The balance tips towards politicians: The civil service will in future be a lighter counterweight.

The retirement of cabinet secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell (see analysis) has long been anticipated, but it will still sadden many civil servants. Empathetic, astute, open-minded and passionate about the civil service, O’Donnell is both well-liked and well-respected across Whitehall – not an easy trick to pull off. While lazy journalists constantly claim that he’s known to civil servants as ‘GOD’, the reality is both rather less neat and rather more revealing: most people simply call him Gus.

New cabinet secretary Jeremy Heywood is quite a different character: a brilliant Whitehall operator, he has a track record of single-minded service to a succession of key politicians. Small wonder that the PM wants to strengthen Heywood’s ability to coordinate policies and messages from the centre – an aspect of Gus’s old job that plays to his strengths.

Heywood is, however, ill-suited to other aspects of Gus’s work. O’Donnell has overseen a shift towards greater engagement with the outside world; strengthened the civil service’s corporate identity; developed its technical and financial skills; pushed for greater diversity. But Heywood isn’t interested in being a public face, a corporate manager, or the champion of performance-improvement initiatives: he just wants to talk to the guys in charge, and to ensure that government policy is sensible, coordinated, and – above all – delivered.

It’s probably sensible, then, to give someone else the job of head of the home civil service (HHCS) – but appointing a departmental permanent secretary to do the job part-time creates new problems. The reform agenda may suffer if the HHCS and new Cabinet Office permanent secretary Ian Watmore ever strike different notes. Other departments may take the HHCS less seriously when the role is based outside the centre; and Watmore’s efficiency drive less seriously when its linkage to the HHCS is less direct. There is a danger that, with Watmore’s line into the centre also weakened, departments will kick back against painful efficiency reforms.

The final danger obvious to CSW lies in the diffusion of power at the top of the civil service. The service is, in part, a counterweight to elected politicians: officials must guarantee probity; ensure that the government acts legally and ethically; watch for changes that undermine democracy or threaten to make the state dishonest. This task is often inconvenient for politicians, and must always be balanced with civil servants’ duty to serve the elected government; it is, however, an essential one.

In future, the HHCS will be both distant from the heart of power, and at risk of coming across as the ‘opposition in residence’; the Cabinet Office permanent secretary may lack the clout to challenge top political leaders; and the cabinet secretary will be a man who’s built his career on utter discretion, total loyalty, and an ability to make damaging stories fade gently into the background. The civil service needs a capacity to stand up to politicians, as well as to serve them; that capacity will be smaller now. 

Keep up the momentum: Fox’s exit must not halt the nascent process of MoD reform.

In fact, evidence of the need for civil servants to question politicians’ actions is thick on the ground these days. It’s disappointing that the Adam Werrity saga (see news) didn’t emerge thanks to a brave whistle-blower, but via an American court case. The Ministry of Defence is, of course, very comfortable with secrecy: former finance director Amyas Morse tells us that even he didn’t have full oversight of its accounts. But this traditional emphasis on discretion must not block moves towards greater transparency. The defence secretary, for all his faults, had started a process of reform; Philip Hammond must not let it disappear down the foxhole.

Matt Ross, Editor. matt.ross@dods.co.uk

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Written by Matt Ross, CSW