Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)

My Lords, I declare an interest as a former chair of the EHRC and as a fellow of the think tank Policy Exchange. The nation’s confidence and trust in our public institutions is ebbing and, as it does, it damages our constitutional and economic settlement as a country. I am very glad the Minister identified this as a priority in her opening remarks. Britain’s reputation for honest, competent and politically neutral public administration has been a prized national asset. It underpins economic confidence, democratic legitimacy and social cohesion. Its loss has consequences far beyond Whitehall and Westminster. The 2023 ONS Trust in Government survey found only 27% of UK adults have trust in government, with Parliament at 24% and political parties languishing at 12%. This places us far below the OECD average of 39% for trust. A recent report by Arch10, called Two Britains, sets this out. It surveyed public sector workers across the Civil Service, the NHS and education, and compared that to the views of the general public to test impartiality. It found patterns of divergence that many of us have experienced intuitively but had not seen through data and rigorous evidence as in this report. The public sector, when compared with the general public, consistently holds more negative views of Britain and our place in the world. It is 50% more likely to believe that Britain has done more harm than good, not just historically, but on current policy too—presumably in disagreement with the elected Government. For example, on attitudes to Hamas, the proscribed terrorist organisation, more than half the general public have no sympathy towards it at all, yet 30% of the NHS were sympathetic to it. When asked about our adversaries such as Iran and Russia, a significant section of public servants hold them in high regard. When evaluating fake news, public servants were more likely to believe factually incorrect anti-Britain statements than what the evidence showed. Beyond this report, other institutions such as the BBC have been exposed over a lack of impartiality too. Rob Burley’s essay only yesterday showed how the LGBT and DEI agendas have “captured” editorial teams, where objective reporting was sacrificed in favour of a single perspective. It would be laughable were it not so serious for trust in our national broadcaster. The consequences are not abstract. A controlled trial of 7,000 participants found that simply being reminded of verified controversial decisions by public bodies, such as “two-tier justice”, reflected precisely this kind of divergence and caused one in six people who trusted the Government to cease doing so. No one seeks ideological conformity in reverse, but what is needed is the robust, consistent and unambiguous reassertion of impartiality as the foundational norm of public service. A revised Civil Service Code should make this explicit across all contested areas of policy, not merely in relation to party politics. Recruitment should concentrate on impartiality alongside technical competence, and we should look afresh at whether current set-ups, such as staff networks, board-level champions for causes and some diversity and equality frameworks have inadvertently entrenched the very problem they sought to remedy. When publicly funded institutions have drifted from the values of the public they serve, this is a genuine threat to democratic governance. I ask the Government to read the report and to act on it in the public interest.