The civil service has become a “flabby machine where the quality is no longer as sharp as it used to be”, says Lord Hurd – and he has the experience to give his views authority. As well as having served as a foreign and home secretary, he was before that a civil servant in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). With Hurd having moved from the Commons to the Lords, some of his five children have followed closely in his footsteps: one son is an MP, while another works for the FCO.

Lord Hurd blames this “flabbiness” – a word that comes up repeatedly in my interview with the Tory grandee – squarely on the government: “It is a tired government and the civil service reflects that.” This is a wholly unsurprising argument from a member of a party that has had 12 years to freshen up and is now eager to reclaim the Whitehall reins of power. “Whoever wins the next election should take a grip, and there are various specific things that are important,” he says.

While there is an element of pre-election stall-setting in what the peer says (though he emphasises that these are all his own opinions, not those of the party leadership), some of his allegations ring true: too many initiatives in quick succession; too many ministerial reshuffles; too much restructuring of departments.

Early on, Lord Hurd admits that “what I say is slightly old-fashioned, but I think it is very important”. The civil service has two jobs, he continues: to advise ministers, and to implement their decisions. “These two things get rather smothered nowadays by what one could almost call fashion,” he claims, citing as examples diversity and climate change. “They’re perfectly valid causes” – he believes there should be more women in the service, for example, and says climate change is important – “but when they become fashionable they breed machinery, they breed extra people.”

The jobs created to pursue these “fashionable” agendas are often, Lord Hurd claims, about “facilitation” and “coordination”, and beg the question “what do you actually do?”, he explains. “It’s not really action. There are terrible phrases: ‘Making a holistic effort to apply a vibrant strategy’ for this or that. These kind of phrases don’t answer the question.” The same “flabbiness of thought and speech”, Hurd argues, can be found in the speeches and documents produced by the civil service. Lord Hurd gives the example of the prime minster’s April announcement of extra troops for Afghanistan. “Three or four paragraphs are enough,” the peer says, “instead you get 15 or 16. [In fact there are 22]. It goes on and on, the thread of it is lost and the impact is lost.”

While some may take issue with Lord Hurd’s views, his belief that targets and public service agreements (PSAs) can be too inflexible and prescriptive may strike a chord. “Because of the financial pressures, they’re trying to measure everything by targets, but there are a lot of things – certainly in foreign affairs, and possibly in other areas as well – that can’t be measured,” he says.

While the facetious example that Hurd gives – of a target for the number of UN security council resolutions sponsored by Britain – does not exist, FCO targets do include everything from reducing conflict to strengthening international bodies. Yet the small print sets out that these will be “broadly quantitative”, rather than “unambiguous quantitative measures”; they might, in fact, be more accurately described as aspirations.

Lord Hurd believes the Treasury’s demands for statistics cause departments to “waste an awful lot of time, and you distort your efforts in order to meet your targets”. The chief secretary to the Treasury, will – indeed should – ask departments tough questions, he says, but the current system “is an abdication, to try and turn that into mathematics”. “These are matters of political judgment; this is what ministers are elected to decide. The ticking of boxes is just not realistic.”

So ministers are not trusted to judge their own departments – and they are also not given time to understand the area they are working in, argues the peer. He describes a “constant shuffling” of ministers for political reasons: “To have eight prison ministers in nine years is absurd,” he says. “You need stability, and we haven’t had it.” The peer had hoped that Gordon Brown, unlike Tony Blair, would leave ministers in place for the length of a Parliament, “instead of which, we’ve gone back into shuffles”, he says.

Lord Hurd is similarly unimpressed by the regularity of changes to Whitehall’s structure in recent years. Speaking a couple of weeks before the prime minister canned the 20-month-old Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, Lord Hurd said: “The idea that you change things by changing the labels on people’s doors is too prevalent.”

He gives the example of the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), created in 2007 from the Department of Constitutional Affairs and the penal work of the Home Office. “The justification was that you were bringing together things that ought to be together, like prisons and courts. But in doing so you were separating prisons from police. You have just moved the dividing line – heaven knows what it cost.” The MoJ has estimated the cost as £1.59m, but such calculations cannot include the price of rethinking policies or rebuilding relationships (for more details see www.civilservicenetwork.com/links).

Hurd’s frustration extends to the creation of coordinating bodies such as the regional development agencies (RDAs) or the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), the umbrella agency set up to manage the prison and probation services. In such cases, he says, “A and B often go on and all you’ve got is expensive C sitting on top. You are just adding to the amount of meetings, the number of organisations, without improving performance.” When things go wrong, prime ministers have had a tendency to tinker with structures, he claims, but “it is probably not the structure that has gone wrong; it is the policies inside the structure.” Prime ministers would be better off setting things up as they wanted them, “and then leave it for 5 or 10 years to work.”

If moving departmental walls just creates a division in a different work stream, and coordinating bodies become pointless additional layers of bureaucracy, how is the civil service supposed to join up its work across department boundaries? With meetings bringing together junior ministers and top officials from different departments, replies Lord Hurd: “Making that work is often more fruitful than reshuffling the structure of departments yet again.” When things go badly wrong, a prime minister should step in, he continues, “but not feel that they have to appear on television every night announcing a new initiative. That is the example that Blair set to prime ministers, and it is a bad one.”

By Lord Hurd’s rules, if elected David Cameron will have one chance to reconfigure Whitehall before letting things settle down. Lord Hurd’s personal preference – he does not say what the leadership’s plans would be – is to bring the Department for International Development back inside the FCO (see news story). But David Cameron’s team may well want to rethink the newly-swollen business department or the new Department of Energy and Climate Change.

Lord Hurd believes that fresh political blood would reduce the “flabbiness” he identifies within the system. The respect that the public once had for the civil service “can be recaptured”, he says. “I don’t think any of this [damage] is mortal, but it needs a prime minister who will set the pace, give the example to ministers and, through them, to the civil service.” It is clear that this Conservative peer believes Cameron can provide the “brisking up” that is necessary; it is altogether less certain that David Cameron and his colleagues, once they find themselves in a position of power, will resist following the bad, but expedient, examples set by the last couple of prime ministers.

Lord Hurd: CV

Born
1930, son of Baron Hurd, a life peer

Educated
Eton College; Cambridge University

1952-66
Foreign Service; in Beijing, at the UN in New York, and in Rome.

1966-68
Conservative Research Department, during which time he publishes the first of 15 books

1968-74
Political secretary to Tory leader and prime minister Edward Heath

1974-97
Conservative MP for Mid-Oxon, later the Witney constituency

1979-84
Junior minister at Foreign and Commonwealth Office, then Home Office

1984-85
Secretary of State for Northern Ireland

1985-89
Home secretary, when his emphasis was on non-custodial sentencing. In 1997, as a backbencher, he described his government’s hardline penal policy as “an expensive way of making bad people worse”

1989-95
Foreign secretary as the Cold War ended and the European Community was strengthened; argued against helping the Bosnians in the Balkan war; in 1994 the government was accused of giving £234m aid to Malaysia in return for a £1bn arms sale, a charge denied by the government

1997
Raised to the peerage as Baron Hurd of Westwell

Other interests
Deputy chairman of Coutts bank; senior adviser for Hawkpoint financial experts; honorary president of the Prison Reform Trust; president of the Falkland Islands Association; High Steward of Westminster Abbey; co-president of the Royal Institute of International Affairs