Civil servants 'can withhold the truth': Loyalty to minister must come first for staff, Commons committee is told

THE FIRST loyalty of civil servants is to the minister in charge of their department, even if that means 'stonewalling' or withholding the truth from Parliament or the courts, a Commons committee was told yesterday.

Elizabeth Symonds, general secretary of the Association of First Division Civil Servants, told the Treasury and Civil Service Select Committee that the increasing tensions of Whitehall should be eased with a new code of ethics.

She said neither the Civil Service conditions of service code nor a 1987 memorandum by Sir Robert Armstrong, then Head of the Home Civil Service, answered the question of 'what is legitimate for a civil servant to do on behalf of a minister, and what steps a civil servant may take if a minister asks him or her to go beyond that point'.

Giles Radice, the Labour MP chairing the inquiry into the management of the Civil Service, said only one appeal had been made to the Head of the Home Civil Service in the last five years under the terms of the Armstrong memorandum, in which officials had been given that ultimate safeguard against impropriety.

Ms Symonds said that should not be regarded as a measure of success. 'We get inquiries on a fairly regular basis from our members about being asked to do work which they believe to be inappropriate to the status of a politically-neutral Civil Service.' The Civil Service code, she said, gave officials duties of confidentiality and loyalty to the Crown. 'Since for all practical purposes the minister represents the Crown in Parliament, those duties are, for all practical purposes - and that's the phrase used - to the minister of the day . . .

'It is the rule the civil servant must abide by. That does not admit a relationship with the House. It does not admit a relationship even with the courts, because these are subsumed . . . by the civil servant's duty to the minister.

'Therefore, if the civil servant is asked a question that the civil servant believes would intrude either upon confidentiality or loyal service, it is the civil servant's duty to, you can say, stonewall, or to abide by what the code says.' She said the issues involved were 'at best, extremely foggy', and were further confused by the creation of Next Steps agencies headed by chief executives who directly answered parliamentary questions to ministers.