HL Deb 24 July 1968 vol 295 cc1049-74

2.40 p.m.

LORD BROOKE OF CUMNOR rose to call attention to the Report of the Committee on the Civil Service (Cmnd. 3638); and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I venture to hope that it may serve a public interest if your Lordships' House spends to-day discussing the Report on the Civil Service. It seems to me highly desirable that one or other House of Parliament should find time to discuss a subject and a Report of this importance within a reasonably early period. It is clear that in another place there would not be available time before they rose for the Summer Recess. I am aware that it is only four weeks since the Report was published. That is a short time, but if we do not debate it now four months will have to elapse, and I cannot help thinking that it may be of value to the Government to obtain at any rate initial reactions from one House of Parliament.

I expect that few of your Lordships will have had time to do more than read Volume 1 of the Report and dip into Volumes 2, 4 and 5. Volume 3 is not yet published. I am certainly not going to demand quick answers from the Government to questions which need far longer study. The sheer volume of the material which the Committee had to handle, as may be seen from the other published reports, emphasises our immense debt to the Committee, and especially to the two noble Lords who served on it, Lord Fulton and Lord Simey; to the noble Lord, Lord Futhon, outstandingly, for carrying this tremendous burden, and to the noble Lord. Lord Simey, for an important note of reservation. By comparison I have small qualification to express views, and I am aware of that; no more qualification than the fact that to me the subject is an absorbing and fascinating one in which I have long been deeply interested. But I had the opportunity to see something of the Civil Service at close quarters when I was for eight years a Cabinet Minister, having before that occupied the post of Financial Secretary to the Treasury which carries special responsibilities for Civil Service matters. I see my function to-day as simply being to roll the pitch for some of the much more experienced batsmen who are to follow, including at least five former Permanent Secretaries, of whom two were also heads of the Civil Service. None of us would accept that through occupying these distinguished positions their view s on these matters should override all others. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the opportunity for both Parliament and the Government to hear quickly the views of such as them, should of itself justify the debate.

Briefly, I find myself thinking that the majority of the recommendations of the Committee are right but that the tone of the Report is wrong. Let me say first of all where I agree with it. I am sure the Committee is right to recommend the transfer of responsibilities, including responsibilities for Civil Service pay, from the Treasury to a new Civil Service Department, and the merging of the Civil Service Commission in that Department. I have only one small piece of personal experience I can add to the case as set out in the Report. When I was Financial Secretary I had, as I mentioned, special responsibilities towards the Chancellor of the Exchequer for the Civil Service and co-incidentally with that special responsibilities towards the Civil Service as a whole. I am quite sure that I did not have sufficient time to discharge those responsibilities adequately. The Treasury Ministers are traditionally extremely busy people, and the Chancellor and the Financial Secretary, at any rate in my time, were outstandingly so. I hope that I let down neither the Chancellor nor the Civil Service, but I am quite sure that I was not able to find sufficient time to give to Civil Service matters in the position that I held, and it seems to me that that would always continue to be the case with Treasury Ministers so long as the control of the Civil Service was within the Treasury.

I know that the charging of the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, with special responsibilities for this new Civil Service Department has been universally welcomed in your Lordships' House. That was quite clear on June 26 when the announcement was made. Indeed, it seems to me that there is much to be said for this particular post being regularly held by a Cabinet Minister in your Lordships' House. The function of the new Civil Service Department should essentially be well shielded from the pressures of Party politics. It would surely be easier to maintain that good tradition if the Minister who is entrusted by the Prime Minister with special responsibility for the Department was not himself daily sailing the angrier sea of Party politics in another place.

As to the structure of the Civil Service, I have long thought that the distinction between the Administrative and the Executive classes was a hindrance rather than a help, and in the light of the Committee's Report I certainly can see a strong case for abolising all classes, as the Committee has recommended and as the Government say that they accept. In this connection, above all, the specialists, the accountants, the scientists and engineers and so on, should be far better integrated into the Service than has been the case. These specialists have also tended to be underpaid, with the result that the Service has not always been able to attract the best of them. I must say that in this whole context it seems to me that the Committee has approached rather optimistically the immense problems for Civil Service pay which the abolition of classes and the Committee's proposals for integration, for job evaluation and so on, are going to create.

I warmly welcome, too, the idea of a Civil Service College, and surely in the new concept of the Civil Service put before us by the Committee the establishment of this college must be given priority. The Committee emphasises the problems that are going to arise in the transition between the Civil Service as it is now and the Civil Service as it will eventually be if reorganised in a thorough-going way, and it is hard to see how we can successfully find our way through that transitional period unless a Civil Service college is in existence for training purposes.

