ABSTRACT

This Offi cial History was commissioned in 2002 at a time when the British Civil Service was the subject of some controversy. Over the preceding decade, both its traditional unity and its future as a career Service had seemingly been jeopardised. The former was as a consequence of the introduction in 1988 of Next Steps agencies, in which three-quarters of offi cials rapidly became employed. Not everyone was convinced by the reassurance that the Service remained ‘unifi ed but not uniform’. The phrase, remarked one leading political scientist, was a ‘typical piece of “mandarinese” nonsense’.1 The latter was seen to be threatened by the increasing emphasis on individual employment contracts, performance-related pay and the advertisement of senior posts following the 1994 white paper, The Civil Service: Continuity and Change. The values of the private sector, lauded by successive Conservative Governments since 1979, appeared about to trump traditional notions of ‘public service’. The election of a Labour Government in 1997 offered little respite. The granting of executive power over offi cials to certain unelected special advisers was a major constitutional change and provoked a sustained public campaign for the enactment of a Civil Service Code to protect the Service’s traditional virtues of ‘integrity, honesty, impartiality and objectivity’.2 Simultaneously Sir Richard Wilson, on his appointment as Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service, was instructed to concentrate on policy delivery. To many this marked the culmination of the long-frustrated administrative revolution promised by the 1968 Fulton Report: the transmutation of senior offi cials from ‘generalist’ policy advisers into ‘professional’ managers. Fulton had been a self-conscious attempt to adapt the Service to the demands of the twentieth century, as the 1854 Northcote-Treveleyan Report had been seen to adapt it to the demands of the nineteenth century. At the start of the twenty-fi rst century, radical reform was again in the air. ‘If you want to reform a great institution’, remarked Wilson, ‘you must understand it; and if you want to understand it, you need to understand its past.’3 Hence the commissioning of this History and its primary objective of directly enhancing the ‘collective memory’ of government. Such an objective accords with the original purpose of the Offi cial History Programme, which was established in 1908 to record and learn lessons from the Boer and Russo-Japanese Wars. It also accords

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with the objective of a lesser known initiative in 1957 by the then Cabinet Secretary (Sir Norman Brook), who urged all departments to write historical accounts of key policy decisions in order to ‘fund experience for Government use’.4 ‘It is a feature of our administrative system’, he wrote, ‘that we make many forecasts but few retrospects. More post-mortems would be salutary.’ Greater effi ciency and economy would result, it was claimed, from the placing in historical perspective of the original assumptions and nature of policy decisions and their subsequent modifi cation. Currently, given the commitment to ‘evidence-based’ policy, the need for such a perspective is as great as ever. Brook’s initiative was not a noted success. Senior offi cials, so they claimed, were too busy making history to read, let alone write, it. The same might well be said today. Consequently a second, but by no means secondary, objective of this History is indirectly to enhance the Government’s ‘collective memory’ through the encouragement of more informed public and academic debate. This objective accords well with the original aspirations of the fi rst general editor of the Civil Series, Offi cial History’s fi rst venture into non-military subjects, which was commissioned somewhat courageously in 1941 to learn lessons from the War which was to be won, it was assumed, as much on the home as the military front. Its fi rst editor (the Australian historian, Keith Hancock) was committed to giving ‘truth a quick start’ by providing others with a quarry of information to which they would otherwise be denied access (indefi nitely in his day and then, after legislation in 1958 and 1967, for 50 and then 30 years).5 It was, in addition, his ambition to enhance this information through a ‘new kind of hands-on contemporary history’ – the interviewing of offi cials whilst the ink was still wet on their minutes. Like Brook’s later initiative, this ambition proved somewhat unrealistic. Senior offi cials had more urgent calls on their time. Moreover, there were certain constitutional conventions concerning confi dentiality. The importance of oral testimony, however, was acknowledged and when the Civil Series evolved into the permanent Peacetime Programme of Offi cial Histories in 1966, it was supported with conviction by at least one senior offi cial on the grounds that

an historian working on recent material will be able to fi ll the gaps, explain discrepancies and produce a continuity of thought and narrative which may be literally impossible in fi fty years time when so many of the characters in the drama have disappeared.6