Editing Civil Service (United Kingdom) (section)

==History==
===Establishment===
{{rquote|right|the incorruptible spinal column of England|[[John Gunther]], 1940<ref name="gunther1940">{{cite book | url=https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.149663/2015.149663.Inside-Europe#page/n309/mode/2up | title=Inside Europe | publisher=Harper & Brothers | author=Gunther, John | author-link=John Gunther | location=New York | year=1940 | page=287}}</ref>}}

The Offices of State grew in England, and later the United Kingdom centred around the street [[Whitehall]], hence the metonym.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Jenkins |first1=Terence |title=London Tales |date=2013 |publisher=Acorn Independent Press |isbn=978-1-909121-04-1 |page=26 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=TszCuTMpxdYC&pg=PT26 }}</ref> Initially, they were little more than [[wikt:secretariat|secretariat]]s for their leaders, who held positions at [[Court (royal)|court]].  They were chosen by the king on the advice of a patron, and typically replaced when their patron lost influence. In the 18th century, in response to the growth of the [[British Empire]] and economic changes, institutions such as the [[Office of Works]] and the [[Navy Board]] grew large. Each had its own system and staff were appointed by purchase or patronage. By the 19th century, it became increasingly clear that these arrangements were not working.

Under [[Charles Grant (British East India Company)|Charles Grant]], the [[East India Company]] established the [[East India Company College]] at Haileybury near London, to train administrators, in 1806. The college was established on recommendation of officials in China who had seen the [[imperial examination]] system. In government, a civil service, replacing patronage with examination, similar to the Chinese system, was advocated a number of times over the next several decades.<ref>(Bodde 2005)</ref>

[[William Ewart Gladstone]], in 1850, an opposition member, sought a more efficient system based on expertise rather than favouritism. The East India Company provided a model for [[Stafford Northcote]], private Secretary to Gladstone who, with [[Sir Charles Trevelyan, 1st Baronet|Charles Trevelyan]], drafted the key report in 1854.<ref>{{cite book|author= Charles E. Trevelyan|title=Report on the Organisation of the Permanent Civil Service, Together with a Letter from the Rev. B. Jowett.|url=https://www.civilservant.org.uk/library/1854_Northcote_Trevelyan_Report.pdf|year=1853}}</ref> The [[Northcote–Trevelyan Report]] recommended a permanent, unified, politically neutral civil service, with appointments made on merit, and a clear division between staff responsible for routine ("mechanical") and those engaged in policy formulation and implementation ("administrative") work. The report was not implemented, but it came as the bureaucratic chaos in the [[Crimean War]] demonstrated that the military was as backward as the civil service.  A [[Civil Service Commission (United Kingdom)|Civil Service Commission]] was set up in 1855 to oversee open recruitment and end patronage as Parliament passed an Act "to relieve the East India Company from the obligation to maintain the College at Haileybury".<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.haileybury.com/about-haileybury/our-story/history-of-haileybury/|title=History of Haileybury|access-date=3 May 2020|archive-date=27 December 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191227195047/https://www.haileybury.com/about-haileybury/our-story/history-of-haileybury/|url-status=dead}}</ref> Prime Minister Gladstone took the decisive step in 1870 with his [[Order in Council]] to implement the Northcote-Trevelyan proposals.<ref>{{cite book|author=Simon Heffer|title=High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=O1gbQwhBSiIC&pg=PA476|year=2013|page=476|publisher=Random House |isbn=9781446473825}}</ref> This system was broadly endorsed by commissions chaired by Playfair (1874), Ridley (1886), MacDonnell (1914), Tomlin (1931) and Priestley (1955).

The Northcote–Trevelyan model remained essentially stable for a hundred years. This was attributed to its success in removing corruption, delivering public services, even under stress of war, and responding effectively to political change.  Patrick Diamond argues:
{{blockquote|The Northcote-Trevelyan model was characterised by a hierarchical mode of Weberian bureaucracy; neutral, permanent and anonymous officials motivated by the public interest; and a willingness to administer policies ultimately determined by ministers. This bequeathed a set of theories, institutions and practices to subsequent generations of administrators in the central state.<ref>{{cite book|author=Patrick Diamond|title=Governing Britain: Power, Politics and the Prime Minister|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=j0_dAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA42|year=2013|publisher=I.B.Tauris|page=42|isbn=9780857734679}}</ref>}}

The [[Irish Civil Service (pre-independence)|Irish Civil Service]] was separate from the British Civil Service. Whilst the [[Acts of Union 1800]] abolished the [[Parliament of Ireland]], the [[Lord Lieutenant of Ireland]] was retained in formal charge of [[Dublin Castle administration|the Irish executive based at Dublin Castle]]. The [[Irish Office]] in Whitehall liaised with Dublin Castle. Some British departments' area of operation extended to Ireland, while in other fields the Dublin department was separate from the Whitehall equivalent.<ref>{{cite book|last=McDowell|first=Robert Brendan|title=The Irish administration, 1801-1914|date=1 December 1976|publisher=Greenwood Press|isbn=9780837185613}}</ref>

