- Public, Friday 30 October 2009 10.00 GMT
The civil service is facing a cut in numbers but discussion is much too polite. Photo: Martin Argles
The English do work in a very peculiar way. You would hardly think, if you were to sit at the back of the Thatcher committee room, listening to white, middle-aged men apparently sharing a private joke, that this is the forum in which the leader of the country's civil service is being "grilled" by the democratically-elected representatives of the tax-paying citizens, in a climate where more and more public services are in danger of being cut.
Public jobs and public services are at risk. The stakes could not be higher. But in this calm, comfortable room, the issues of public spending cuts, of democracy, of unelected ministers, of cabinet meetings where all the serious decisions have already been taken, of leaks that might, or might not, endanger national security - all these become a matter for polite debate.
Perhaps it has something to do with the urbane style of Sir Gus O'Donnell, the cabinet secretary, who last Thursday appeared in front of Tony Wright's public administration committee, to talk about the Cabinet Office's performance. Without actually saying so, he insinuated that the targets set for his department were perhaps not as relevant as to other departments, which may have accounted for its poor performance in delivery.
His own performance was also subject to feedback from all Whitehall permanent secretaries. What are his weaknesses? "There are occasions when I am too strategic and don't get involved in the detail," he acknowledged. Sometimes, he uses too much economic jargon.
But if anyone is at ease in front of a select committee, it is O'Donnell. There were many references, on both sides, to previous comments and discussions. But there were also plenty of questions that O'Donnell, smoothly, failed to answer. Was he talking to the Conservative party about its plans to cut billions from the civil service budget? Those discussions are, he said, private. The process has started by which permanent secretaries may engage with their shadow ministers - but they are not going to say anything about what might be talked about. Transparency only goes so far.
The proposal put forward by Francis Maude, the shadow minister for the Cabinet Office, to publish the salaries of the 35,000 most highly-paid civil servants might, said O'Donnell, be too expensive to implement. "It's perfectly possible, but we might ask about the cost of doing so," he said.
The government is planning to publish details of meetings with outside groups, to bring greater transparency into the lobbying process. Meeting with foreign governments will be exempted from this.
O'Donnell is between a rock and a hard place at the moment. He has to answer to the present government, but has to bear in mind the possibility of a change of government. How would he measure success, the MPs asked him. Some of the Cabinet Office performance, on the targets set in the capability reviews, has, he acknowledged, been disappointing. But as the head of the civil service, O'Donnell is clear on what will constitute success in the next three or four years and he has communicated it to his top 200 senior civil servants.
Success will be to reduce spending, to keep the government target of halving the public sector deficit in the next four years, without having damaged the most vulnerable people in society. That will require greater innovation and closer working across the boundaries - and that, in turn, will require the Cabinet Office to continue carrying out what O'Donnell described as one of its main tasks - knocking heads together across Whitehall.
