It happened for the first time a fortnight after I joined. I was sitting at my desk reading when a colleague leaned over and asked: "What was your topic?" "Excuse me?" I replied. "I have a PhD too," he said. "What was the title of your thesis?" I was surprised, as I had kept quiet about my doctorate; the colleague must have spoken to my manager, who had seen my personnel file. I had thought that my postgraduate past was something I should hide, that it might identify me as impractical, stuffy, cerebral. But then I had a series of conversations with people who had researched subjects as diverse as particle physics and German literature. Some time afterwards I found myself in a meeting where the chair quoted John Locke. And then, when I used the form "notes from the margin" in a draft, my manager replaced it with the word that I had hesitated to use: "marginalia." Within a month I realised that the policymaking elite of the civil service was brainier, cannier and more literate than I had assumed. Now, after three and a half years, I wonder whether it is the last refuge for the British intellectual.
The contribution of civil servants to policymaking is scarcely understood. I recall another incident that occurred shortly after I began working in Whitehall, in which a senior judge with whom I had been regularly meeting informed me that, frustrated by my approach to our discussions, he had written direct to the minister. "Yes, I know," I wanted to say, "I have a copy of your letter in front of me and a member of my team is drafting the response."
What was interesting were the two assumptions that the judge had made: that the position that I was taking with him had been formulated without reference to the minister's views; and that therefore any matters of principle had to be discussed directly between him and the minister. He overestimated my autonomy and underestimated my influence.
The spectre of Yes, Minister looms here. But I don't mean to imply that ministers are led by their civil servants when formulating policy. Government policy is very firmly led by ministers. But the tasks of understanding and planning for the full impact of these policies, placing them in the context of existing debates and helping to articulate them to partners, NGOs and the public—all these are central to the job description of the policy civil servant. As well as, I think, the job description of a certain kind of intellectual.
So what is it, exactly, that these civil servants do? Of course, the vast majority of people employed by government departments are involved in "delivery." They manage the NHS, they administer the social security system, they calculate and collect taxes, they run the courts. Arguably, especially in the light of the recent problems at the home office, they don't do these things well enough. The focus of my argument, though, is narrower. I'm talking about those civil servants who assist ministers in implementing a political commitment through legislation, devise a policy response to a new problem or engage with European and international institutions. Let me offer two examples of what civil servants do in these roles.
The first relates to the Gender Recognition Act 2004. The act provides, for the first time, transsexuals with the opportunity to seek legal recognition of the gender in which they now live. Before this legislation, a transsexual who identified as a woman, dressed as a woman, had undergone treatment to look like a woman, was known to others as a woman, was nevertheless regarded, in law, as a man. And so was only permitted to marry a(nother) woman and had all the other rights and responsibilities of a man.
Although there was broad support for the change proposed by the legislation, there was a protracted controversy over the extent to which religious organisations—which might not accept the "truth" of transsexualism—could continue to treat the transsexual person as being of their birth gender. For example, must an evangelical women-only prayer group accept a male-to-female transsexual as a member? The bill also included a prohibition, applying to those who acquire the information in "an official capacity," on disclosure of the fact that a person was once of a different gender. So certain religious groups wanted the assurance not only that discriminating against a transsexual person would be legal, but also that sharing the knowledge that facilitated the discrimination would be legal.
On the other side of the debate was the hope of transsexual people that this legislation, which would improve their legal rights in some key ways, should also protect against this sort of discrimination and provide tough guarantees of their privacy. I don't believe I am understating the nature of this dispute if I identify it with one of the central problems in contemporary political philosophy: the neutrality, or otherwise, of the liberal state. It seemed inevitable that, in settling this issue, the state was going to favour either transsexual people or religious organisations; it needed a basis on which to do that, and that basis needed to be consistent with the type of liberalism manifested by the British political system. Ultimately, the decision was made by a minister; that minister articulated the government's position on the floor of the house; and after hearing those arguments, alongside others, parliament decided not to provide religious organisations with a special exemption. But drafting the minister's speech, examining the history of how similar issues had been resolved, speaking to representatives of both sides beforehand, dealing with correspondence on the issue—all this was all done by civil servants.
My second example centres on the application of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. The act provides everyone with the right to information held by any public authority. A public authority, including a government department, can only refuse a request if one of the exemptions in the act applies, and the application of most of the exemptions depends on a public interest test. So there is provision to withhold information about the policymaking process but only if release of the information would, for example, damage the effective conduct of public affairs and this damage outweighed the public interest in disclosure. In the first instance, these determinations are made by civil servants. It is a difficult balance, requiring an understanding of on the one hand what disclosures would inhibit the full and frank discussion of policy, and on the other, what benefits greater openness has for a democratic political system. We know that some governing needs to be done away from the public gaze—otherwise no one would agree to compromise for fear of showing weakness—but the question is how much? The public may be interested in whom ministers have lunch with, but is it in the public interest for the diaries of ministers to be fully disclosed?
These are not only questions of political theory; answering them also requires an understanding of how disclosures will be received in the public sphere and what effects they will have on perceptions. You can't work out the public interest in disclosure without considering these factors too. So again, we find that civil servants are considering deep issues concerning the power of the modern state, but also combining that analysis with harder-edged practical concerns—the archetype of the engaged intellectual.
