64 year old Sir Peter Housden, Permanent Secretary to the Scottish Government – Head of the Scottish Civil Service – has announced that he is standing down at the end of June this year, 2015, to allow his successor to get his feet securely under the table before the Scottish Parliamentary Elections in 2016.
Sir Peter was appointed to his current position half way through the first SNP administration at Holyrood, which was a minority administration with ‘comfort and supply’ agreed with the Conservatives.
He has held his post through the extraordinarily prolonged, informal and formal, run up to the Scottish Independence Referendum in September of last year.
Faced with an SNP majority Scottish Government led by the forceful Alex Salmond – a government and a leader seeing boundaries only between those who were committed to the independence agenda and the rest, Sir Peter came under progressive and evidenced criticism for leading what became the most politicised civil service the United Kingdom has seen.
This was so widely recognised that high level questions were raised about the ability of the Scottish Civil Service to serve a government of a different political persuasion.
Whether this situation was born of professional and personal weakness or because of a genuine personal support for independence is irrelevant. The universal trustworthiness of the civil service relies utterly on its neutrality and objectivity.
It would be hard for Sir Peter to mount a successful defence of the Scottish civil service he led against a challenge to its performance in these key criteria.
The Scotland of today has been formed in the cauldron of that period and so has its civil service. Whether supine or engaged, the legacy Sir Peter leaves to a successor who is likely to be chosen from the same comfortable cloth, is one accustomed to supporting government in ways new to civil servants – but not unwelcome.
The SNP made sure they were well rewarded. Finance Secretary John Swinney was quick to put them on bonuses and their salaries have been protected, on occasion to critical response. Quite how one calculates bonuses for civil servants other than on one or more of the following is hard to see: E for Effort; cock-up count; pliancy; conversion rate.
It has certainly not been calculated on well framed legislation, with some howlingly weak and damaging laws trunking through to the Statue Book on majority votes. There was the profoundly flawed Schools [Consultation] [Scotland] Act of 2010, which had to be revised at an early stage. There is the Children and Young People Act [Scotland] 2014 – under current challenge at Judicial Review for its creation of State Guardians for every child in Scotland from birth to legal maturity.
There were and still are legal challenges to some actions taken by civil servants – with, for example, officers’ award of the Northern Isles ferry services contract, by a disputed process, to the hugely troubled Serco still facing legal challenge from another bidder.
The less said about the management of the affairs of the Justice department, the better.
In October 2012 Sir Peter came under scrutiny himself for his apparent compliance, if not complicity, in the First Minister’s alleged – and apparent – deceptions on having had legal advice from Scotland’s law officers on EU membership. [We covered this issue here.]
Scottish Government press releases became indistinguishable from those of the Yes campaign – as we showed in this article in August 2014.
A fair description of Sir Peter Housden’s tenure in charge of the Scottish Civil Service is that he and it were reliably supportive of the government of the day. It was not seen to be neutral. It was seen to be engaged. It was a comfortable companion to government, which is not quite its purpose. It was not a first class performer.
It is telling that the most high profile and vociferous support for the retiring Sir Peter came yesterday, to coincide with his announcement lf departure – from the man in the progress of whose unquestioned and autocratic rule Sir Peter placed no obstacles, former First Minister, Alex Salmond.
Mr Salmond said: ‘Peter is an outstanding public servant and Scotland owes him a great debt of gratitude for his work. I wish him well for the future.
‘Peter was the first head of the Scottish civil service to be chosen by a First Minister and first to move from leading an English department to climax his career in Scotland.
‘It’s very significant that during his time in post the morale and performance of the Scottish Government civil service has been substantially and consistently higher than that of their Whitehall counterparts. That is due in great measure to Peter’s personal style and leadership. Key initiatives such as the living wage have been carried forward with great skill at a time of substantial pressure on the service.
‘He handled the process of constitutional change particularly well, including the key negotiations with his London colleagues which led to the Edinburgh Agreement, paving the way for Scotland’s historic referendum.
‘He leaves a strong and commanding legacy for his successor.’
It is fair to say that Mr Salmond has every demonstrable reason to see and to speak for Sir Peter’s service in this particular light.
