It was not always inevitable that a policy going badly wrong would lead to blame falling on the civil service. Unfortunately, it is increasingly becoming so. The more desperate the political situation, the more likely it is that the government will find an individual or department to blame. All the better because they can’t answer back.
The Rwanda scheme fits neatly into this scenario. It is by any measure a controversial policy; even its cheerleaders would admit that. There are, of course, moral arguments about the policy – but there are also practical questions. Is it workable? Is it legal? Will it give value for money? The job of the civil service is to work through these quandaries with ministers.
When the Home Office permanent secretary, Matthew Rycroft, appeared before the home affairs select committee at the end of last month, he came close to confirming that the legal advice the government had received was that at least one of the various legal challenges to the scheme was likely to succeed. Ministers would have been told about those challenges. It is cowardly to then start blaming those who have advised them when their political choices lead to failure, as was the case last week, when we once again saw senior government figures briefing the press to suggest that officials are throwing up objections because they “just don’t like” the policy. Of course, supporters of the scheme were quick to seize on this narrative, with the Conservative MP Neil O’Brien apparently believing that the advice from the government’s legal department is “guff”. Since then, Rycroft has been summoned to appear before the public accounts committee on Monday to explain how the costs of the scheme have risen from £140m to £290m.
The Rwanda debacle, rather than proving that the civil service is trying to inhibit the will of the government, has ably demonstrated that the civil service has actually been doing its job. I suspect that civil servants told ministers this is exactly where we’d be, which is what the civil service is there to do.
Civil servants are just like everybody else – they have their own political and moral views. But where they do differ from most of us is that they know to leave them at the door when they come to work. Those working in the Home Office are fully aware that they will have to deal with controversial policies, regardless of the party in government. But there will be genuine doubt as to whether the Rwanda scheme will deliver what it’s supposed to: deterring those who arrive in the UK in small boats. When it was introduced, the permanent secretary required a ministerial direction – a mechanism in which ministers give their department a formal instruction to proceed with a spending proposal. This was needed because there was no evidence to suggest that the outcome envisaged – reducing the number of people seeking asylum – would be delivered. The permanent secretary could not say it was a good use of taxpayers’ money as there was insufficient evidence to demonstrate that. Ministers are entitled to ignore that lack of evidence, but it is the job of a civil servant to point it out.
There will undoubtedly be frustration within the Home Office about the amount of resources poured into a policy that was always likely to fail, especially when there are other projects of equal public concern that suffer because of the distraction. The job of a civil servant is to pose that conundrum to ministers. Are there alternatives to this policy that could deliver the same objectives? Are there other priorities of government that are being overlooked? To govern is to choose, and in the current fiscal environment, ministers are choosing to spend a thus far unspecified amount of money on a scheme that is yet to deliver anything but headlines. Inevitably this will be at the cost of other areas of policy or delivery. Again, this is entirely a political decision. To blame civil servants for the outcomes of their own poor political choices shows a weakness not only in the policy, but in the ministers themselves.
