About the civil service
The evolution of the United Kingdom Civil Service 1848-1997
In section navigation (page 2 of 10)
2. Embedding professionalism
The nineteenth century ideal of professionalism was very clearly incorporated by the report into their new model civil service. Not only would a service recruited and run in such a way be professional, but it could claim to be meritorious. Competitive “literary examination ... to test the intelligence as well as the mere attainments” as they put it would be objective, avoid patronage and ensure the survival of the fittest. In particular, Whitehall – the generic term for the civil service – was to be opened up to the meritorious products of the finest British universities, “a non–political administrative class educated in the moral values of a liberal education further developed by a reformed Oxford and Cambridge”.3 Above all, it was the quality of the personnel that Northcote-Trevelyan sought to improve. They wanted
Each man’s experience, interest, hopes and fears are limited to the special branch of service in which he himself is engaged. The effect, naturally, is to cramp the energies of the whole body, to encourage the growth of narrow views and departmental prejudices, to limit the acquisition of experience...
Although there was immense contemporary controversy the plans of the report were eventually put into effect. In 1855 a Civil Service Commission was appointed, in 1859 the Superannuation Act ensured that civil service pensions would only be paid to those who had received civil service certificates from the Commission and in 1870 an Order in Council of 4th June set up the system of competitive examinations. The different ”Classes“ of the service were introduced in stages. In 1876 the Lower Division (later the Executive Class) was created and after 1918 the Clerical and the Administrative, while it took until the 1940s to create the Professional, Technical and Scientific Classes.4
Northcote–Trevelyan, and the Liberal Governments of the 19th century5 carried through the first revolution in government6
they obtained the abolition of patronage and corruption, of amateurism and inefficiency, extravagance and waste, secrecy and lack of accountability, and their replacement by selection and promotion by merit, by professional efficiency, retrenchment and economy, publicity and full financial accountability ...transformation of the old multifarious collection of ‘persons in public offices’, chiefly the personal appointees and dependants of individual ministers, into a modern, integrated civil service...
With the creation also in 1867 of the Public Accounts Committee in the House of Commons and its idea of the Accounting Officer as an official answerable uniquely to the House of Commons, the civil service by the end of the century had definitively become modern.
And one more brick in the wall needs to be added. It is taken so much for granted by British civil servants that we barely notice it. The Gladstone Government of 1884 determined, by an Order in Council dated 29 November 1884 that “a civil servant standing for election in a constituency must resign his post when he announces himself as a candidate”7. Hence the line dividing the British political class and its official class became and remains clear in this respect - that the one is basically a parliamentary class, the other is not8. And since, by another convention of British government ministers can only come from the Houses of Parliament, it also means that the gulf between a career official and his or her Minister is wide.
This detachment from political life is one of the things that is meant by the term “permanent” which has such a long and significant history in relation to our subject. As Anson puts it
They are severed from political life not merely by the Statutes which disable them sitting in the House of Commons but by the usage of the Civil Service which secures that the members of the service remain free to serve the government of the day...the parliamentary chief changes, but they are unaffected by the ebb and flow of political opinion.
Given that governments and ministers in the United Kingdom may change with immense rapidity (more perceived as a truth in the 1920s than in the 1990s) it would be absurd, he argued, for the British service to have its heads changed by new ministers equally frequently. In the USA an administration is constitutionally guaranteed four years of life, not so in the United Kingdom. But Anson goes on to add, most significantly9
It is well to bear in mind that the permanence of the civil service is really only a matter of convention...it would be perfectly legal, though wholly unconstitutional, for an incoming minister to obtain from the Crown as a proof of confidence the dismissal of every civil servant who holds office during his pleasure.
It was with a moderate-sized service that the British state fought the Great War of 1914-18. Around 100,000 civil servants worked in different departments10. After the war the central coordination of the service was given to the Treasury11. Under the leadership of officials like Sir Warren Fisher, there evolved the ethos of a single service to work alongside the military services12. The only major machinery of government change that occurred during the war was the creation of the Cabinet Office, initially by Prime Minister Lloyd George, under Sir Maurice Hankey. This had as its main function the preparation of papers and records of Cabinet meetings but it was to gradually evolve into a central function in the system alongside the Treasury.
Notes
3 See Peter Hennessy, ‘Whitehall’, 1989, p.31.
4 See Lord Bridges, ‘The Treasury’, London, 1964
5 The ‘Northcote-Trevelyan report’ was published while W.E.Gladstone was Chancellor of the Exchequer under the premiership of the Earl of Aberdeen.
6 See Harold Perkin, ‘The Origins of Modern English Society’, 1969, p.320.
7 Anson, p.230, Note 3. It is worth mentioning that in early April 1997, the Cabinet Office circulated reminders to all civil servants that the same rules still apply, apropos of the 1 May General Election.
8 Although certain officials have been widely accused of crossing the political line, they must remain officials unless they stand for Parliament.
11 Order in Council 22 July 1920 empowered the Treasury to control the conduct of the civil service and to regulate classification, remuneration and other conditions of service. A Department of the Treasury under the control of an under-secretary was responsible. Anson, p.238.
12 "After the First World war transferability of staff was strongly fostered by the then Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, who did much in the 1920s to break down barriers between Departments" quoted in Chapman, Style in Administration, ed. Chapman, 1973, p.48. On Friday 18 August 1939 the "Service Match" at Lords, often Navy or RAF cricketers, featured "The Civil Service Versus MCC.