===Lord Fulton's committee report===
Following the Second World War demands for change grew again. There was a concern (illustrated in [[C. P. Snow]]'s ''[[Strangers and Brothers]]'' series of novels) that technical and scientific expertise was mushrooming, to a point at which the "good all-rounder" culture of the administrative civil servant with a classics or other arts degree could no longer properly engage with it: as late as 1963, for example, the Treasury had just 19 trained economists. The times were, moreover, ones of keen respect for technocracy, with the mass mobilisation of war having worked effectively, and the French National Plan apparently delivering economic success. And there was also a feeling which would not go away, following the war and the radical social reforms of the 1945 Labour government, that the so-called "[[Mandarin (bureaucrat)|mandarins]]" of the higher civil service were too remote from the people. Indeed, between 1948 and 1963 only three per cent of the recruits to the administrative class came from the [[working classes]], and in 1966 more than half of the administrators at [[undersecretary]] level and above had been privately educated.<ref>{{Cite web |title=House of Lords - Public Service - Report |url=https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld199798/ldselect/ldpubsrv/055/psrep05.htm |access-date=2025-02-18 |website=publications.parliament.uk}}</ref>

[[John Fulton, Baron Fulton|Lord Fulton]]'s committee reported in 1968. He found that administrators were not professional enough, and in particular lacked management skills; that the position of technical and scientific experts needed to be rationalised and enhanced; and that the service was indeed too remote. His 158 recommendations included the introduction of a unified grading system for all categories of staff, a Civil Service College and a central policy planning unit. He also said that control of the service should be taken from the Treasury, and given to a new department, and that the "fast stream" recruitment process for accessing the upper echelons should be made more flexible, to encourage candidates from less privileged backgrounds. The new department was set up by Prime Minister Harold Wilson's Labour Government in 1968 and named the [[Civil Service Department]], known as CSD. Wilson himself took on the role of Minister for the Civil Service (which has continued to be a portfolio of the Prime Minister), while the first Minister in Charge of the Civil Service Department was Cabinet Minister Lord Shackleton, also Leader of the House of Lords and Lord Privy Seal. The first Permanent Secretary was Sir William Armstrong, who moved over from his post as Permanent Secretary at the Treasury. After the 1970 General Election, new Conservative Prime Minister Ted Heath appointed Lord Jellicoe in Lord Shackleton's place.

Into [[Edward Heath|Heath]]'s [[Downing Street]] came the [[Central Policy Review Staff]] (CPRS), and they were in particular given charge of a series of Programme Analysis and Review (PAR) studies of policy efficiency and effectiveness.

But, whether through lack of political will, or through passive resistance by a mandarinate which the report had suggested were "amateurs", Fulton failed.<ref>{{Cite web |title=House of Lords - Public Service - Report |url=https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld199798/ldselect/ldpubsrv/055/psrep05.htm |access-date=2025-02-18 |website=publications.parliament.uk}}</ref> The Civil Service College equipped generalists with additional skills, but did not turn them into qualified professionals as [[École nationale d'administration|ENA]] did in France. Recruits to the fast stream self-selected, with the universities of [[University of Oxford|Oxford]] and [[University of Cambridge|Cambridge]] still producing a large majority of successful English candidates, since the system continued to favour the tutorial system at [[Oxbridge]] while to an extent the Scottish [[Ancient universities of Scotland|Ancient universities]] educated a good proportion of recruits from north of the border. The younger mandarins found excuses to avoid managerial jobs in favour of the more prestigious postings. The generalists remained on top, and the specialists on tap.

===Margaret Thatcher's government===
[[Margaret Thatcher]] came to office in 1979 believing in [[free market]]s as a better social system in many areas than the state: government should be small but active. Many of her ministers were suspicious of the civil service, in light of [[public choice]] research that suggested public servants (as well as elected officials themselves) tend to act in ways that seek to increase their own power and budgets.<ref>{{Cite web |title=The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1986 |url=https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1986/summary/ |access-date=2023-11-29 |website=NobelPrize.org |language=en-US}}</ref>

She immediately set about reducing the size of the civil service, cutting numbers from 732,000 to 594,000 over her first seven years in office. [[Derek Rayner, Baron Rayner|Derek Rayner]], the former chief executive of [[Marks & Spencer]], was appointed as an [[Business efficiency expert|efficiency expert]] with the Prime Minister's personal backing; he identified numerous problems with the Civil Service, arguing that only three billion of the eight billion [[pound sterling|pound]]s a year spent at that time by the Civil Service consisted of essential services, and that the "mandarins" (senior civil servants) needed to focus on efficiency and management rather than on policy advice.<ref>Sampson, pp. 174–5.</ref> In late 1981 the Prime Minister announced the abolition of the Civil Service Department, transferring power over the Civil Service to the Prime Minister's Office and [[Cabinet Office]].<ref>Sampson, p. 171.</ref> The [[Priestley Commission]] principle of pay comparability with the private sector was abandoned in February 1982.

