The news in yesterday's Times that Ministers are "likely to hire hundreds more political appointees" (£) is, for anyone who cares about the concept of a non-political bureaucracy, deeply depressing.
I'm a rather old-fashioned soul, I admit, and rather proud that we live in a country where civil servants are appointed on merit through a process of open competition. It means, in theory, that an incoming administration can call on a corps of senior officials who understand how their departments work and are grounded in the process and legislation that determines what should and should not be done, as well as what might be possible.
The Northcote-Trevelyan report, commissioned by Gladstone and published in 1854, made the following recommendations;
- Recruitment should be entirely on the basis of merit by open, competitive examinations
- Entrants should have a good ‘generalist’ education and should be recruited to a unified Civil Service and not a specific department, to allow inter-departmental transfers.
- Recruits should be placed into a hierarchical structure of classes and grades.
- Promotion would be on the basis of merit not on the grounds of ‘preferment, patronage or purchase’.
On the face of it, the new proposals breach all four of the recommendations, which does not commend them to me.
I also worry about the impact that such an influx would have on the Senior Civil Service. The idea that these new recruits will be able to give orders to civil servants is a troubling one, and is likely to make the task of recruiting talented individuals to the Civil Service even harder than it is already becoming - bear in mind that one-fifth of senior civil servants would like to leave.
It also means that, if there is a change of government, then a whole tranche of the higher echelons of central government will need to be replaced overnight, with a significant destabilising effect on our governance.
No, I can't say that this is one of the Coalition's best ideas...
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