Serve ministers well by telling them when they’re wrong.

Sir David Bell says that political pressures do not explain the mistakes the Department for Education made in dismantling Building Schools for the Future (BSF). But the DfE’s embarrassment was just the first of many coalition tactical errors, and a pattern has emerged. The cause is often an unfortunate combination of inexperienced ministers eager to make a big policy impact in a short time (many quote Tony Blair’s regret that he didn’t move faster in his first term); and increasingly under-resourced officials eager to demonstrate their enthusiasm and loyalty to ministers who, they fear, have built their views of the civil service around Yes, Minister, Blair’s A Journeyand The Thick of It.

Some people now acknowledge such problems. At Civil Service Live, National Audit Office chief Amyas Morse and former civil service commissioner Chris Stevens warned that officials must be ready to give ministers unwelcome messages, while the cabinet secretary pointed out that “it’s very much in [ministers’] interests that we say ‘no’ sometimes.”

Then Defra permanent secretary Bronwyn Hill suggested that officials hadn’t consulted sufficiently before the forestry sell-off,while outgoing health comms chief Sian Jarvis acknowledged that key groups didn’t feel their contributions to NHS reform consultations had been heard. Both errors had a high political cost.

It may well be that, as Hill argues, there’s now a “more mature relationship” between officials and ministers. More departments are learning to, as Bell puts it, “roll the pitch” before acting. And this government is certainly not the first in which officials too eager to serve their political masters have allowed loyalty to blind them to hard realities: the security services’ complicity in producing ‘evidence’ of Iraq’s weapons programmes had far, far worse consequences than any of the coalition’s errors. But the political fall-out of the BSF, forestry and NHS reform debacles (let alone the bloody years after the ill-founded invasion of Iraq) should convince civil servants that, no matter how uncomfortable it is to challenge a poorly-conceived ministerial plan, the results of failing to do so are often very much worse – for politicians, officials and the public alike.

Click here to see all news and features from Civil Service World

Written by Matt Ross, CSW