Meanwhile, [[Michael Heseltine]] was introducing a comprehensive system of corporate and business planning (known as MINIS) first in the [[Secretary of State for the Environment|Department of the Environment]] and then in the [[Ministry of Defence (United Kingdom)|Ministry of Defence]].  This led to the ''[[Financial Management Initiative]]'', launched in September 1982 (''Efficiency and Effectiveness in the Civil Service'' (Cmnd 8616)) as an umbrella for the efficiency scrutiny programme and with a wider focus on corporate planning, efficiency and objective-setting. Progress initially was sluggish, but in due course MINIS-style business planning became standard, and delegated budgets were introduced, so that individual managers were held much more accountable for meeting objectives, and for the first time for the resources they used to do so. [[Performance-related pay]] began in December 1984, was built on thereafter, and continues to this day, though the sums involved have always been small compared to the private sector, and the effectiveness of PRP as a genuine motivator has often been questioned.

In February 1988 [[Robin Ibbs]], who had been recruited from [[Imperial Chemical Industries|ICI]] in July 1983 to run the [[Efficiency Unit]] (now in No. 10), published his report [[Next Steps Initiative|''Improving Management in Government: The Next Steps'']]. This envisaged a new approach to delivery featuring clear targets and personal responsibility. Without any statutory change, the managerial functions of Ministries would be hived off into [[Executive Agency|Executive Agencies]], with clear [[Framework Document]]s setting out their objectives, and whose [[chief executive]]s would be made accountable directly (in some cases to Parliament) for performance. Agencies were to, as far as possible, take a commercial approach to their tasks. However, the Government conceded that agency staff would remain civil servants, which diluted the radicalism of the reform. The approach seems somewhat similar to the Swedish model, though no influence from Sweden has ever been acknowledged.

The [[Next Steps Initiative]] took some years to get off the ground, and progress was patchy. Significant change was achieved, although agencies never really achieved the level of autonomy envisaged at the start.<ref>The ''locus classicus'' showing the difficulty of this boundary was the interview of [[Michael Howard]] on ''Newsnight'' on 13 May 1997, which pivoted on the question whether as Minister he had intervened in the detailed management of the Prison Services Agency.</ref> By 5 April 1993, 89 agencies had been established, and contained over 260,000 civil servants, some 49 per cent of the total.<ref>Patricia Greer, 1994,''Transforming Central Government: the Next Steps'', preface.</ref>

The focus on smaller, more accountable, units revived the keenness of Ministerial interest in the perceived efficiencies of the private sector. Already in the late 1980s, some common services once set up to capture economies of scale, such as the [[Property Services Agency]] and the [[Crown Supplier]]s, were being dismantled or sold off. Next, shortly after Thatcher left office, in July 1991, a new programme of market-testing of central government services began, with the White Paper ''Competing for Quality'' (Cm 1730). Five-yearly or three-yearly policy and finance reviews of all agencies and other public bodies were instituted, where the first question to be answered (the "prior options exercise") was why the function should not be abolished or privatised. In November 1991 the [[private finance initiative]] was launched, and by November 1994 the [[Chancellor of the Exchequer]] had referred to it as 'the funding mechanism of choice for most public sector projects'. In 1995 the decision was taken to privatise the [[Chessington Computer Centre]], [[HMSO]], the [[Occupational Health & Safety Agency]] and Recruitment & Assessment Services.

===The Citizen's Charter===
It was believed with the Thatcher reforms that efficiency was improving. But there was still a perception of carelessness and lack of responsiveness in the quality of public services. The government of [[John Major]] sought to tackle this with a [[Citizen's Charter]] programme. This sought to empower the service user, by setting out rights to standards in each service area, and arrangements for compensation when these were not met. An Office of Public Service and Science was set up in 1992, to see that the Charter policy was implemented across government.

By 1998, 42 Charters had been published, and they included services provided by public service industries such as the health service and the railways, as well as by the civil service. The programme was also expanded to apply to other organisations such as local government or housing associations, through a scheme of "Chartermark" awards. The programme was greeted with some derision, and it is true that the compensation sometimes hardly seemed worth the effort of claiming, and that the service standards were rarely set with much consumer input. But the initiative did have a significant effect in changing cultures, and paradoxically the spin-off [[Chartermark]] initiative may have had more impact on local organisations uncertain about what standards to aim for, than the parent Citizen's Charter programme itself.