Splitting the roles of cabinet secretary and head of the civil service (HCS) could be detrimental to the civil service and the prime minister’s ability to effect reform across government, a former cabinet secretary has warned.

Lord Butler, cabinet secretary and HCS from 1988 to 1998, told the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) yesterday that he disagreed with the decision to split the post when Sir Gus O’Donnell retires at the end of this year.

“I do regret the splitting of the post, for a number of reasons,” he said, explaining that the split could damage the interests of the civil service because a departmental permanent secretary carrying out the role of HCS may have a lower status, and wouldn’t have as much access to the PM as the cabinet secretary.

He also suggested it could be detrimental to the PM’s influence across Whitehall: “When there were things that the prime minister wanted to have done, the leverage that I had as head of the civil service enabled me to get a great deal of cooperation from colleagues on policy matters.”

Another former cabinet secretary, Lord Armstrong, also raised concerns in evidence to the committee. The HCS “cannot campaign outwardly for the civil service, as one might do if one was the head of the Army,” he said; the role’s strength lies in “the proximity to the PM [and] the ability to represent the needs and the views of the civil service to him or her.”

Yet under the new arrangement, the civil servant closest to the PM will be the cabinet secretary. While he and the HCS will share a pay grade, said Armstrong, “the secretary of the cabinet will be first among equals; the sheer proximity to the PM will ensure that. I suspect people will look to the cabinet secretary... as the top civil servant.”

Lord Armstrong, who served as cabinet secretary and HCS 1983-’88, previously spent two years working as cabinet secretary while sharing the role of HCS with the Treasury permanent secretary. When the roles were merged, he told CSW last month, both of his own predecessors as cabinet secretary “wholeheartedly welcomed the arrangement, were sure that it was right, and wished they could have achieved it.”

Labour MP Lindsay Roy asked witnesses whether they agreed with a CSW Editorial (p4, 19 October) which argued that the capacity of the civil service “to stand up to politicians, as well as to serve them” has been weakened by the split. Lord Butler said that will “depend entirely on the status, ability and personality of the person appointed as HCS. If I was on the selection panel, that’s what I’d be looking for: somebody who can properly represent the interests of [the country] to ministers.”

Butler also expressed surprise that the Foreign Office has accepted an apparent broadening of the HCS’s remit: previously, the role has always been restricted to ‘head of the home civil service’.

Meanwhile Sir Richard Mottram, another highly experienced former permanent secretary, has also raised concerns about the reorganisation. Writing in Public Servant magazine, he suggested that the appointment of a cabinet secretary whose career has been almost exclusively at the centre of government may suggest to “up and coming” civil servants that “proximity to power at the centre” is still more valued than “leadership and management skills and experience.”

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Written by Suzannah Brecknell, CSW