Baroness Finn (Con)

My Lords, I too begin by congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, on securing this important debate and on her informative, impressive speech. This was the view of the Constitution Committee of your Lordships’ House—I was a member of it at the time—in its 2023 report on Permanent Secretaries: “The impartiality and perceived impartiality of the civil service is a central and uncontested tenet of our constitution”. The two-part principle remains uncontested. The Civil Service cannot afford merely to act impartially: it must avoid any perception that it is falling short of that expectation. In 2014, my noble friend Lord Maude of Horsham and the late Lord Heywood of Whitehall jointly wrote: “The Civil Service is sometimes said to be ‘independent’ or ‘neutral’. It is neither. It is wholeheartedly committed to serving the elected government of the day in devising and implementing its programme. What is internationally unusual and often envied is the service’s ability to preserve its impartiality so that it can transfer seamlessly its expertise, commitment and loyalty to a government of a different political make-up tomorrow”. That paragraph remains as true today, but there were and are conditions to preserve that ability. Civil servants must act in a way to earn and retain the confidence of Ministers, and, once a Minister has made a decision, they must make that decision a reality. They must also sustain the skills and capability of the Civil Service to serve future Governments equally well. Time and resources are scarce so, if there is a conflict between ministerial priorities and the organisation’s professional capability, the accounting officer should seek a ministerial direction. Civil servants should not pursue their own politically partial objectives at the expense of doing their job. The Civil Service Code has correctly anticipated the ever-present risk in any permanent bureaucracy. It states that civil servants must not “deceive or knowingly mislead ministers, Parliament or others” or “frustrate the implementation of policies once decisions are taken by declining to take, or abstaining from, action which flows from those decisions”. If there were no risk of either behaviour occurring, there would be no need to prohibit them, but there they are on the public record. These are the true risks to Civil Service impartiality: misleading those whom officials are appointed to serve and frustrating decisions once they have been taken. Too often, we have seen the will of Ministers being frustrated rather than facilitated by their departments. When Ministers pull levers, all too often the machinery of government fails to respond. The Civil Service must police these risks properly. It must not reward, through promotion or appointment to key positions, those who exemplify the very behaviours that its own code prohibits.