From the Prime Minister's announcement of June 26 I sense that in the present economic circumstances the Government could be reluctant to find room for this new college in the Estimates, but the force of the Committee's logic is that if there is not to be an unacceptably long period of transition this must be done quickly. The Committee is right, too, I am sure, in stressing the inadequate amount of training in modern management throughout the Civil Service. So far as they stress this I am entirely with them in what they say about the need for a greater professional element in the Civil Service and in the training of civil servants. The Civil Service is a vast organisation, and more pressingly than most it needs a widespread understanding of the personal, the administrative and the financial problems inherent in the running of a very large undertaking. I would not myself accept that management consultants are always right in their findings, but to omit to learn from them all that one can about modern techniques is folly.

Last of the major points on which I agree with the Committee is on the need for greater mobility in and out of the Service, combined with less rapid mobility in some cases within it. If the present non-contributory pension scheme is incompatible with ready transferability of pension rights in both directions then that is a strong case for going over to a contributory scheme. In this context the Committee also has some suggestive ideas for breaking down the sharp distinction between established and temporary service, though it need not have insinuated, as it did, a link between establishment and complacency.

For the main defects of the Service the Fulton Report blames what it calls the philosophy of the amateur, the cult of the generalist. In stinging words it says—I quote from paragraph 15: The cult is obsolete at all levels and in all parts of the Service". Your Lordships may wish to test this sweeping judgment against the quality and relevance of the contributions that will be made later by some of the scorned amateurs who rose to high positions in the Service.

I can identify two major defects in the functioning of Government Departments which do not seem to derive from what the Committee thinks it has diagnosed as the main weakness, the root of all else. The first is delay. All sorts of operations in the Civil Service take too long. The Civil Service is not sufficiently responsive to the pressures of time—with one exception, and that is the Parliamentary Question. If one of those coloured folders containing a Parliamentary Question is going round it moves swiftly. In other respects this lack of responsiveness to the pressure of time is in contrast with the running of most businesses, especially businesses in direct contact with the public, where, if a person cannot get served quickly with what he wants or cannot get answers to his letters he goes elsewhere, and the business knows it. With the Civil Service one cannot go elsewhere. In-trays are constantly full, arrears do not get cleared off, and there has grown up an acceptance of delay as in the natural order of things. Maybe I am committing a fault and generalising too much. I know there are exceptions, but I think informed public opinion would accept that what I have said is, in general, true. I find too little about all this in the Report, though for my part I believe it is a greater cause of public ill-feeling towards the Civil Service than any of the specific matters mentioned in Chapter 8.

Secondly, for thirty years the higher ranks of the Civil Service have been grossly and continuously overworked in most Departments. This is largely the fault of Governments. Originally it was the fault of the war, but since the war it has been the fault of Governments which cast huge new tasks on the Civil Service without sufficiently taking into account the side effects of what they were doing thereby, or sufficiently building up the strength of the higher ranks of the Civil Service to cope with the extra burden.

My Lords, few even of the busiest businessmen would care to grapple with the colossal load of work, particularly paper work, which almost every senior Civil Servant has to tackle daily and to take home with him in the evenings and at weekends. The fundamental fault here is not with the amateurs nor with the Treasury as the Report suggests, but with Governments. I mention these points because I am not convinced that the Committee probed deep enough when they sought to make the all-round amateurs the scape-goats for everything that was wrong. The most outstanding manifestation of first-rate efficiency at the highest levels which I have had the privilege of coming across anywhere is in the Cabinet Office. I greatly doubt whether this level of wise, swift, unfailing efficiency is matched in any other country of the world. It is entirely based on the amateur tradition which the Report so roundly condemns.

In the selection and recruitment of civil servants the Committee has much that is wise to say. I agree with the minority against the majority on what the Committee calls, in the jargon, "preference for relevance". The majority say that in the selection of graduate recruits for the Civil Service preference should be given to those who have studied at their universities subjects which will be directly relevant to their probable work in the Civil Service. I would say rather that graduate candidates must be selected on grounds of sheer ability, not influenced by the subjects that they had chosen to work at in their universities.

Let us by all means go on trying to get more men and women into the Civil Service from the great provincial universities and the new universities. So far as the provincial universities are concerned, the Civil Service Commission has been trying for this for years. Do not let us go to lower standards of intellectual quality for recruits in order to do this. If Oxford and Cambridge continue to attract the ablest students and continue to produce abler men and women with an inclination towards entering the public service, let us accept this as one of the facts of life.

The Report has a great many wise things to say about training within the Service and about career management in relation to the individual. Some doubts arise in my mind about the recommendation to establish two new and distinct classes, a class of civil servants specially trained in social subjects and a class specially trained in economic, industrial and financial subjects. However, I have the feeling that a successful plan which takes these divisions of specialisation into account but is not rigidly governed by them can probably be evolved by the disparaged but highly gifted amateurs to whom it will fall to work out the practical schemes for the immediate future.

