A bevy of Whitehall experts have raised concerns about the government’s decision to split the cabinet secretary and head of the civil service (HCS) roles at the end of this year.

The Public Administration Select Committee has heard from two former cabinet secretaries, three professors and three journalists specialising in Whitehall affairs over the last week: not one of them told MPs they agreed with the decision,

Lord Wilson, cabinet secretary from 1998 to 2002, was critical of the fact that the new arrangement seems to split the heads of policy and of management in the civil service. “The role of policymaking is one that must be integrated with management of the [civil] service,” he said, adding that  the ultimate role of the civil service is to make things happen for the public.  Unless the civil service is “integrated and looking at policy proposals in the light of whether they can actually happen or not, and able to mobilise the resources to make it happen, then the taxpayer – the electorate – is not being served.”

Lord Turnbull, the cabinet secretary before Sir Gus O’Donnell, acknowledged that the workload for a cabinet secretary has risen in recent years, but said it would have been preferable to keep a unified role – albeit with greater support.
Both men suggested that the new situation could also undermine recent programmes which have attempted to raise the status of operational and management skills in government.

There has been a lot of work to promote finance, procurement, management and other specialist skills as routes to the top of the civil service, said Turnbull, and “this move is a step backwards”, since “the senior person in all this is the head of policy, and then someone else is the head of all that [operational] stuff.”

Turnbull noted that the HCS role has also been split, with Ian Watmore continuing to lead civil service reform as permanent secretary of the Cabinet Office. Watmore has close links to the Treasury, he said: “That is where the real crunch issues [around pay and budgets] are going to be decided”. He questioned how much real power the HCS would therefore have.

At another evidence hearing, Whitehall expert Professor Peter Hennessey said that the new configuration doesn’t provide “the strength that the civil service as a profession and a federation of departments needs”. He explained that he doesn’t believe “reforming the civil service can be done on a truly part-time basis”, and that giving the HCS role to a departmental perm sec is a “recipe for constant fire-fighting” that will leave the incumbent with no time to develop a strategy for civil service reform.

Former work and pensions permanent secretary Leigh Lewis, writing in the Times last week, also suggested that the split would downgrade the leadership of the civil service. He wrote that civil servants deserve “powerful and visible leadership”.

Click here to read about previous evidence given to the PASC on the new arrangement.

Written by Suzannah Brecknell, CSW