Wednesday 22 August 1994
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Wednesday 22 August 1994 |
By Michael Dynes, Whitehall Correspondent.
SENIOR Whitehall policy-makers should be held publicly accountable for their errors in the same way as professionals in other walks of life, a cross party think-tank said yesterday.
Graham Mather, president of the European Policy Forum, said that a new disciplinary body should be created to ensure that top officials are regulated by the same exacting standards applied to doctors and lawyers.
Mr Mather's call follows the disclosure that it was a mistake by unnamed Whitehall officials that led to Michael Portillo, the Employment Secretary, scrapping a job support scheme designed to help disabled workers.
Senior civil servants had inadvertently dropped the traditional legal protection given to disabled workers from a new European Union directive governing public supply contracts. The mistake led Mr Portillo to believe that he had no option but to terminate the concession.
Mr Mather told The Times: "If a lawyer made an error of this magnitude, he would be sued by his client. If a doctor botched an operation, he would face disciplinary proceedings. But in Whitehall, no one is ever held responsible for their mistakes."
He added: "Lawyers and doctors face the constant threat of negligence claims, which has the effect of concentrating the mind. But there is no equivalent discipline in Whitehall. Senior civil servants do not lose sleep out of fear that they might be held responsible for their actions."
Whitehall has been responsible for several errors in recent years, including the Lawson boom, the policy-induced recession needed to correct it, the pit closure fiasco, and the Matrix Churchill arms-to-Iraq affair. But no civil servant had ever been called to account for those errors, Mr Mather said.
Much of the blame for Whitehall's lack of accountability lay with the doctrine of ministerial responsibility, whereby ministers were supposed to take the blame for any mistakes made by their officials, he said.
But the doctrine was clearly obsolete, as no minister had resigned since Lord Carrington stepped down as Foreign Secretary over the Falklands War in 1982. "Nor should ministers resign every time a civil servant makes a mistake. The turnover of ministers is already too high," Mr Mather said.
He insisted, however: "Someone should be held responsible when things go wrong. The system of institutionalised buck-passing does nothing to promote the high professional standards expected from all other professions.
"If mistakes are not owned up to, the system that generated them cannot be corrected. If senior civil servants felt personally responsible for the policies they recommended to ministers, they would pay far greater attention to detail."
Mr Mather said that the growth of "next steps" agencies, such as the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency and the Passport Agency, had witnessed a new ethic of responsibility emerge in the executive fields of government, which had led to considerable improvements in efficiency and productivity.
He added, however, that the core of Whitehall policy-makers had so far remained immune and aloof from this development.