The Quest for an ‘Efficient' Civil Service

If the Fulton Committee’s strategy was ‘to toss a number of high explosive bombs’ at the home civil service in order to justify a programme of ‘radical change’ - as its secretary, R. W. L. Wilding said that it was - the service could reasonably expect that what was effectively a Fabian group - and, hence, believers in bureaucratic social engineering — would aim to leave the essential framework in place. ‘Though not without recommendations for change’, Sir James Dunnett, one of the committee later said, the Fulton Report was ‘broadly conservative’. This combination of conservatism and radicalism came out in Fulton’s recommendations relating to the structure of the home civil service. ‘The problems of structure would in some ways be much simpler if each department employed its own staff independently, and constructed its own grading system to fit the precise needs of its own work and staff, the committee wrote, ‘But the Civil Service cannot be run in this way . . . the Service must be a flexible, integrated whole; it must continue to be a unified Service. Its structure should be designed accordingly as a structure that is common throughout.’ Sir Warren Fisher might have said much the same. Given that, although unknowingly, Fulton was reacting against the Fisher inheritance, it was strange that the committee ruled out re-creating a structure which, allowing for the subsequent growth of the service, would resemble the pre-1914 departmentalized structure that Fisher had deplored and which would cramp the style of ‘the generalist’ against whom Fulton had directed so much of its fire. A unified grading structure covering the service from top to bottom seems to have been recommended by Fulton in imitation of British Petroleum: but its implementation would also have the effect of taking Fisher’s logic to its extremes — the universalization throughout the service of a structure (‘essentially a pay structure’) paid scant regard to the range and complexity of work done by half a million civil servants, and did not readily relate to Fulton’s proposals that ‘business methods’ such as accountable management’ should be introduced into the service. It was, after all, to remain a career service and one in which staff costs, the predominant element in departmental running costs, were to remain broadly standardized and not necessarily related to performance. While some of Fulton’s ‘radical’ ideas were taken up, for fifteen years unified grading made little progress. 1