My confident hope is that something similar to that will happen to the Committee's recommendation for separate planning units in each Department. My impression is that every Permanent Secretary worthy of his position has already created some planning machinery of this sort within the Department, probably all the better for not being on too formal a basis. These units need not be staffed wholly by the young; I disagree with the emphasis in the Report here. I think the Report is weakened by its too easy acceptance of a number of current superficial judgments, one being that it is only among the young that you find thrust and drive. If that were true, the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, with whom I enjoyed the relationship of Minister and Permanent Secretary for four years, and whose maiden speech we are all looking forward to, must be permanently young. I think her speech will prove that she is.

I cannot easily visualise the triangular relationship between the Minister, the Permanent Secretary and the Senior Policy Adviser which the Committee envisage. In paragraph 182 they said: His prime job … would be to look to, and prepare for, the future and to ensure that day-to-day policy decisions are taken with as full a recognition as possible of likely future developments. No, this will not work happily. The true task, in my judgment, is for a Permanent Secretary to secure for himself more time to think ahead by accepting that a great deal of paper of secondary importance should not pass through his hands at all on the way to his Minister. More of his senior colleagues should be trusted to make submissions and recommendations to Ministers direct. That has been the practice in the Treasury, I know, for years, and it could and should be more widely extended.

LORD SHACKLETON

My Lords, may I interrupt the noble Lord? He says, "it could and should be more widely extended". Certainly my limited experience is that this is normal practice. There are occasions upon which it is quite right that certain matters should come from the Permanent Secretary; but certainly the great majority of submissions that came to me when I was running a Department came from whichever appropriate Under-Secretary was concerned.

LORD BROOKE OF CUMNOR

My Lords, I am glad to hear that. I have no doubt that it varies in different Departments. I must apologise if, again, I fell into the trap of making too generalised a statement. I think the noble Lord would agree with me that it is desirable that the practice in this respect of the best Departments should be the practice of all.

I was about to say that in the work of Government, planning ahead is subject to an important difference from planning ahead in the business world. The difference is that Governments change, and they change quite rapidly. Are the departmental planning unit and the Senior Planning Adviser in a Department to take into account in all their work the constant likelihood that, within two or three years, there may be a change of Government?

A wise Permanent Secretary will, I believe, use those weeks that are quiet for Whitehall just before Polling Day at a General Election to think out alternative programmes of work for the Department over the next four or five years, according to whether the Department is to get a Right-wing or a Left-wing Minister. I believe in long-term thinking, but if it is too formalised in a separate section of the Department a dangerously high amount of that long-term thinking and planning work may prove abortive.

I should have liked to see the Committee tackle in greater depth, not only the implication of its proposed abolition of classes for the problems of Civil Service pay, but also the practical possibilities of securing a greater amount of two-way movement across the boundary between the Civil Service and outside world. Considering the importance of this, and especially the importance of enabling civil servants to gain experience in outside employment, I find the references in Chapter 4 and Appendix G a little—shall I say—jejune. This is a field where I should welcome an assurance from the Government that there is going to be a vigorous follow-up.

I believe the Committee felt debarred from considering in much detail the working relationship between Ministers and their Departments; yet this has considerable importance if one is thinking about the work of the Civil Service. There might be great value to future Ministers and possibly to future civil servants also if a Working Party of former Ministers and retired civil servants was commissioned to make a study of this fascinating and, I think, highly important relationship.

Just as Governments have been known to overload Whitehall, so some Ministers tend to overload their Departments, sometimes by starting too many hares at once, more often by simply not knowing enough of how the Civil Service works and therefore not understanding how to get the best out of their Department. As compared with civil servants, Ministers are net intrinsically superior beings. But Ministers and civil servants are, for the time at least, different ani- mals, each to be respected as such. In the business world there is normally no similar dividing line. I doubt whether we shall get full productivity out of even a reorganised Civil Service without Ministers of all Parties being enabled to learn quickly more about the machine of which they are temporarily in charge, and about the tools which are available to them for the purpose.

With regard to the Report, I regret that I must end on a critical note. It contains material of great value but it is vitiated by defects to which the noble Lord, Lord Simey, has drawn attention in his reservation to Chapter I. He deserves great credit for the courage of that reservation. I am only surprised that more members of the Committee did not join him in it. I feel particularly grateful to him for his reminder to us all of the outstanding importance of qualities of judgment and of decisiveness, which are not necessarily the concomitant or the result of professional training. My judgment is that the Report reads like a piece of advocacy rather than a balanced appreciation. There are too many dogmatic assertions, too many flat statements that things are wrong without presenting either background or reasons, too many optimistic assurances that if one makes the Service professional and classless practical difficulties and obstacles of all sorts can be overcome.

When the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Grasmere, was my tutor at the university and I was reading essays to him, frequently he used to interrupt one of my insufficiently thought out generalisations with the inquisitive word, "Namely?". It was very good for me. There are many assertions in this Report which I feel tempted to challenge with the demanding word "Namely?". I am aware that the Committee could answer me back by saying, quite correctly, that I have presented views in this speech without backing them up sufficiently with reasons. I can but reply that I have had only thirty minutes and they had one hundred pages and could have taken more.

