From Sir Humphrey to Sir Nigel: What Future for the Public Service Bargain after Blairworld? CHRISTOPHER HOOD AND MARTIN LODGE A generation of change in public service bargains What should senior public servants get for their labours and what should politi- cians expect from them in return? That question is becoming central to British politics, with an ever more heated debate about relationships between ministers and public servants. 1 A generation ago, the conventional answer was that public servants gave up the right to an open political life and high-rolling salaries in return for relative anonymity, a trusted role at the heart of government, and job securitywithgenerouspensionsandhon- ours to compensate for their modest salaries. On the other side of the bargain, the conventional answer went, politicians gave up the right to blame and ®re civil servants at will in exchange for a lifetime of loyal service from the best and bright- est the top universities could produce, with the highest ability to work the state machineandtooerbetterinformedand morepoliticallyacuteadvicethananyone else could provide. Such was the British `public service bargain', as expounded forty years ago by the late Bernard Schaer and Henry Parris,theleadingscholarsoftheirdayin the historical dynamics of British execu- tive government. 2 Both of them stressed the deep historical contingency of the bargain they described, and Schaer in particular pointed to the ever present political pressures to break the bargain. Even so, things have greatly moved on since the days of Schaer and Parris. A decade or so ago, Colin Campbell and GrahamWilsonpublishedabookentitled The End of Whitehall?, which argued that the traditional Civil Service system was coming apart. If they were producing a second edition today, they might well be tempted to dispense with the question mark, in the same way that the Webbs did in the 1930s for the second and third editionsoftheir Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? 3 Christopher Foster certainly dispensedwithanyquestionmarksinhis British Government in Crisis published last year. Indeed, every part of that traditional public service bargain seems to be com- ing into question today. For instance, the partofthedealthatconcernedwhotakes the blame for failures in government's administrative performance began to crackaftertheVandGinsurancecollapse in 1969 the failure of a major insurance company regulated by the then Board of Trade). 4 It took a decisive new turn with the creation in the 1990s of executive agencies led by civil servants who could be sacked for `operational' failures, as in the cases of the Prison Services Agency and the Child Support Agency. And in the 2000s the traditional loyalty deal seemed to have weakened even for `pol- icy' sta in departments, with `naming and shaming' of individual civil servants by ministers, and the early departure of SirNigelCrispasPermanentSecretaryof the Department of Health earlier this # The Authors 2006. Journal compilation # The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2006 Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA 360 The Political Quarterly, Vol. 77, No. 3, July±September 2006