The Century of Northcote-Trevelyan

A permanent civil service, in the sense of ‘full-time salaried officials, systematically recruited, with clear lines of authority, and uniform rules on such questions as superannuation’, emerged in Britain early in the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century there was no clear distinction between political and administrative offices. The civil service of the Grown became established as the growing volume of parliamentary and administrative business made it necessary to place more of the latter in the hands of officials. Civil servants owed their permanent status, at a time when the development of party politics was making their political chiefs less secure, to parliamentary jealousy of Crown patronage: the opportunities for patronage could be reduced by granting security of tenure to officials already in post. The alternative to a career service - a spoils system in which officials were replaced as their political sponsors demitted office - never took root in Britain.