Kwasi Kwarteng’s sacking of his most senior Treasury official will have a “chilling effect” on public servants and marks a “troublesome” shift towards ministers wanting advice aligned with their own views, he has warned a former head of the civil service.
Lord Kerslake, a peer and former head of the civil service, said the new chancellor’s decision to sack Tom Scholar as permanent secretary as his first act in office was “quite shameful” and a “retrograde and worrying” step. .
Speaking to The Guardian, Kerslake said the government appeared to be shifting to a “new way of behaving”, which could prevent senior officials from being willing to challenge and damage the public trust ministers receive the best tips
He said that normally new cabinet ministers would seek to work with permanent secretaries and only in rare circumstances would they decide they could not work together after a period of time.
“What seems to have happened here is that they had a vision about what they perceived was their approach to the politics of things, and they decided they didn’t want to have that kind of sound advice on the issues,” Kerslake said.
“That’s precisely why the high officials are there. Even more than before, senior officials will be nervous about this and worried that strong advice will be interpreted as political differences with their policies.
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“It marks a new level in the growing trend of blaming officials and firing them, and essentially saying they want a senior official who is aligned with our personal views. I think that’s really problematic, I really do… I think there will be a chilling effect and the world at large will have less confidence that decisions will be made on the basis of sound advice.”
Kerslake joins a growing chorus of former permanent secretaries expressing concern over Kwarteng’s decision to remove Scholar, a highly experienced and well-regarded civil servant, after Truss hit out at his leadership campaign in “Thinking of the Treasury”. The move was designed to send a signal that Kwarteng wants a new direction at the Treasury that focuses on promoting growth above all else.
Truss is believed to have personally ordered the sacking but cooled to the idea of sacking Simon Case as Cabinet Secretary. However, there is anger among sitting permanent secretaries that Case has kept his job despite overseeing the Partygate scandal and not fighting Scholar’s sacking.
Some inside Whitehall have referred to him disparagingly as “courtly” in reference to his background advising members of the royal family and a perceived unwillingness to defend the civil service against political attacks and threats from cuts from 91,000 sites.
Simon McDonald, a former permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, said on Wednesday that cabinet ministers sacking their top official on their first day in office was “foolish and unconstitutional, but the government has discovered it can do what it wants with the civil service, which has no power to resist”.
“Retirees complain, but so what? Parliament must act,” he added.
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David Normington, a former permanent secretary at the Department for Education (DfE) and the Home Office, wrote in The Times that Kwarteng and Truss “have sent a clear message to the civil service that they are not interested in impartial advice and they intend to surround themselves with ‘yes’ men and women”.
Lord Butler and Lord Gus O’Donnell, two former cabinet secretaries, last week expressed their disapproval of Kwarteng’s move, while Richard Wilson, a former Tony Blair cabinet secretary, told The Independent on Wednesday: “To summarily fire a key senior official, judged by most people to be exceptional, at this time is destabilizing. It can affect morale; there has already been a distressing loss of talent over the past decade.”
It is not known whether Scholar will receive a payment, but Jonathan Slater, a former DfE permanent secretary, received more than £250,000 after being asked to leave his post in 2020.
Number 10 does not comment on the controversy during the period of national mourning. But Scholar’s sacking has been defended by Theodore Agnew, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, who wrote in the Times that “Sir Tom Scholar’s dismissal as Principal Permanent Secretary to the Treasury should be cause for celebration”.
“Whether it was the foot-dragging and passive resistance to the creation of a Treasury office in the north, which was fiercely resisted, or the failed arrangements in the construction of the recovery loans during the pandemic , all roads led to him,” he said. said