Higher Civil Servants in Britain by R. K. Kelsall

Author:R. K. Kelsall [Kelsall, R. K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781136261053
Google: zTxGAQAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

Apart from the special case of the wartime entrants, the non-examination direct entrants form, as we have seen, a relatively insignificant proportion of the 1950 Higher Civil Service. Four-fifths of them have had a university education, and the types of school and university they have attended are very much the same as those of their open competition colleagues. What is the future of this method of entry likely to be? At the time of the MacDonnell Commission, Graham Wallas suggested that the Service would benefit if more people with experience of the outside world were recruited.12 More recently, such a policy has been advocated by Ernest Barker. In his view, the increase of state functions, whereby the ‘regulator’ has also become the ‘doctor’ and the ‘maximizer of social utility’, calls for a review of recruitment methods. The Service needs not only those who have just graduated but also, by selection up to the age of 30 or so, post-graduate people who have had a period of actual social or public work which has enriched and completed their training.13 Despite the attractions of such a proposal, there are several reasons for believing that it is most unlikely to be adopted. First, the unfortunate precedent of the appointment of Assistant Examiners in the Board of Education makes any suggestion of the kind open to attack on the ground that, in the past, it has led to jobbery, favouritism and inefficiency. Secondly, the much more recent case of the wartime entrants, though widely regarded (particularly from outside) as having enriched the Service, has naturally been viewed by many open competition entrants and promotees as an unfair and undesirable form of dilution, not to be countenanced except under the stress of war. Thirdly, and perhaps most important of all, while each of the other main routes of entry has its organized support in the sense that any lessening of its importance would be opposed by powerful interests (the associations representing the lower ranks and the professional groups ensuring the maintenance of avenues of promotion and transfer, the Civil Service Commission and the Treasury defending the fabric of open competition), there is not, and can hardly be, a pressure group to protect or enlarge the opportunities of potential ‘back-door’ entrants. This being so, it looks as though direct entry otherwise than by open competition will be even more exceptional in the future than it has been in the past. Isolated cases may occur in which someone with a distinguished career in, say, one of the Armed Services is given a senior civilian post in a Service Department, but anything in the nature of a deliberate policy for the recruitment as administrators of outsiders with experience in other fields would be opposed by too many powerful interests to have any chance of acceptance. For if there is one matter on which the great majority of members of the Administrative Class are agreed, it is that the tradition of recruiting amateurs with no specialist knowledge or outside

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