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The evolution of the United Kingdom Civil Service 1848-1997
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4. Defining the problem differently: Fulton
The names of a small number of politicians are inextricable from the evolution of the British Civil Service. Gladstone is certainly one, and others will occur later. It is a general truth that, with his or her position as First Lord of the Treasury and, more recently, Minister for the Civil Service, the Prime Minister of the day, of any day, has an unparalleled opportunity, if they wish, to reshape the system of which they are the political head.
Harold Wilson, Labour Opposition Leader in his speech to the Scarborough Conference in September 1964:
We are restating our Socialism in terms of the scientific revolution... The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices... At the very time when even the MCC has abolished the distinction between amateurs and professionals, in science and industry, we are content to remain a nation of Gentlemen in a world of Players... 16
It is probably impossible to convey to those who are not familiar with the old British class system and the role of cricket in English society the full significance, and emotional charge of these phrases. Wilson was from the north of England, a grammar-school boy, but also an Oxford academic, opposed politically to the aristocratic Lord Home, the Conservative Prime Minister. When he became Prime Minister in October 1964 he very soon appointed a Commission to look into the Civil Service, chaired by Lord Fulton, which reported in June 196817.
The key sentences of diagnosis were as follows
The Home Civil Service today is still fundamentally the product of the nineteenth- century philosophy of the Northcote-Trevelyan report. The tasks it faces are those of the second half of the twentieth century. This is what we have found; it is what we seek to remedy...(para 1) (It) concentrated on the graduates who thereafter came to form the top of each service... took much less notice of the rest...(para 4) To meet the new tasks of government the modern Civil Service must be able to handle the social, economic, scientific and technical problems of our time in an international setting...It is inadequate in six main respects...(para 14) First, the Service is still essentially based on the philosophy of the amateur (or "generalist" or "all-rounder"). This is most evident in the Administrative Class which holds the dominant position in the Service.(para 15)
This was turning the arguments of Bridges judiciously and quite deliberately on their head. He had argued for the breadth and generalism of experience of the Administrator as his chief virtue; Fulton defined it as "amateur". The word contained exactly as much emotional charge there as it had in the speech by Mr Wilson at Scarborough, and it also threatened those at the top of the Civil Service Class system in exactly the same way. Implicitly, it suggested that those at the top were amateur and the only true professionals were the despised "specialists" of which Northcote-Trevelyan had said little and which Bridges had only mentioned in passing ("I have no time to include in my picture the large and important professional and technical staffs who pursue their own specialised duties").
In other words the Fulton report did not challenge the main model of examination-based merit but suggested that the Administrative Class should sharpen up its act and its language and style and that the specialists in the Civil Service should be granted what is often called "parity of esteem". These were people who had not entered via the main examinations but had been appointed after interview, with a board always including a representative of the Civil Service Commission, and who had the technical expertise that general examinations in the Northcote-Trevelyan mould would not distinguish. Economists, planners, statisticians, research officers, accountants, lawyers and scientists all came within this heading. They had been definitively "below the salt" in the past, and Fulton aimed to lift them up.
Its recommendations included
- the creation of a Civil Service Department to run the Civil Service (not only a job for the Treasury)
- its head to be designated Head of the Civil Service
- the abolition of all Classes and replacement by a unified grading structure for all
- the creation of a Civil Service College.
As always, any Report is only significant descriptively insofar as it sets out how things are and how they could be, but it has meaning practically if it changes the way the institution - which is what the British Civil Service had become by 1968 - conducts its affairs. Fulton led, as Northcote-Trevelyan had, to immense controversy, exactly because it challenged the existing model. It attempted to use the language of professionalism against those who most proudly claimed to be professionals in the field of public administration. A contest ensued which was in the end resolved by the respective practical skills of the participants on various sides of the debate.
A change in machinery of government is always the simplest thing for a Prime Minister wishing to bring about change to engineer. The Civil Service Department was set up in November 1968. The system of unified grading was more gradually introduced. A Civil Service College was established in June 1970.
CSD, as it soon came to be known, was initially headed by the dynamic Sir William Armstrong and its original 900 staff were transferred directly from the old Pay and Management Group of Her Majesty’s Treasury18. Armstrong, whose later career had an Icarian eminence, understood that his job was not to run the whole Civil Service - as he said, it was a federation of departments employing between them half a million - 500,000 - civil servants but his job was:
First, to manage the Civil Service - i.e. to keep it running as a going concern Second, to carry out a programme of reforming the Civil Service, with the object of improving its efficiency, and its humanity...
