Free The Downing Street Years by Margaret Thatcher Page B

recruitment to help reduce the Government’s pay bill by some 3 per cent. Departments came up with a range of ingenious reasons why this principle should not apply to them. But one by one they were overruled. By 13 May 1980 I was able to lay before the House our long-term targets for reducing civil service numbers. The total had already fallen to 705,000. We would seek to reduce it to around 630,000 over the next four years. Since some 80,000 left the civil service by retirement or resignation every year, it seemed likely that our target could be achieved without compulsory redundancies. We were, in fact, able to do it.
    But the corollary of this was that we should reward outstanding ability within the civil service appropriately. The difficulties of introducing pay rates related to merit proved immense; we made progress, but it took several years and a great deal of pushing and shoving.
    Similarly, I took a close interest in senior appointments in the civil service from the first, because they could affect the morale and efficiency of whole departments. I was determined to change the mentality exemplified in the early 1970s by a remark attributed to the then head of the civil service, that the best that the British could hope for was the ‘orderly management of decline’. The country and the civil service itself were sold short by such attitudes. They also threatened a waste of scarce talent.
    I was enormously impressed by the ability and energy of the members of my private office at No. 10. I usually held personal interviews with the candidates for private secretary for my own office. Those who came were some of the very brightest young men and women in the civil service, ambitious and excited to be at the heart of decision-making in government. I wanted to see people of the same calibre, with lively minds and a commitment to good administration, promoted to hold the senior posts in the departments. Indeed, during my time in government, many of my former private secretaries went on to head departments. In all these decisions, however, ability, drive and enthusiasm were what mattered; political allegiance was not something I took into account.
    Over the years, finally, certain attitudes and work habits had crept in that were an obstacle to good administration. I had to overcome, for instance, the greater power of the civil service unions (which in addition were increasingly politicized). The pursuit of new and more efficient working practices — such as the application of information technology — was being held up by union obstruction. In a department like Health and Social Security where we needed to get the figures quickly to pay out benefits, these practices were disgraceful. But eventually we overcame them. There was even a problem at the very top. Some Permanent Secretaries had come to think of themselves mainly as policy advisers, forgetting that they were also responsible for the efficient management of their departments.
    To see for myself, I decided to visit the main government departments to meet as many people as possible and discuss how they were tackling their priorities. I devoted most of a day to each department. In September 1979, for instance, I had a useful discussion with civil servants at the Department of Health and Social Security. I brought up the urgent need to dispose of surplus land held by the public sector. I was keen that where hospitals had land which they did not need they should be able to sell it and retain the proceeds to spend on improving patient care. There were arguments for and against this, but one argument advanced on this occasion, which was all too symptomatic of what had gone seriously wrong, was that this was somehow unfair on those hospitals which did not have the good fortune to have surplus land. We clearly had a long way to go before all the resources of the Health Service would be used efficiently for the benefit of patients. But this visit planted seeds that later grew