My Lords, I have just had time to "roll the pitch" for wiser people than me to follow. My innermost belief is that the best thing we can all do to-day is to "roll the pitch" for Sir William Armstrong, because I believe it is supremely fortunate for the country that at this very moment we have as the head of the Civil Service a man whom I would trust more than most to extract everything which is of value in the Fulton Report, which is a great deal, and to translate it into practical action. Let Parliament back him up. I beg to move for Papers.

3.12 p.m.

LORD SHACKLETON

My Lords, I should like to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, and indeed to thank the Opposition for choosing this subject for debate to-day, essentially a subject of no Party political controversy and, therefore, characteristically appropriate to your Lordships' House. I felt, like anybody else in this field, as if I knew a great deal about it, that I was thoroughly competent to speak about it, until I looked at the list of speakers. Now I realise that I am a Minister new to his task without even the Department which is to give substance to it, whereas the noble Lords who are to speak to-day—these mandarins, mandarins emeritus, or emeriti: I am not sure which it should be—are going to bring a weight of knowledge to bear that certainly requires me to pick my way with a great deal of care.

My Lords, the Government, the Civil Service, and indeed the country, are very greatly indebted to the authors of this Report They have produced a far-reaching study of the situation and of the problems of our Civil Service to-day, and a large number of recommendations which point the way to enabling the Service to be better fitted to meet the problems not merely of the latter part of this century but, indeed, of the next century. I am very glad that the noble Lord, Lord Fulton, is here, and I hope also the noble Lord, Lord Simey (I know that recently he has not been well) who gave us an important reservation in Chapter 1.

One of the things I am not here to do—and on the whole I hope that your Lordships will also be inclined to eschew this—is to debate at too great length those aspects either in regard to the presentation of the Fulton Report or the weaknesses, as we see it, in the arguments. I should like to say one thing right at the beginning. I think it is unfortunate that Part 2 of the Report has not been generally available, because to my mind this is far and away a more important background document. Indeed, in some ways it is really more important than Part 1—and this is not to depreciate the value of Part 1. But in Part 2 noble Lords will find many of the answers as to the reasons—admittedly some of the answers may have been post hoc rather than pre hoc—for particular recommendations.

Much of the evidence that is contained within Part 2, and which was put forward by various bodies, illustrates the extent to which the tasks of Government have changed in recent years. And this is true of any Government, whatever its political complexion. There is one point that I would make right at the beginning: I agree wholeheartedly with the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, that the deficiencies in the Government service, such as there are, are due in no small measure to the unco-ordinated efforts of Ministers. If we are to talk about amateurs (and I should be careful not to get too deeply into the controversy of the amateur versus the professional) it is clear that our system of government is not well suited to achieve efficient management if one is merely talking about management.

Let me not mislead anyone into thinking I am advocating any other system, at least at this stage of our development, from our present type of Parliamentary democracy; but we all know, and those of us who have been Ministers know, what miracles the Civil Service succeed in working in producing consistency, and indeed sense, out of the actions of ministers. It is against this background that we have to look at the great extension of responsibilities that are laid upon the Civil Service. I need not spell them out: the extent to which the traditional regulatory functions have multiplied; the new responsibilities in so many areas, and the ever-increasing interaction of problems in both our domestic and, international affairs. Government is very much more complex. Therefore it is not surprising that this Report should contain many proposals for change; and it is not surprising, either, that many of us, without the benefit of the examination and the analysis which the Fulton Committee have produced, have in fact been in favour of these changes. What the Fulton Report has done—and this is one of the great virtues of Reports—is to produce the stimulus to action.

My Lords, these proposals are limited to the Civil Service, which is the subject of the Committee's inquiry, and this is not the only field in which change will be needed for the efficient conduct of our affairs. Therefore this Report (and here again we have an example of interaction) has to be seen as an important part of the debate that will go on in the future of all our institutions: local government, the law, the trade unions and employers' associations, machinery of government, Parliament—even the reform of your Lordships' House. But within the Committee's terms of reference (and I think that the members of the Committee must at times have regretted that their terms of reference were not wider, though at other times they no doubt sighed with relief that the terms were, in fact, as restrictive as they had to be) there was a wide measure of agreement on the changes that were needed, though there is a division on certain points. Of course, we shall find agreement and disagreement in our debate to-day, and some of the issues which will be the most fascinating to debate may not necessarily be the most important issues in regard to the reform of the Civil Service.

Clearly it would be impossible for me to produce any startling statement on the implementation of the Fulton Report. The Government have done their best to strike a difficult balance in a not uncommon dilemma. Here is a Report with 158 numbered recommendations, many of them interrelated, some very far-reaching, some very costly, and the whole of them bound to call for the most careful study and, of course, consultation with interested parties, in particular with the Civil Service staff associations.

