Sam McBride: Stormont’s bungling search for a Sir Humphrey, at the worst possible time

The organisation built much of Northern Ireland after its creation a century ago, it kept public services running during near civil war, it withstood the downfall of the only parliament Northern Ireland had ever known, it coped with former members of a terrorist group which once sought to murder civil servants giving those officials orders, and it has even managed to govern for almost three years in which there was no government.

But with the exception of 1921 and the years where the fledgling institution was being put together, the civil service has arguably never been in a weaker position while facing internal and external crises.

The institution was humiliated by the RHI Inquiry which exposed an organisation with parts as bungling as they were weak. The sort of waffle which might save officials facing often limp inquisitions from MLAs on Stormont committees was hopelessly inadequate in front of Sir Patrick Coghlin’s team of lawyers.

And the absurdity of some of their written work on RHI – with one department late in the day attempting to dress up cash for ash as something other than the disaster they knew it to be – was emblematic of a tendency to shift blame rather than face up to gargantuan problems.

It is that organisation which is now advising ministers on how to handle the pandemic and prevent economic collapse, while also preparing for a Brexit whose form is still unknowable but is now just 90 days hence.

Knowing that, it might have been thought that when the DUP and Sinn Féin returned to govern in January that they would have prioritised reform of the bureaucracy which ministers control.

After all, even the most fecklessly selfish of ministers knows that if his officials are hopeless then he is probably going to look pretty hopeless.

On paper, the New Decade, New Approach deal which restored devolution pledged that “the Executive will as a matter of priority take forward reviews of civil service reform”.

In practice, there is scant evidence of urgency (four and a half years after RHI shut, not one civil servant has been disciplined), and limited evidence of reform (although changes such as making clear that civil servants don’t just serve their ministers, but the whole Executive, are an improvement).

There was an opportunity for totemic reform – right at the top of the organisation – but that chance has been squandered.

Last December David Sterling announced that he would be retiring as head of the civil service – Stormont’s equivalent of Whitehall’s powerful cabinet secretary, memorably depicted as Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes Minister. Mr Sterling deliberately gave ten months of notice to allow for his successor to be chosen.

Inexplicably, the job was not advertised until mid-July, something a retired senior civil servant told me was “pretty disgraceful”.

In a statement to MLAs last week, Arlene Foster and Michelle O’Neill blamed the pandemic for the delay. Yet the issue preceded the pandemic by several months and filling the post is an important part of addressing coronavirus.

Despite the advertisement being placed in The Economist among other places, it apparently did not attract the calibre of outside applicants that was expected. All six of those interviewed in the first stage of the process are either current or former Stormont officials.

Sue Gray, Richard Pengelly and Peter May got to the second stage which involved being interviewed by Mrs Foster and Ms O’Neill, just over a week ago.

The process put the first and deputy first ministers in the role of professional interviewers who had to score candidates in four areas: seeing the big picture, leading and communicating, delivering at pace, and taking effective decisions. Out of 80 possible marks, they had to achieve at least 14 marks in each area and at least 56 overall.

For some reason, the ministers rejected all three applicants. By then Mr Sterling had gone and so the civil service is now leaderless.

More than a week ago I asked Stormont Castle whether Mrs Foster and Ms O’Neill agreed about not appointing any of the candidates or whether they could not agree on who should be appointed. There has been no response.

Nor was there any response to the elementary question of who is currently in charge of the civil service.

In a statement to the Assembly a week ago, the first and deputy first ministers said they were “urgently working to put in place appropriate interim arrangements and in parallel considering how best to fill this crucial role on a substantive basis”.

What does this mean in layman’s terms? That they don’t yet know what to do? – Or that they can’t agree on it? Appointing an interim head of the civil service is now probably inescapable. But it is evidence of Stormont Castle’s sluggish decision-making lack of forward planning.

There is already an interim Attorney General and Mrs Foster and Ms O’Neill have failed to appoint a Victims Commissioner.

But an interim appointee is hardly going to have the authority to drive sweeping reforms; recalcitrant civil servants need only wait out their temporary boss’s tenure to avoid changing their ways.

And many of the problems identified by RHI centred on moral leadership rather than a need for new management processes or beefier codes.

At key junctures the deficiencies were those of not speaking truth to power; of attempting to shift the blame, and of failing to treat the expenditure of public money as if it was one’s own (as the Comptroller and Auditor General Kieran Donnelly memorably said at the inquiry).

Addressing those failures requires consistent leadership, not stop-gap temporary appointees.

We are only 10 months into this Foster-O’Neill administration and in several key areas it is a government which is not governing; it is putting off decisions rather than taking decisions.

The pandemic has placed an immense workload on the Executive and it is inevitable that other areas of government work – such as legislation – will in consequence suffer. 

But the failure to advertise in time and appoint a head of the civil service is not due to coronavirus; it is due to basic administrative failures and perhaps political dispute.

Last week the Belfast Telegraph reported a suggestion that ministers are keen to see an outsider get the job and are prepared to increase the salary.

There is logic to the idea of an outsider having more credibility to reform rather than someone who has existed within such a problematic organisation (although one which contains plenty of honourable and talented members).

Yet Mrs Foster and Ms O’Neill have already hiked the salary – from a ceiling of £160,000 to one of £188,272, taking it above that of the Prime Minister – without success.

An impressive businesswoman or senior civil servant in Dublin or Edinburgh might view that as insufficient to compensate for a role in which one of the key requirements is mediating between two frequently disputatious ministers.

The disorganised way in which this recruitment competition has been handled might itself alarm some potential candidates.

As the centenary of Northern Ireland looms, turning to an outsider would in at least one sense be something of a return to the sort of leadership which the civil service had in its early years.

In the memoirs of John Oliver, who would go on to become one of the most distinguished civil servants of Northern Ireland’s first half century, he records that every one of the permanent secretaries of the civil service which he entered in 1937 were from outside Northern Ireland.

The civil service in that era had plenty of flaws too, but he wrote that the composition of its upper ranks “had a powerful effect on a new local recruit, creating the image of a public service that, far from being parochial, was international in its flavour”. Few people speak of the civil service in those – or any other glowing – terms today.

Northern Ireland Civil service left leaderless after DUP and SF fail to make appointment – despite nine months’ notice

Pay hike as Executive makes last-minute search for top civil servant

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