Putting it in writing will not make peace with Sir Humphrey

It is a truth commonly — but not universally — acknowledged that the traditional bargain that used to govern relationships between politicians and top bureaucrats in the Whitehall village has broken down and needs to be fixed.

Indications of discontent by senior ministers include David Blunkett’s diaries complaining about lack of loyalty from civil servants, John Reid’s assault on the department he headed as ‘unfit for purpose’, and John Prescott’s attack on former senior diplomat and diarist Sir Christopher Meyer as ‘a red-socked fop.’

Creaks and groans from the other side include complaints about the conduct of foreign policy from retired diplomats, and criticism of Gordon Brown’s personal style as chancellor of the exchequer from retired cabinet secretary Lord Turnbull.

And stories about operational failures in the civil service appear all too frequently in newspaper headlines, as in the cases of Defra farm payments, NHS financial and IT management, the tax credit system, and, most of all, the Home Office.

So are we moving away from the arrangement that used to apply to the respective rights and responsibilities of civil servants and politicians in Whitehall?

A generation ago, the bargain was conventionally seen as a deal in which public servants gave up the right to an open political life and high salaries in exchange for tenure, a trusted advisory role at the heart of government, avoidance of public blame, honours and a guaranteed pension. Politicians, in turn, gave up the right to ‘hire and fire’ in exchange for the loyal and enthusiastic ‘Rolls-Royce’ service by the best and the brightest from the elite universities.

Those creaks and groans indicate stresses and strains on that traditional bargain, and other things have changed as well. For instance, what was once seen as a uniform arrangement applying to all the upper-level civil servants in the Whitehall village has given way to a variety of different ones.

Three of the newer variants include the protocols applying to the technocratic economic regulators that emerged in the 1980s with the privatisation of the former nationalised industries, the one applying to the chief executives of executive agencies in the 1990s who gave up anonymity in return for a promise of managerial discretion and performance related pay, and the arrangement applying to the card-carrying political civil servants (special advisors) which was first created in the 1970s but became especially prominent and controversial in the early Blair years.

So how did we arrive at this world of multiple bargains, shrill criticism on all sides accompanied by suspicion about political and bureaucratic motives, complaints about cheating, and blame games played out in the media? And, more importantly, is there any quick fix to this malaise at a time when the incoming Brown government seems eager to restore confidence in the way Britain is governed at the centre?

Accounts vary as to why the traditional Whitehall bond seems to have broken down. Some see the problem as starting a decade ago at the start of Tony Blair’s reign as prime minister.

This argument goes that the demands of publicity-seeking but blame-avoiding politicians used to campaign-style organisation in a 24/7 news environment led to a politicisation of communications work, a sidelining of career civil servants in policy deliberations, and a propensity to name-and-blame officials for government failures.

For others, the seeds of the present difficulties were sown far earlier, in the last years of Mrs Thatcher’s Conservative government, when traditional cabinet government procedures were weakened.

Others would point to developments even earlier than that, for instance with the then momentous move in 1969 to name and blame individual civil servants after the failure of a major insurance firm (Vehicle and General), then regulated by the Board of Trade.

Indeed, for the dwindling band whose memories go back to World War II, the running of Whitehall with an army of outsiders drawn in from business to conduct delivery functions is nothing new.

However we got here, what is the way forward over public service contracts? One view, perhaps a bureaucratic version of James Lovelock’s famous Gaia hypothesis, is that ‘not everything falls that is shaken’ and the system is capable of self-correction.

The argument for that position would rest on the historical observation that there have been earlier crises over public service bargains, from which the system has recovered in the past.

Arguably, the most serious conflicts over loyalty and responsibility in recent times — particularly those involving conflicts over the role of special advisers and spin-doctors relative to regular departmental bureaucrats — peaked in the early 2000s.

Since then, some have detected signs of a return to a version of the traditional arrangement. From that viewpoint, in spite of the recent creaks and groans, the system is already self-correcting from the disturbances of the early 2000s, and may perhaps continue to do so during the Brown regime.

Those of this persuasion would see major reform as unnecessary and perhaps even counter-productive, when what is needed is quiet encouragement of the existing direction of travel.

A far less sanguine view is taken by those who think the old bargain either needs to be shored up by new measures, or replaced entirely. In both of those camps, many see the answer as ‘putting it in writing’ — getting away from the current mixture of convention and implicit understandings towards a deal that is explicitly codified like a formal business contract.

The ‘putting it in writing’ position, one endorsed by Gordon Brown in his recent statement on constitutional reform, means enthusiasm for a public service statute comparable to those of continental Europe, or, in a more informal home-grown version, some development of the ‘compacts’ recently introduced at the top of the Home Office.

Putting it in writing, such advocates suggest, is the only way to protect civil servants’ constitutional roles whilst clarifying who takes the blame for what kinds of faults and failures.

However, for ‘shorers-up’, the purpose of putting it in writing is to get back to the old compact, while for ‘transformers’ it is to make clear that the rules of the game have decisively changed and that senior civil servants should be publicly accountable for their work other than through ministers.

So it is easier for these two camps to agree that the transaction should be put into writing, than to agree on what contract exactly should be codified. Even if such an agreement could be arrived at, there is no common view about what codification could achieve.

After all, the sort of codification about politician-civil service relationships that has been tried in the past in New Zealand and in the British executive agency framework agreements has been far from problem-free.

When the political water gets choppy the meaning of words inevitably becomes problematic, and formal agreements do not prevent acrimonious blame games. Codification does not necessarily equate with a politics-free civil service either, as can be seen in Germany.

Difficult issues can also arise over enforcement of whatever any formal code says. For example in the decades after World War II, government ministers repeatedly by-passed the formal statutory arrangements for the governance of nationalised industries by exerting influence behind the scenes, rather than by issuing formal directives within the statutory framework.

Further, some insiders say that an effective relationship between a minister and a permanent secretary is more like a marriage or comparable partnership than a legalistic contract between ‘principal’ and ‘agent’. A strong pre-nuptual agreement may just lower trust among the parties, produce merely legalistic compliance and work against necessary adaptation in the light of events.

In addition, some issues important to any public service bargain, such as how to control politically-damaging leaks and how to define and improve individual and collective competency, are essentially beyond the scope of a ‘put it in writing’ approach.

Finally, when the political stakes are high, the traditional Westminster majoritarian system of governance may simply be less suited to provide stable frameworks for such matters than that of other countries.

So if the ‘Gaia hypothesis’ requires trust in resilience that may involve a triumph of hope over long experience, the alternative ‘putting it in writing’ strategy isn’t a sure-fire fix to restore trust in government either.

Such a strategy is likely to help solve the problem only if institutions and a common culture underpin it. Indeed, a scratchy, creaky relationship may still be a price worth paying for avoiding some of the problems that come with over-enthusiastic endorsement of ‘putting it in writing’.

Christopher Hood is Gladstone Professor of Government, All Souls College, Oxford; Martin Lodge is Lecturer in Political Science and Public Policy at

the London School of Economics.