To give an instance, and to demonstrate his grasp of the new language appropriate for a senior official who was politically sensitive, he described the staff of the new Department. His lecture delivered in May 1970 ended as follows
...we have had nearly a hundred new entrants...we now have 25 scientists, 13 engineers, 3 economists, 6 accountants and auditors as well as many others. At the same time we have brought in 23 people from outside the Civil Service altogether, including 8 from universities and 10 from private industry, including 5 from management consultants. In this way we are hoping to match our new tasks with new men.
Sir Edward Bridges would have recognised what Armstrong was doing here. These carefully enumerated staff were clearly Players and not Gentlemen.
As it turned out, the CSD was not a great success, and it lasted only 13 years. Its head did not command a large enough staff to carry weight with the colleagues of Whitehall, or to persuade the Treasury, and it depended crucially upon the support of the Prime Minister. After 18 June 1970, the holder of that office changed when Edward Heath became head of a new Conservative government. But much of the Fulton programme rolled on.
The Civil Service College, for example, recommended by Fulton and set up by Sir William Armstrong in the CSD, actually came into existence under the Heath government in June 1970, with the invitations to Mr Wilson being altered at the last minute for the new Prime Minister. The author of this paper works at this institution, it has survived to spring 1997. It will be returned to later.
The abolition of classes and the system of "unified grading" came in very gradually. When it was almost fully in place the service contained a grading system in which all civil servants could be graded, to ensure simplicity, comparability and fairness, across the whole of Whitehall.19
| Title | Grade Number |
|---|---|
| Permanent Secretary | Grade 1 |
| Second Permanent Secretary | Grade 1A |
| Deputy Secretary | Grade 2 |
| Under Secretary | Grade 3 |
| Director etc | Grade 4 |
| Assistant Secretary | Grade 5 |
| Senior Principal | Grade 6 |
| Principal | Grade 7 |
| Senior Executive Officer | - |
| Higher Executive Officer | - |
| Executive Officer | - |
| Administrative Officer | - |
| Administrative Assistant | - |
The post-Fulton Civil Service had to some degree, therefore, been shaped by the Class and competence concerns of the Wilson premiership. The Administrative Class no longer existed as such. It would be possible for anyone, administrator, executive or specialist to proceed, in principle, up the unified grading system instead of their hitting a ceiling at a certain level well below the top20.
Under the Conservative administration from 1970 to 1974 the agenda did not change dramatically. Much of the energy of the government between June 1970 and February 1974 was taken up with, on the one hand, negotiating entry into the EEC (which happened in 1973) and, on the other, dealing with the oil crisis of 1973-4 and, in the United Kingdom, the associated coal-miners’ strike and the attempt to control wages from the centre. Mr Heath, himself once a Civil Servant - one of his officials commented that he would have made a first-rate Permanent Secretary - promised a revolution in government and produced, most unusually, a White Paper on the Reorganisation of Central Government21 soon after he came into power.
There were some radical innovations; Programme Analysis and Review,22 a new Central Policy Review Staff or "Think-tank", headed by Lord Rothschild, the creation of large unified departments in the Departments of the Environment and Trade and Industry, but this administration did not fundamentally challenge or threaten the system which was still living through the consequences of the Fulton Report.
The same is true for the Wilson-Callaghan23 Labour government elected in February 1974, which remained in power until 1979. The Labour government maintained the Central Policy Review Staff, and of course the CSD continued. There was a lengthy review of the Civil Service by a Select Committee of the House of Commons; its main concern was to discuss whether the role of Head of the Civil Service should continue to be held by the head of the CSD or that of the Treasury, by one person or two.
Attention focused on many things between 1974 and 1979 - the first-ever national referendum on British membership of the EEC, referendums on Scotland and Wales, pay crises and the IMF problems of the 1970s. During this period the Civil Service grew to its largest size since 1945, reaching 750,000 (industrial and non-industrial) in 1975.
However there were three straws in the wind that might have indicated a coming change of weather. The first was the announcement by Anthony Crosland on 9 May, 1975 that, as far as spending in local government was concerned "the party’s over!" He was the Secretary of State in the Department of the Environment, a super-ministry created by Mr Heath to incorporate local government, planning, transport and environmental matters. It sat in Marsham Street near Smith Square and tried to control what local councillors across the country wished to spend. Hit by, for the first time, a really severe need to cut back on public spending, Crosland’s speech was seen at the time as simply an attempt to look at local government. But in retrospect it seems to have an even wider significance.
