Barry J. O'Toole

The Role of the Civil Service: A Traditional View in a Period of Change

From 1854 until the late 1960s the civil service developed greater uniformity and tighter central control. In the 1980s, that process was deliberately reversed, with the establishment of executive agencies and the delegation from the centre of many management responsibilities. The question of standards of conduct was not much considered when those changes were made: the need for efficiency and effectiveness in the delivery of resources was given pre-eminent place. (Nolan, 1995, p. 57).

Editorial: The Loss of Purity: The Corruption of Public Service in Britain

More often than not the word corruption is taken to mean &dquo;the abandonment of expected standards of behaviour by those in authority for the sake of unsanctioned personal advantage&dquo; (Pinto-Duschinsky 1985, p.164). While there can be little doubt that corruption of this sort does indeed take place at all levels of government in the United Kingdom, it is probably a minor problem; and it is certainly a minor problem in comparison with the all-pervasive, more insidious

The Challenge of Change in the Civil Service: 2004 in Retrospect

This is an article of record. It presents information about what has happened in relation to the British Civil Service in the last year or so, analyses that information and presents a discussion of it. The article has no methodological pretensions, and is essentially based on official documents and other publicly available records or information. Three of the most important of these sources are: first, the evidence and report of the Hutton Inquiry, which revealed much about the inner workings of government; secondly the report of the subsequent Butler Inquiry; and thirdly, the report of the Gershon Inquiry on the delivery of public services and the statement by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, which partly dealt with some of the matters raised in the Gershon report. There is one other set of documents that provides an overall framework for discussion, and these relate to a ‘Civil Service Reform Event’ held in February 2004, addressed by the Prime Minister and the Head of the Civil Service. These documents reveal the attitudes of those in charge of the civil service and, as with the other documents discussed, contain information and recommendations that are vital to understand changes in the civil service over the period under review, and potential changes for the future. To some extent this is countered by the thoughtful deliberations of the Public Administration Select Committee, which published a report including a draft Civil Service Bill, but the overriding impression, despite lip-service to the contrary, is of a government out of sympathy with public service.

Vision and Values: the Government's mission to modernise

Speaking to the Conservative Reform Group in October 1993 the then Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, talked of the impression the then Conservative Government gave of believing in ’a permanent cultural revolution in the style of Trotsky or Mao’ for the public services (The Independent, 8 October 1993). The impression over the period with which this article is concerned, from about 1988 to the present day, does indeed seem, on the face of it, to have been exactly that. It is an impression which applies equally to the New Labour Government as to

Permanent Secretaries, Public Administration and Public Management

over enormous changes in the policies which they were responsible for implementing, they were also to be subjected to enormous changes themselves.. It is at least arguable that the most affected department was the Department of the Environment over which Sir Terry Heiser presided. It has directed what are regarded by many as some of the most far reaching changes in the system of local government this century. In addition it was a ’prototype’ for the management changes which were later to sweep the whole of Whitehall, having as its Minister during the early 1980s, the enthusiastic and energetic Mr Michael Heseltine. It is

The FDA and the GCHQ Affair: A Prediction Made Manifest

industrial relations matters. These include specifically questions about pay, especially the 1981 unilateral abolition of the Pay Research Unit, and questions about trade union rights in the Civil Service, questions made manifest by the GCHQ affair. This paper examines the origins of the Association of First Division Civil Servants (FDA), and analyses the Association’s reaction to the GCHQ affair in an attempt to see if the Association has lived up to the expectations held about it that it would, in time, become a trade union. That question is important because the FDA represents the most senior managers in British central government. If it is a trade union, and there is now no doubt that it is, then it is yet more evidence of private interests playing an increasing part in the actions of public officials (see Chapman 1988, p16, O’Toole, 1989). This