Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)

My Lords, I am indebted to the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, for securing this important debate. For full disclosure, I worked with civil servants as an elected Member of Parliament and special adviser in DExEU between 2016 and 2018 and found the private office I worked with exceptional and exemplary. That said, the notion of a Rolls-Royce Civil Service machine and the era of complacency arising from the exceptionalism of the Northcote-Trevelyan dispensation is long gone. I will concentrate on two areas, efficiency and effectiveness and political impartiality, and make some suggestions for change. Despite endless reviews and of course a plethora of delivery units, no Government in the past 25 years have got a grip on the Civil Service, including its poor productivity, its ideological groupthink, its paucity of innovation and imagination, its lack of delivery and its incremental, self-interested expansion over the years, rather than any implementation of changes. Add that to the proliferation of quangos and we see a depressing picture of senior civil servants sometimes using the system to obfuscate the clear instructions and democratic mandate of Ministers and Parliament as intercessors and arbitrators. In the area of recruitment, for instance, we have seen the concept of results-based performance management marginalised. Even the Institute for Government described Civil Service headcount as “unplanned and uncontrolled” in a paper in 2025. The facts speak to a focus away from delivery. Largely front-line administrators have had their numbers reduced by 45% since 2010, while grade 6 and 7 policy roles have increased to 78,000, up 121%. Overall, the Civil Service workforce has risen by 35% in the last 10 years, while the public sector remains chronically unproductive and too large. Others will no doubt elucidate on the lack of impartiality and the issue of bias. Suffice it to say that the misuse and abuse, in terms of ultra vires actions, of the Civil Service diversity strategy from 2022 and the Civil Service Code; the pernicious influence of campaigning activist groups in the wider public sector; a liberal groupthink on things such as gender ID, Brexit, net zero, patriotism, capitalism and multiculturalism; and woke recruitment practices, do nothing but damage the Civil Service’s reputation for impartiality, esprit de corps, fairness and efficiency. The leadership of the Civil Service, particularly the Cabinet Secretary, must radically reform with alacrity, with: a proper long-term workforce plan, as the IfG has suggested; minimum terms of service; targets for reducing turnover; a greater focus on performance management; all Civil Service jobs to be advertised externally; an end to routine working from home in mission-critical Civil Service functions; more specialist roles; and more transparency in respect of HR data, including disciplinary issues and absence management. My favourite, I think, is public confirmation hearings in Parliament for senior civil servants in leadership positions. Without these radical changes, a future Government with a big or even just a small parliamentary majority will use that and Orders in Council to close departments, sack senior civil servants and bring in their own partisan supporters. The Civil Service should seize the opportunity voluntarily to move towards urgent reform before it is compelled so to do.