The second was more clearly related to the Civil Service. In 1978 Leslie Chapman published Your Disobedient Servant24. He described how, as one of them from 1939, when he joined as a junior executive officer (not Administrative Class) until 1974 he
sought, in a variety of ways, to reduce waste and extravagance...My subject is the very limited one of waste in government service and especially in the Civil Service.25
Chapman was very well aware of the problems involved and of the likely Civil Service response to criticism
..first dead silence...By tomorrow the newspaper or the politician will fix their attention elsewhere...Second, courageous silence...only because the full story cannot be told is the criticism left unchallenged....Third, ‘we are not perfect, but we are willing to learn’ ....this requires a relaxed approach...is suitable for television or radio interviews... These methods have enabled the Civil Service, in the past, to shrug off most attempts to change it...26
Chapman had an extraordinary story to tell of inefficiency and the waste of tax-payers’ money because of what he saw as the poor management of his colleagues, and of his unavailing attempt to get anything done through the system. A public image of incompetence was established by this widely-serialised book. Leslie Chapman advised Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative leader, in the run-up to the 1979 general election.
What was to have even more impact in terms of public and politicians’ attitudes was the BBC television series "Yes, Minister" that took to the air in 198027, but which emerged from the 1970s perceptions of the Civil Service. In fact its title took its origins very precisely from the Diaries, published in 1975, of Richard Crossman, who, describing his first week in office as Minister of Housing and Local Government in October 1964, in Harold Wilson’s new Labour Government wrote28
My Minister’s room is like a padded cell...Of course they don’t behave quite like nurses, because the Civil Service is profoundly deferential - ‘Yes, Minister! No, Minister! If you wish it Minister!’ -and combined with this there is a constant preoccupation to ensure that the Minister does what is correct...one has only to do absolutely nothing whatsoever to be floated forward on the stream...
This image, personal in the case of Crossman but turned into art by the scriptwriters of Yes Minister, however unfair, was that of a manipulative and outwardly-deferential but inwardly-superior class of supercilious Civil Servants, the pure type of Northcote-Trevelyan official spoiled by one hundred years of precedent and pride. It entered deeply into the mental equipment of the political circles. "Sir Humphrey Appleby", the mandarin Permanent Secretary of the "Department of Administrative Affairs", knew exactly how to deal with Ministers, and "Jim Hacker", the new Minister, was, at least in the earlier episodes, comprehensively outmanoeuvred by Appleby and, in between them, his Private Secretary, Bernard Woolley. This was only entertainment, but it expressed the mood of the time.
Some observers argued that a deeply complacent class of mandarins, having dealt with the Fulton reforms29, confronted by Ministers who for most of the 1970s had small or no Parliamentary majorities, had been able to get on with what Peter Hennessy has referred to as "the orderly management of decline" without politicians interfering too much into their domain. They had not needed management skills, since good administration was enough.. Although concerned about taxpayers’ money, they seemed to possess inadequate means to measure its proper use. Government belonged to them. The various departments felt that they had learned by experience how to run a mixed economy, and that the structures of the state were set. Such were the perceptions. Then came 1979.
Notes
16 Ben Pimlott, Harold Wilson, 1992, p.304. The MCC is the Marylebone Cricket Club, the most senior body in English cricket and a most exclusive club, which for many years distinguished between those cricketers who played for love of the game and were unpaid amateurs - "Gentlemen" - and those, often from the north of England and rarely ‘university men’, who played for money, for a living - "Players".
17 ‘Fulton report’, Cmnd 3638, June 1968, Volume I.
18 See ‘The Civil Service Department and its Tasks’, in Chapman, op cit., p. 318.
19 The titles as shown came fully into use in around 1985 and ceased to be fully correct in 1996. For many years the job titles carrying the word "Administrative" carried instead the older "Clerical". The Grade 4 had no "standard" title attached. The unified grades never reached below Grade 7. The above table shows the titles used in the main administrative grades.
20 This system determined three things - an official’s salary (moving up by increments to the top of the scale for that grade), their place in the hierarchy (their boss was above them, their staff below, and annual reports on them were to be completed by their senior) and the shape of their careers. In general you hoped to begin at the bottom and you could, without examination but with the passing of promotion boards, move in theory from AO to Grade 1. This did, in one case, happen.
21 Reorganisation of Central Government, Cmnd 4506, October 1970
22 Discussed in Hennessy, op cit., p.237
23 Harold Wilson became PM as a result of the election held on 28 February 1974, and won the 10 October 1974 general election. He served as PM until 6 April 1976 when he was succeeded by James Callaghan.
24 Leslie Chapman, ‘Your Disobedient Servant’, Penguin Books, 1979
27 First broadcast Monday 25 February 1980.
28 Richard Crossman, ‘Diaries of a Cabinet Minister’, Volume 1, Hamish Hamilton, 1975, p.21. Diary entry for 22 October 1964.
29 In ‘The Civil Servants, An Enquiry into Britain’s Ruling Class’, Macdonald, 1980, by Peter Kellner and Lord Crowther-Hunt (the latter a member of the Fulton Committee) one of the chapters is headed "The Lost Reforms" and another "How Armstrong Defeated Fulton".