Some may argue that I have articulated a lost ideal of the civil servant—that today's Whitehall is dominated by special advisers and media handlers, and there is no room for impartial intellectual endeavour any more. There may be an element of truth in this, but I believe that the civil service not only remains a place where intellectuals prosper, but that it is also the best such place.
The first consideration is money. Civil servants get paid significantly more than academics, and only the most successful writers are likely to earn more. Those joining the fast stream—many of whom have postgraduate degrees and so have had academia or teaching open to them—earn about the same as junior lecturers or teachers. But on promotion out of the fast stream—which is expected within four to five years, and many do it faster—the starting salary for the next grade ranges from £35-40,000, a figure that academics are only likely to achieve after twice that length of service. And the differentials increase as you ascend the respective career ladders. Comparing higher civil service pay to think tank researchers leads to similar results. Pay matters—it's inexact, but we invariably treat it as a marker of how much our work is valued and how important we are.
What is of even greater significance is that the intellectual activity and output of civil servants is contained within their working days; it is at the core of what they get paid to do, and they aren't expected to do anything else. Academics, on the other hand, are paid for the teaching that they do. They are also expected to publish, but have to use evenings and weekends, or the scraps of time available between tutorials, if they are to research, reflect and write. They are unpaid or at least underpaid for their intellectual engagement, and unsurprisingly, most academics are irritated by this and find it undermining. Institutionally, civil servants are supported in their intellectual activities; academics are not.
The position of writers is more precarious still. They benefit from public acclaim in a way that civil servants do not, but they lack the reassurance provided by a regular pay cheque, and they need the public forums for discussion of their work because without them their work finds no purchase. Civil servants, on the other hand, are always at the heart of public decision-making and, unless relationships with the minister have broken down irretrievably, their memos are at least read, even if not well received.
Ultimately though, what guarantees the intellectual role of the civil servant, the reason for the security of this refuge, is neither the pay nor the conditions, but the complexity of the business of governing. The Gender Recognition Act provides a good example. The essence of the act is simple: new rights for transsexual people. However, settling all the issues raised in law by someone changing gender is not so straightforward. Should transsexuals be required to have surgery before they can receive recognition of their acquired gender? In terms of designing a robust, credible and sustainable system for gender recognition, there are deeper questions about whether the physiological alteration is intrinsic to the psychological change of gender. Would, for example, a surgery requirement breach the human rights of those transsexuals who can't have surgery for medical reasons? In the absence of a requirement for surgery, is there a possibility that a female-to-male transsexual could get pregnant, and if so, what would be that person's parental status? And under these circumstances, remote though the question may be, what would be their entitlement to fertility treatment? None of these issues can be avoided when it comes to enacting legislation. It may be possible to refer certain complexities to the courts but we should want to avoid this as much as possible; at least if the legislation attempts to provide a resolution, there is an opportunity for interested parties to engage and for parliamentarians to debate.
What provides the civil service intellectual with further job security is that, even in a culture with fairly low levels of political engagement, these issues of detail do excite debate, at least in the rarefied settings of policy consultation and parliament. There are groups representing transsexual people, there is the General Medical Council and the British Medical Association, the Evangelical Alliance, Liberty, academics who work on issues of gender identity. They all contributed to discussion of the Gender Recognition Act. And parliamentarians continued the debate in the two houses.
But intellectual civil servants have their limits too. Running a large organisation, or taking any senior delivery-focused role, requires a more managerial set of qualities, less akin to those of an intellectual. The civil service needs to include, at senior levels, people who understand how to deliver a service, who can design a user-friendly process, negotiate a complex contract, spot where glitches are likely to occur in the practical running of what may have been a brilliant idea. The question for the civil service, put into sharper focus by recent examples of maladministration, is: does too much kudos still attach to the intellectual mandarin role I have described?
The emphasis on the importance of delivery has been growing. Young civil servants, even those recruited from leading universities to the fast stream graduate entry scheme, are encouraged to take "front-line" roles and, in future, promotion for all civil servants will depend on having demonstrated aptitude in a range of roles, including those far removed from ministers' offices in Whitehall. There remains a lot of scepticism, however, as to whether this new emphasis will have lasting effects. Many young civil servants take these roles purely because they know that doing so is now important for career advancement. They don't spend enough time in them for the way they think or work to be changed. They fulfil the requirement, do their time, and return to policy work in Whitehall from the regional outpost, armed with anecdotes about how disorganised it all is and how distant.
Also, too often, when a need for something other than policy skills is identified, the solution is to hire consultants or short-term contractors. This fails to create incentives for top civil servants themselves to acquire a wider set of skills—and can even inhibit them from doing so. Each of the last three cabinet secretaries has spoken extensively about the importance of delivery, has even spent a token day here or there "on the front-line," demonstrating his commitment to making a change in the ethos of the civil service; still, it's telling that none of these cabinet secretaries has ever worked in a delivery-focused role. The people who spend their entire careers in those more practical settings still cannot expect to rise to the very highest levels of the service. It may be that rather than being in peril, the British intellectual, within his last refuge of the civil service, is instead too powerful.