On the other hand, there was a real challenge in this Report which called for an immediate response if the Government were to mean business—and I would emphasise that the Government do mean business. Noble Lords will recall the Prime Minister's Statement, which I repeated, in which the Government accepted three of the principal recommendations in what might be called the institutional changes. These are the establishment of a new Civil Service Department; the creation of a new Civil Service College; and the abolition of classes, and the study which the Committee propose so that a practical system can be devised to give effect to this particular recommendation. I shall come back to those different points later on. The Government approach the remaining recommendations also with sympathy and goodwill. We may find that there are practical difficulties in regard to certain of the detailed proposals of what the Committee would have us do, but I suspect that the objectives in nearly every case will be found to be sound and likely to afford at least the target at which we should aim.

Arrangements to bring the new department into legal effect will be brought before Parliament as soon as practicable. It will be my immediate task to supervise this. I can assure noble Lords from the contacts which I have already had, particularly with the Treasury, short though they have been, that there is no spirit of holding back. Indeed, I have been struck by the determination of those I have talked with to press vigorously ahead without delay. I echo the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, in regard to Sir William Armstrong. It is a remarkable piece of fortune to me, first to be able to talk at all in this House about my Permanent Secretary instead of his being hidden away, and, secondly, to have the good fortune to be working with him. One of the first steps which has to be taken, a step to which I attach importance and which is strictly in accordance with the Fulton recommendations, is that a planning unit should be set up at once to map out the first tasks of the new Department and the practical application of the changes that are and will be agreed. The work of planning and setting up this new planning unit is already well in hand.

My impression is that, despite anxieties about criticisms, the Civil Service welcomes the close interest that is now being taken in its affairs. The Service is so often the butt of ill-informed or ill-directed criticism. I must say that I thought the B.B.C. news programme "Twenty-Four Hours" dealing with the Civil Service was quite inappropriate for what was meant to be a serious news programme. I have always been an upholder of the B.B.C., and I was strongly in favour of "TW3" until it became horrifyingly unfair. But if that sort of treatment is going to move into news programmes as well, I should be sorry to see this tendency go on.

The Civil Service, as I say, is accustomed to criticism—so are we all; it is one of the things we have to put up with—but I believe that the Civil Service welcomes the Report both for its recommendations and for the opportunity which it provides for other reforms, so many of which civil servants would have liked to see come into effect before. They are not averse to criticism and change—at least, I do not think that any general argument on those lines stands up. That is shown in the evidence which has been offered to the Committee by individuals, groups and staff associations, and by discussions with any representative group of civil servants.

The debate is well started, and it will go on. This is not something which we are going to settle to-day. Our debate to-day is really a Second Reading debate so to speak. Some of the recommendations are bound to be long-term. The provision of the extra resources that are needed to give effect to some of the recommendations will have to be fitted into the Government's public expenditure programme; and there will have to be a great deal of consultation and discussion, which cannot be achieved in a few months. Wherever it is possible to introduce changes quickly, this will be done.

I should like now to deal with some further general impressions of the Report. There are three general points which I have noted. The first is that both the Fulton Committee Report itself and public discussion have inevitably intended to concentrate on the central direction of the Civil Service, and especially the Administrative Class centred in Whitehall; but it is important to remember just how large and diverse the Civil Service is. Here again Volume 2, the Report of the Management Consultancy Group, clearly demonstrates the enormous range of activities carried on far from Whitehall and, in certain areas, involving very few members indeed, if any at all, of the Administrative Class. The much more numerous members of the Executive Class, the Clerical Class and the Special Departmental Classes run local offices throughout the country and major blocks of work in places like Newcastle and Cardiff. In Whitehall many Departments are run by a combination of Treasury grades, engineers, scientists and other experts. One can go on at great length throughout the whole gamut of the great research establishments. Wherever there are Armed Forces to be found, there you will find the supporting Civil Servants.

The Report deals with different parts of the Civil Service, and criticisms applicable to one group may well be inapplicable to others. It may well be true that Whitehall has inadequate contact with the public. This is a difficult issue. But one must stress that there are many thousands of civil servants in daily contact with the public in local offices. I am sure that, like myself, the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, and any noble Lord who has been engaged in welfare work either as a Member of Parliament or in other ways, would without hesitation pay tribute to the efficiency and humanity of the civil servants who deal directly with the public in all parts of the country. It is amazing notwithstanding the delays to which the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, drew attention; and we could all give examples. I had one case brought to my notice which had been going on for three years when I became a Minister; the civil servant who knew all about it had died in the interim. Such examples are to be found. But when one thinks of the astonishing amount of efficient work that is done in the payment of pensions, and so on, one realises that it is an achievement of high efficiency and very great humanity.

