SERVANTS OF THE CROWN

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28938, 4 July 1959, Page 3

SERVANTS OF THE CROWN

[Reviewed by

J.H.E.]

The Spirit of British Administration. C. H. Sisson. Faber and Faber. 162 pp. 21s.

"In England,” says Professor Mackenzie of Manchester University in a foreword to this book, “we all criticise the Civil Service.” This is also true to a certain extent in New Zealand among the four-fifths of the working population who are not employed by central or local government, and the hybrid word “bureaucrat” is heavily charged with emotional connotation. But the growth of the socialised State has made a relatively large Civil Service a permanent feature of Our life, something to be thought about seriously by every responsible citizen, and a book of this kind is always welcome if it only helps us to clarify our thoughts.

Mr Sisson, himself a Civil Servant of 20 years’ standing, has written, not of the Civil Service in general, but of anl important section of , it—“the group of officials who may be said to specialise in the awareness of ministerial responsibility,” a group which in England is called the Administrative Class, the Permanent Secretaries, Under-Secretaries, Assistant Secretaries and Principals. These are the aristocracy of the British Civil Service, recruited mainly from the bright young men from the universities—a system of appointment foreign to the New Zealand scheme of things, which mistrusts most forms of privilege (especially that of the intellect), and in the Public Service prefers grading within a Clerical or Professional Class which the university graduate enters with a number of salary increments. It is also probably true that our Public Service employs relatively fnore people with technical and specialist qualifications suited to the various permanent departments.

Mr Sisson’s book is largely a defence of the non-specialist system and, to those unacquainted with it, the chapter on "The Education of the Administrator” is most revealing. The entrance examination to the Administrative Class is competitive and stiff, but the choice of subjects is wide and technically unrelated to the candidate’s future career. "This,” we are told, “as if it did not matter what one knew as long as one could explain clearly what it was.” The administrator has a liberal and general education—and this does not mean a mere smattering of a number of subjects. This is in keeping with older English ■ tradition, which in the past relied for administration on magistrates without specialist qualifications and, it may be added, the importance of the technically unqualified is recognised, in a similar way in other departments of English life. In how many countries would a solicitor be selected as the headmaster of a great school, or a professor of moral philosophy become in turn a senior civil servant, ambassador in Washington and chairman of a great bank? It’s worth thinking about.

Precisely what is the task of the gifted amateur who finds his way into the administrative class, and how is he trained to do it? “The essential character of government,” says the author, “and of administration, by which alone it is effective, is the process of maintaining the unity of the political group.” As the servant of the Crown (a title shown in the last chapter to be one of real meaning), the administrator is concerned with maintaining con-

tinuity, “the coherence of the realm.” His distinguishing quality is a certain freedom from ideas; his vision is deliberately ccmmonplace; constitutional subordination is his watchword. His chief concern is not with what is done, but with the acceptability of actions. For this worth is he inducted rather than trained, the emphasis being always on practice rather than theory—a concept which will be readily understood in New Zealand. His training in fact comes from the tasks on which he is engaged, and Mr Sisson quotes Treasury authority that members of the administrative class are “intelligent amateurs who form their judgments on the basis of experience rather than on a prescribed course of theoretical training."

<&&&& This is a typically British approach, and in this book it is contrasted with the very different attitude to administration in a number of European countries which the author has studied in considerable detail. The German civil servant, for instance, is essentially a lawyer; so is his French counterpart, although his training contains a more practical element We are also introduced to the Austrian Procedural Law. by which the rights of citizens are protected against official encroachments, as we are protected by public opinions and parliament. to the French prefet who represents the central government locally add has no English counterpart, and to the remarkable system of Swedish administration by which the ministries are kept very small and official documents are made available to the private citizen while the day-to-day administrative work is carried on by administrative agencies responsible to the government as a whole. For the various Continental practices there are, of course, good historical reasons, some of which are expounded in a most interesting way The British administrator fs not concerned with politics, and Mr Sisson is rightly glad that this is so. He has no wish to adopt, for instance, the practice of France where, as he says, frequent changes of government encourage civil seivants to nurse their own private policies, and the Minister has his own cabinet linked politically with his personal fortunes. Nor does be like the German system by which promotions and appointments are open to political interference.

In discussing the possible reforms of the British service which he admires so warmly he points out that if civil servants were willing to take more public and political responsibility there would be a danger of a spoils system, and that in any case any form of political connexion would be completely at variance with the picture of the civil servant who is supposed to have no pretensions to play a positive role. He also discusses (and rejects) the criticism that civil servants have an inadequate appreciation of law (which is not their primary concern) and should have a less “slipshod” training. The administrative class of the civil service in Britain has long attracted, and continues to attract, many of the most able of the young men who could have enjoyed a pleasant (and often more glamorous and financially more profitable) career elsewhere Readers of this pleasantly written book may find in it at any rate part of the explanation of the pride which Mr Sisson and his colleagues take in the work that they do. Would-be reformers may also find some interesting lines of thought.