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Workshop 5.4 - The Civil Service - Coggle Diagram
Workshop 5.4 - The Civil Service
What the Civil Service does
Supports the government of the day to develop and implement its policies.
It follows the Civil Service Code and the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010.
Civil servants are politically impartial and must serve government of different parties equally well.
Constitutional principles
There are 3 main constitutional principles underpinning the Civil Service.
Permenance
The Civil Service does't change personnel with each new government. This creates a pool of people with specialist skills and experience from which ministers can draw.
Political neutrality
The Civil Service must be politically neutral to remain constant through changes in the political character of government.
Anonymity
With the exception of some senior servant, civil servants are not public-facing. The Minister, not their civil servants, are politically accountable for the department's actions.
General principle 5.1 of the Ministerial Code requires all ministers to uphold the political impartiality of the Civil Service and to not ask civil servants to act in a way which would breach the Civil Service code.
Accounting officers
Accounting officers are usually the Permanent Secretary in the Department and are always politically neutral.
They form the foundation of Parliament's ability to hold the Executive to account for public spending.
They are personally responsible for the regularity of expenditure, robust evaluation of different mechanisms for delivering policy objectives, value for money.
Accounting officers give evidence to Parliamentary Select Committees.
Senior Responsible Owners
They are politically neutral senior civil servants who are personally responsible for the delivery of major government projects.
SRO's may be called to give evidence to Parliamentary Select Committees.
The Civil Service Code
Civil servants are accountable to ministers, who in turn are accountable to Parliament.
The core values of the Civil Service Code are: integrity, honesty, objectivity, and impartiality.
Political impartiality
Civil servants must act in a way which deserves and retains the confidence of ministers while at the same time ensuring that they can establish the same relationship with those they may serve in future governments.
It is important for civil servants not to alienate possible future ministers.
Civil servants can't be dismissed by ministers.
Accountability to Parliament
The Executive is held to account by Parliament through the questioning of civil servants by Parliamentary Selects Committees (PSCs).
The ultimate responsibility for the implementation of policy lies with the PSCs.
Giving evidence to PSCs is seen as a stepping-stone towards seniority in the Civil Service.
Detailed guidance for civil servants giving evidence before select committees is set out in the Osmotherly Rules.
A broken convention?
Margaret Hodge MP said that the convention of civil servants being accountable to ministers is broken as there are too many civil servants and those who are responsible for errors rarely find themselves accountable.