David Farrar: Five thoughts from the UK on civil service impartiality

An interesting blog post by a former UK civil servant and special advisor:

I'd also note that the vast majority of civil servants I worked with, both as a civil servant and as a SpAd, were committed to impartiality. …

Concerns are rising about civil service impartiality – just look at the regular headlines in the Telegraph or the Daily Mail or, for some more thoughtful articles, see here here, or here, which set out some good reasons for this. When one side starts losing faith – rightly or wrongly – with an institution that is meant to be impartial, that causes real problems for that institution's ability to continue to exist in that form. Like Caesar's Wife, an impartial institution must be above approach. Those who care most about civil service impartiality should be in the forefront of addressing and rectifying these concerns.

He lists five areas of concern:

1. Poor performance. He suggests that “there should be a formal means whereby Ministers could raise performance concerns about officials with their Permanent Secretary, and request that the person be reassigned. Such a power would be used rarely – similar to when a Permanent Secretary requests a formal written direction – but, when used, would normally be considered and resolved swiftly.”

2. Recognising certain issues are politically contentious. “There is an urgent need to address the insistence by the civil service that certain matters – e.g. on gender and race – are somehow ‘non-political'. Regardless of your views on these issues, it is undeniably the case that questions around sex, gender, self-ID and women's sports; or on race, privilege, statues, heritage and curriculum are highly politically contentious, regularly splashed on the front pages of newspapers, covered by the broadcast news and hotly debated in Parliament. Yet in the civil service, very one-sided positions on these are fully embedded within training courses, HR policies, within ‘staff support groups' or in statements made by senior leaders. Sometimes these directly contradict the policies or positions that have been set out by Ministers.”

3. The embedding of campaigning, activist groups in the public sector. This typically takes place through membership of diversity schemes, such as the Stonewall Diversity Scheme. This is a fundamental problem when civil servants must advise impartially on sensitive matters – such as transgender prisoners or self-ID in schools – where there are contested views in society. It is not enough to say that these schemes are only about internal HR policies. If staff have been taught, through training, lunchtime talks and so on, a one-sided view of an issue, and if their HR policies reflect that view, and suggest that anyone challenging may be subject to disciplinary action, how can they possibly submit impartial advice that considers the issues in a fair and balanced way?

4. Group-Think The IFG report is right to say that group think is (mostly) a bigger concern than explicit bias. But with education polarisation increasingly the biggest divide in UK politics, this poses real challenges for an organisation that by necessity draws heavily from the highly educated. Essentially, in some areas most civil servants will have views which do not represent the nation as a whole, but only a particular slice of it.

5. The use of accusations to bring down those with opposing political views.

They're all valid issues, both in the UK and also I would say in NZ.

David Farrar runs Curia Market Research, a specialist opinion polling and research agency, and the popular Kiwiblog where this article was sourced. He previously worked in the Parliament for eight years, serving two National Party Prime Ministers and three Opposition Leaders.