My second general point is that, with perhaps two or three exceptions, the Report is essentially an advocate of evolution rather than revolution. Some critics of the Report have indeed suggested that it was dressed up as a revolutionary report, and the Press headlines have been misleading on this matter. One need take only a few examples. Chapter 2 deals with the need for better training of administrators. I think it has been a criticism of the Government Service in the past that there was not nearly enough training. Neither was there nearly enough training in business. I should say that in this matter business still lags far behind the Government Service. In the last few years, since the Centre for Administrative Studies was set up, some very real progress has been made. To-day every Assistant Principal who enters the Service has to do a six-months' course. The recommendations on recruitment, with one exception which I shall mention later, are not particularly revolutionary.

The proposals for greater mobility in and out of the Service which are urged upon us are ones of which I think the Government Service has always been strongly in favour. There are difficulties in this matter. In my experience of industry, it is not so easy to take somebody from the Civil Service and put him in a production job or a marketing job. As we well know, it is sometimes easier to bring businessmen into the Government Service, especially those with administrative experience. There can be no question as to the desirability of this, and the Report rightly urges us to press on with it.

Then, again, the section on accountable management and management by objectives strikes a familiar chord in the Management Services Division of the Treasury. This has been under study for quite a long while. It has major implications for the Government's accounting system, and here I think there is scope for very important developments in accounting. This is also very desirable in large areas of industry, where in some cases they do not know whether or not they are making a profit and what certain activities are costing. I was always amazed in industry at the extent to which the cost of certain activities is known to a penny while there is no check at all on certain other activities. This is particularly true of some of the administrative services to be found in industry.

However, the proposals to which the Committee draw attention are important, because we have not been moving anything like far enough or fast enough. I suspect that there is not a single modern management technique which somebody in the Service has not studied, but their systematic application or introduction over a wide field has not got very far. The greatest service which the Report has rendered is not so much that it proposes some radically new approach as that it provides a powerful impetus to move further and faster in ways which we know and which the Civil Service know they ought to go.

Then there is the question of under-management. If one were to find one word to sum up the criticisms in the Fulton Report and the defects which the recommendations seek to make good it would be "under-management". Here, again, many of the suggestions can be traced back to the fact that inadequate resources are available for management of all kinds. I think there will be agreement that this is a general shortcoming in almost all parts of our national life. I should like to quote from another Report which has some relevance both to Fulton and to the Civil Service. This is the statement: The trouble with the public school and Oxbridge graduates lies not in the old-boy network of recruitment but rather in their amateurism. Those words were not said by Fulton about the Civil Service but in the Brookings Report about British industry.

There are many statements here—whether or not one accepts them in detail—which seem to be a criticism not just of the Civil Service but, indeed, of standards of management throughout our national life. It is important to recognise this; indeed, it is important to recognise some of the deficiencies in the education system which have led to this position. The interesting point is that in the past it has been the Government Service and the Civil Service which have sought to influence the education system in the direction in which it could be most relevant to our national life. But further emphasis and further changes in this direction may be necessary, and neither industry nor the Civil Service can afford to be content. In my view, the Government need the Fulton Report to jolt them into altering our priorities. Therefore, we must be clear what is at issue.

More people are needed for personnel management, to plan careers, to provide training, to negotiate schemes for exchanges of staff and to apply in each Department many of the modern techniques which we already have at our disposal. It will be necessary for people to be released from some of the day-to-day pressure. It is always the counsel that there should be people with time to think, but how difficult it is for them ever to find time to think about the longer term! This is not just to say that we need a net increase of staff to manage the Civil Service better, although there is bound to be some element of this. We need to improve methods and, in some posts and areas, the quality of those who are carrying out certain jobs.

I have already indicated that I cannot hope to cover even a tiny proportion of the many recommendations, but I should like to single out a few, either to make a statement or perhaps to invite debate. There is the fascinating controversy which is summed up in words like "professional" "amateur", "specialist" and "generalist". While I was trying to draft a passage of my speech on this subject, I found I was so engaged in producing fresh definitions for each of these terms that I suddenly decided it might be better for me to hear what your Lordships have to say on the subject. So I do not propose to get into a philosophical discussion or either to rebut or justify criticisms. But one point comes clearly through the Report—and I hope we shall all agree on this—and it seems to be one of the main points of the Report, and one of the main messages of Part 2. It is that administrators or managers must seek to develop greater knowledge in depth, not merely of specialist subjects or functions—and here, again, there are lots of management theories available on this subject—but also of the profession of management. The dilemma that confronts the civil servant is brought out in Part 2. It is his obligation to be both a policy adviser and a manager.

I must make clear that the first priority has inevitably had to be policy advising, and any Minister who has had to conduct legislation through Parliament—and the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, will know this as well as anyone—knows the very high quality of the advice which one gets on these occasions and the extraordinary rapidity with which the Civil Service works in these matters. It is indeed a miraculous and remarkable achievement. But it is clear—and I think there will be general agreement on this point—that on the management side there is a need for improvement of a kind which, equally, is necessary within industry.

