Civil servants fear government may seize up in runup to election

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/may/07/civil-servants-government-may-seize-up

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The civil service has expressed fears that collective government will grind to a halt in the final year of the parliament as the coalition parties launch surprise attacks on each other or defer decisions until after the 2015 election.

Civil servants have also called for a published code to protect them from warring parties making competing demands for selective and partisan policy advice.

The revelations come in a report prepared by the Institute for Government and published on Wednesday, one year before the general election. It is based on more than 30 interviews with senior civil servants.

It calls for the government to give Labour earlier access to professional policymaking advice to ensure a smooth transition. David Cameron has ruled that Labour can hold no conversations with Whitehall until October.

The warning about the threat to collective government came as the prime minister sent a message to his party members saying that "for the next 365 days, the Conservatives have one clear message: we are the team that is turning Britain around. From the ashes of the Great Recession we are building a Great British revival".

The inquiry found nervousness in Whitehall that the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats will increasingly demand advice from civil servants that is kept from their coalition partners.

Much of the advice will not be for use in the final term of the government, the report says, but to help flesh out party manifestos.

The report says: "Civil servants already report that they are being put in a very difficult position as – in the absence of guidance from the centre – they try to work out how to give advice to ministers from different parties without being, wholly falsely, seen as favouring one party or another."

The paper says it is normal for civil servants to be drawn into offering party political advice as an election nears, as they are asked to cost opposition policies or to work up policies that will appear in manifestos.

But the report predicts uniquely difficult tensions between the coalition parties as to what support they are entitled to.

One consequence may be an unwillingness for civil servants to undertake long-term thinking, fearing that it will be used for partisan purposes and claiming they have no political cover to carry out such essential work.

One official said: "It's going to get more and more difficult for civil servants to know what the right thing is to do, and therefore I do think that clearer guidance about what the rules are, how you deal with requests from different parties within a department, how you make sure that you are giving adequate support to the range of ministers that you are supporting while at the same time recognising that there are two different parties, will be really, really helpful."

The report also warns that civil servants fear they will increasingly be dragged into preparing surprise attacks on one coalition partner by the other. It describes a complete breakdown in communications when the Department of Energy and Climate Change's media team was required to brief against the prime minister's surprise announcement that energy companies would be required to put customers on their lowest tariffs.

Similarly, the deputy prime minister gave no notice of his decision to oppose unqualified teachers in schools.

One civil servant said: "We are often … providing things sometimes for one or the other [minister] without copying in the other minister[s] in the department. That's quite an uncomfortable place for us to be." Another spoke of the challenge of "being asked to work up ideas where it was completely implausible these might be pursued as part of a collective, agreed plan, and were in fact intended as the expression of a single party's views, or to contribute to a single party's manifesto".

The institute called for a clear code, drawn up jointly by Cameron and Nick Clegg, setting out the responsibilities of the civil service in the final year before the election.

The thinktank said the principle of constructive ambiguity, which may have worked in the context of a single-party government, would be put "under serious strain in the context of coalition, particularly as the focus shifts to the election".

Parties should be able to request information on estimated costs, implementation challenges, the likely timelines for delivery and relevant legal implications of proposed policies for future parliaments.

But officials should not offer advice or develop alternative policy options in areas with no coalition agreement. Nor should the system be used by parties to identify weaknesses in other parties' plans, as this would draw officials into providing political ammunition.

The institute also said officials should not reveal the contents of requests or responses from one coalition party to the other.

Secretaries of state must respect the right of the other party to access support from officials in their department in private, and should not interfere in this process and should be able to request information directly from their department through the permanent secretary's office.

The other party should be able to make such requests via the party leader or a nominated junior minister, also through the permanent secretary's office.

Labour's preparation for government programme is being led by the former lord chancellor Lord Falconer.

The report says there is a strong case that, if the civil service is to indirectly support future policy development for the two incumbent parties, it should do so for the opposition too.

The report recommends that the opposition should be able to request "limited analysis of estimated costs, likely implementation challenges and other practical issues relating to planned manifesto policies.

"This provision of information would build on – and would need to be aligned with – the narrower scope of conversations between shadow ministers."