The Hindu Business Line : Minister-civil servant equation

There has been a recrudescence of tension in the UK in the relations between Ministers and civil service since Mr Gordon Brown became Prime Minister. The reason is a series of snafus centring round the Prime minister himself for which he had to take the blame, while the civil servants involved in those decisions could hide behind their cloak of anonymity.

In fact, the tensed up relationship has never been too far below the surface. The Ministers of the Labour Government still recall with bitterness how one of their bright and efficient colleagues, Mr Charles Clarke, in charge of Home Office during Mr Tony Blair’s Prime Ministership, had to resign following the breaking of news that nearly 2000 foreign prisoners who should have been deported at the end of their sentences were released from prisons and went untraced merging with the general population.

It was pointed out at that time itself that poor Mr Clarke could not be expected to be aware of day-to-day implementational aspects and observance of administrative and legal requirements in particular cases. These were really the business of the civil servants in charge of prison administration. As it happened, while Mr. Clarke resigned, the civil servants were not touched.

A recent article published in The Guardian is peppered with exasperated observations by members of the political class. One Minister was quoted as saying, “There is simply no price for (bureaucratic) failure in Whitehall”.

Another talked of “a wall of sullen resistance” encountered by him, and brains being used “quite brilliantly, 24 hours a day, to prevent any of our initiatives going forward at all”.

A third complained about the civil service being full of “useless, oppositional, forty- or fifty somethings who had once been highly intelligent, and were now drifting listlessly and bitterly to retirement.”

All were agreed that “officials’ immunity from sackings, and the security blanket of guaranteed jobs with guaranteed pensions, had had a dangerously negative effect,” leading to a situation where in any dispute with senior civil servants, Ministers paid for any misjudgment while the bureaucrats did not.

Assigning constructive responsibility

To set doubts at rest, it is necessary to set out clearly the circumstances in which the Minister or the civil servant advising him should assume constructive responsibility for any failure.

Constructive responsibility can be said to attach to a Minister only when the things going wrong were within his personal knowledge and he did little or nothing to set them right. From this perspective, it was not obligatory for Lal Bahadur Shastri or Madhav Rao Scindia to resign as Railway and Civil Aviation Ministers respectively just because of a rail or plane accident in some obscure corner of the country.

The civil servant should be judged on stricter standards, because he has certain privileges and protections which a politician does not have. He is expected to examine properly and comprehensively the pros and cons of the policy before he advised the Minister so as to keep him above criticism. He should be sufficiently vigilant against things going wrong and take timely remedial measures, keeping the Minister informed.

In the case of failure on either of these counts, and in case the civil servant himself had a hand in mismanaging the course of events and causing public damage, there should be no hesitation to hold him to account and seek his formal explanation for dereliction with a view to ascertaining the nature and extent of his omission/commission and imposing whatever penalties are justified, including premature retirement from service.

This is the only approach that maintains a balance between the roles of the Minister and the civil servant in conformity with the Western model of division of responsibility between both.

B. S. RAGHAVAN