There are certain recommendations which bear on this matter. There is the question of the "preference for rele- vance" in education. I can only say that this is a fascinating subject about which I am going to say nothing more at the moment. The Government will obviously have to face this. But whether or not it is right—and the Commission were divided on this issue—to influence our education system, I can only say that the Civil Service sought to do so in the past. It may well be that this is a matter of presentation. It may be the image of the Civil Service; and, as I say, I shall await with great interest to hear what other noble Lords have to say.

Then there is the streaming of administrators—an interesting concept which the Committee put forward rather more tentatively to indicate again this problem of the immense increase in the number of specialisations which may require a greater focusing in a certain area. After all, most people tend to pursue careers in particular areas and with particular expertise. This, of course, is a problem which confronts not merely the administrator in the Civil Service but the engineer and the technologist to-day. Whereas before engineers had four or five main branches and could be divided into electrical engineers or mechanical engineers, here, too, the same problem of specialisation within the specialisations arises. It is an interesting proposal.

As to training, I have already said something about that. It is fair to say that since 1963 some of the younger civil servants have been receiving training at a level not far short of what the Fulton Committee recommend; but, here again, attention has perhaps focused unduly on the training of central administration. The Committee acknowledged that very much of the departmental training was very good indeed—and I would have said on the whole better than is to be found in large areas of industry. It is only in the last few years, since the Industrial Training Act, that there has been real pressure to bring into industry generally the sort of training standards which are to be found in the best of industry. Let me also make clear, so that the emphasis is not wrong, that the best of industry is very good indeed; and it is on the best of industry that the Fulton Commitee has set its sights.

Personnel management is a subject on which I should have liked to talk at great length and on which I shall have to be particularly careful, as the departmental Minister, to avoid turning myself into the chief personnel manager of the Civil Service. The Treasury freely admit that both the resources and the understanding that have been given to personnel management have been nothing like enough. Again, personnel management in the best of industry has advanced a good deal further. It is interesting to see how often Civil Service methods have been taken from the Civil Service and developed much more effectively outside; and I think we shall need quite usefully to look at some of the developments which have gone on in some of the nationalised industries, particularly those which are very much concerned with—I will not say entirely similar activities, but high-level activities, like the Atomic Energy Authority. It will be there, as well as at private industry, that we must look.

My Lords, here we come to another, different problem—the problem of scientific and professional staff. We agree with the Committee that they need to be given greater responsibilities within their specialist fields, and greater opportunities to reach high posts in policy-making and management, although it would be quite wrong to assume that every scientist and professional wants to become a Permanent Secretary. If they did, far more would seek to enter the Civil Service as administrators in the first place—where, again, there would be a strong welcome for an increase in the number of candidates with a scientific or technological education. Let us not forget that one of the greatest civil servants of our age, the late Lord Waverley, in fact entered with a scientific qualification; and there are more to be found. I remember Lord Waverley pointing out, in relation to his earlier work—I think it was on uranium—that much of the physics which he did in those days was pretty out-of-date and not very relevant to the present time.

The opportunity, however, must be more readily available for those who are professionals to gain the experience and to get the extra knowledge necessary for the use of management techniques. In particular, we welcome the Fulton Committee's idea of a senior policy and management group across the whole hoard of the Civil Service. But what will be more important to a greater number of scientific and professional staff is, I think, the opportunity to carry fuller responsibility within their own field. This, I think, comes down to two things which are related: first, the boundary line and the inter-relationship between the work of the specialist and the work of the administrator needs looking at very carefully. There is a tendency here for duplication. Examples of this are interestingly Set out in Part II, and certainly we shall be looking very closely at the idea of moving towards a more integrated approach; although there are kinds of management teams which, again, are being developed in private industry, where integration is not as strictly pyramidical as some people might prefer. But certainly there may be a strong case for giving professionals more control over all aspects of their work, including the financial, accounting and contractual sides. Of course, this is not new in certain parts of industry. It already exists in various ways in parts of the Ministry of Transport, the Ministry of Technology and the Navy Department of the Ministry of Defence. One could go on at great length on this subject but the lesson must surely be again to provide greater opportunities for training, not only in the present new techniques that are becoming more familiar but in the new techniques which will come into use in the future.

I should like to say a word or two about the Civil Service college, because I think there is some misunderstanding here. The criticism of this proposal is based on two assumptions. The first is that such a college would be a single, large residential centre which would monopolise all the management training of civil servants and where the courses would be conducted by civil servants for civil servants with a complete lack of contact with the outside world. The second criticism is that virtually all the training needs of the Civil Service could be better met by universities, business schools, technical colleges and so on, and therefore it is unnecessary for the Service to have any, or more than a very small, organisation of its own. The first of these misconceptions cannot be reconciled at all with the intentions set out in the Fulton Report, and it is equally inconsistent with the present policy on Civil Service training or any policy likely to be adopted in the future. Neither envisage an introspective bureaucratic centre. The Report recommends that many courses should be open to students from business firms, nationalised industries and local government, and the college would run some courses in more than one centre, making use also of existing courses and outside institutions, as well as teachers and lecturers from other establishments, as in fact they do now. It could well become a particularly useful focus for research in problems of government. None of this, is it suggested, should be exclusive; and perhaps the word "college" itself has an emotive significance which is apt to disturb clear thinking on this wider concept that I have put forward.

