Every year closes with ‘fury’ as the press reacts to yet another honour for a ‘mandarin’ who has been doing something they disagree with, and 2016 is no exception. This year’s villainous recipient of a gong is Sir Mark Lowcock, Permanent Secretary of the Department for International Development.
Much of the anger directed as Lowcock’s gong is really frustration with the government’s policy on aid spending, which is that 0.7 per cent of national income is spent on development projects around the world every year. That’s not Lowcock’s decision, but something that the Coalition Government introduced and that this majority Conservative Government under David Cameron and then Theresa May has remained committed to.
But the real scandal of Lowcock’s gong – and of those handed out to other ‘mandarins’ – is that this civil servant is being rewarded simply for doing his job. Not even for doing it particularly well, if the formidable Public Accounts Committee, which scrutinises government spending, is to be believed. Earlier this month, it published a report on DfID’s involvement in the construction of St Helena Airport, which is unable to function because there is too much wind. The report was damning, saying it was ‘staggering that the Department commissioned and completed the St Helena airport before ascertaining the effect of prevailing wind conditions on landing commercial aircraft safely at St Helena’ and criticised the Department’s assessment of the tourism industry on the island, and its own technical resources and competence to build the airport.
The PAC also recommended that the Department ‘send us a copy of its review identifying who was accountable for the failure to identify this key issue’. As Permanent Secretary, Sir Mark is ultimately responsible for whoever is accountable for this particular failure, which does rather beg the question of what looks like a bad year for the Department if this was a good one worthy of an entry in the New Year’s Honours List.
The Sun is similarly unimpressed that HMRC staff are being rewarded this year, despite similar criticisms of ‘abysmal’ performance from the PAC. Are people being rewarded for something truly special, or simply for continuing to occupy their jobs?
In 2012, the Public Administration Select Committee argued that honours should only be handed out to those who had shown ‘exceptional service above and beyond the call of duty’. It specifically criticised the practice of honouring people ‘for simply “doing the day job”, no matter what that job is’. Yet every year, civil servants whose ‘exceptional service’ is difficult to divine receive gongs which make the ‘exceptional service’ of those working thanklessly in communities look rather less special.
One simple reform would be to give a short citation spelling out the precise reason why someone is deemed to have offered ‘exceptional service’, rather than the vague ‘for services to this that and the other’ currently offered. If it’s difficult to write one without caveats, it may be that the person being considered for the gong is receiving reward enough in their well-paid senior Whitehall job.
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