracy whose faith had to be above suspicion. Certainly the state machinery included the Soviets at the many levels, through which, in theory, democracy was enabled to participate both in the making of government policy and in actual administering, but inevitably local party controls reduced outside participation to a minor role. The ubiquity of the official in the Soviet system is exemplified by the use of the general term ‘state employee’ for the entire range of government worker from the minister at the top to the humblest manual worker, but to the officials of the higher and middle ranges who are classified as civil servants elsewhere, the legal title ‘holder of office’ is applied. Endowed with certain administrative capacities these functionaries include not only the equivalents of the administrative and executive civil servants in Britain, but also managers of factories and enterprises, professional and technological experts, judges, procurators, accountants, senior local officials, and so forth. The idea of a separate corps of civil servants is alien both to the general concept of the communist society, to the service of which all human participants are dedicated without distinction, and also to the socialist idea that the state and industry are not separate spheres of operation...
eBook - ePubThe Politicization of the Civil Service in Comparative Perspective
A Quest for Control
- B. Guy Peters, Jon Pierre, B. Guy Peters, Jon Pierre(Authors)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The connotations of the term are almost always negative, bordering on corruption, but we have attempted to point out that there may also be some functional aspects of shifts toward a more committed bureaucracy – it may be more than a necessary evil. In particular, greater political commitment may energize the public service in a way that may not be possible with a more neutral public service. Therefore, when we confront the issue of politicization we not only have the empirical challenge of identifying the nature and extent of political involvement, we must also assess the real impact of any changes on the legitimacy and effectiveness of the political system. Notes 1 Also, we are not directly concerned with the actions of public servants who themselves seek out involvement in partisan politics. The only relevant part of that activity would be if those civil servants believed that political activity was the best way to achieve career advancement. 2 This is less true for traditional Westminster systems than for other types of political systems; in some instances, e.g. the United States under the Hatch Act, civil servants were not supposed to engage in any political activity other than voting. 3 The Yes Minister television series is a humorous, if sometimes a little close to the bone, portrayal of that tendency in career public servants. 4 The “temporary retirements” in the German system, for example, mean that a number of highly skilled civil servants may be tending their dahlias rather than working for government. 5 For example, the Thatcher and Major governments were said to have so changed the culture of the Civil Service that they could no longer serve a Labour government (IPMS Bulletin, 1996). The prediction turned out to be radically incorrect, but it did point to the potential problems of politicizing by changing culture. 6 This outcome is in part a function of the difficulties that sub-national governments may encounter in raising revenue...