My Lords, I would say only that I do not think either that it is possible or, indeed, that it would be responsible, any more than it would be in industry, for the Civil Service to hive off the whole of its training and do nothing itself. Universities and other institutions are bound to feel that they have a great deal to contribute and, of course, they have. But, as we know, in other countries—and we have had attention drawn to them—there are such specialised institutions as the American schools and the E.N.A. in France. We shall, of course, go widely and carefully into this. I think it will be possible to arrive at a sensible and reasonable balance in which there will be a hard core of training, including management training, which may best be met within the Service, even though there may be help from outside institutions.

My Lords, time is pressing. I ought to say something about the unified structure; but I think it might be useful if I were to leave this until I have had the benefit of hearing what noble Lords have to say. The point that has attracted most attention is the proposal that classes should be abolished. Certainly, it is the Government's wish—very much with the agreement of the Treasury that unnecessary formal barriers should be removed. But this must be read in the context that occupational groups are bound to have to be retained. Therefore, we shall have to make very clear in any organisation that a position will have to be found especially for the professionals in the Service. There may have to be some grouping; we cannot think entirely of a large undifferentiated mass; but we cer- tainly accept that there are far too many different groups and that the border line is sometimes badly drawn.

My Lords, I have said a good deal about the criticisms of the Civil Service. I hope I have made it clear that these criticisms have been accepted in a constructive spirit. But here again, we must not forget the many achievements of the Civil Service. Perhaps I have said enough already on this, but it is interesting to recognise how many developments in management started originally within the Government service. This is particularly so in what are now called management services: the provision of specialised assistance to general management. We all know the contribution of the Government service to the early development of Organisation and Methods, of how operational research grew up within the Government service, particularly among scientists during the war. From this base has begun to grow a modern management service which makes use of outside consultants where appropriate. But many of these developments have advanced far more slowly into general use than the early promise would have suggested. Here I think Governments must share some of the blame. We know that in the field of automatic data processing the Government and Government Departments are well in the lead. Certainly many of the most sophisticated uses of the computer have been developed within the Service. And we have been hearing much about all these modern techniques of investment appraisal, cost benefit analysis and discounted cash flow. There has been great development, particularly within the Treasury itself, and programme budgeting, which was introduced into the Ministry of Defence under the previous Government, has been a tremendous success in the field of defence planning.

I hope that the picture therefore is of a Service which, while open to criticism in some respects, is one of which we can be as proud as of any institution within the country. Some of us may hesitate to accept in full all the criticisms in the Report. But I want to emphasise that we ought not to spend too much time arguing about whether a particular criticism is fair or not. We ought not to argue about it until one has read Part I and Part II of the Report; and indeed Part III, which has not yet been published, which is a certain handicap. The most striking thing—and the Report fully acknowledges this—is the extent to which we now take for granted the integrity of the Civil Service; so much so that we never question it; yet we know that in other countries they are still striving towards the same sort of integrity.

The burdens that Governments of all Parties have placed on the Service in recent years—and let me accept that the present Government have put some pretty heavy burdens on the Civil Service—have been very heavy indeed. The Service has responded not only with remarkable thoroughness but with most extraordinary speed and ability. This constant pressure, as the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, pointed out, of day-to-day business falls most heavily on the top men. It is this as much as anything else which has hampered rapid progress with major internal reforms.

Nevertheless, in conclusion, I would say that if there are aspects of the Report with which some of us may disagree they are far outweighed by the many valuable and constructive ideas put forward by the Committee. Civil servants, both individually and collectively as represented by the staff associations through the Whitley machinery, have built up something which is very remarkable and unequalled in other parts of the world. I am glad that the Report commended Whitleyism as it approaches its 50th anniversary. I am impressed by the way in which the staff associations have received the Report. I think there is one thing we shall be agreed upon: that there can be no doubt that the Civil Service will respond to the challenge which has been offered by the Committee.

It is a challenge which I believe must be met, and the outcome will certainly be of great importance if it is successfully carried out, not merely to the present Government but to many Governments in the years ahead. This is not a reform that can be implemented in a day. It will be a long process. It is a task that will fall to others who will come after me, and perhaps after the noble Lord, Lord Carrington. I noted what the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, had to say about the desirability of the Minister for the Civil Service being in the House of Lords. But this is going to be a long haul, and I think we who are now beginning to work on this matter are conscious that we are having to build something which will last for a very long time into the future.