One day there’ll be a Brexit reckoning, which is why civil servants are being so careful to record and annotate their advice to ministers, enabling them to tell future inquirers that it wasn’t them, guv – it was Liam Fox, David Davis, Michael Gove and the other Brexit ultras.



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Civil servants serve the Crown, as the memorandum [pdf] by the former head of the civil service Sir Robert Armstrong laid out in 1985 and again in 1996, and for all practical purposes the Crown means departmental ministers. This arid doctrine remains in place. It was inadequate then and is inadequate now, so if you are a hapless official in the Department for Exiting the European Union you would probably want to make it crystal clear for posterity that you were only following orders.

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The Armstrong doctrine is inadequate because civil servants are also proactive; they make decisions of which their ministers are only dimly aware. And this leaves Whitehall accountability mysterious and opaque.

For example, what responsibility does the permanent secretary at the Department for Work and Pensions, Sir Robert Devereux, carry for the fact that claimants have to wait six weeks in penury for money under universal credit, or for the humiliation suffered by those assessed by Atos for personal independence payments?

Where’s the line to be drawn between the administration that Devereux and his colleagues carry out, policy, which comes from Iain Duncan Smith, the Tory manifesto or rightwing thinktanks?

If you are a hapless official in DExEU you would probably want to make it crystal clear you were only following orders

In January, Devereaux will retire. He has been getting it in the neck from social media and the tabloids for going at the age of 61 with a generous pension two years before his own department pushes the statutory pension age to 66 for both men and women.

Of course Devereux isn’t personally responsible for the change; that is a policy decision. But it has been Devereux’s fate to run the DWP during years of austerity, with the David Cameron and Theresa May governments also pursuing deep cuts in spending on working-age benefits. “Policy” – otherwise known as the electoral welfare of the Tory party – has decreed that pensioner benefits have been not just untouched but augmented.

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You could conduct a forensic examination of Devereux’s tenure and try to pinpoint specifics. Under Margaret Hodge, the Commons public accounts committee tried just that, looking at the department’s Work Programme, outsourcing (especially the Atos contracts), fraud and both under- and overpayments. Devereux didn’t always help himself. On one occasion he airily dismissed the “20-odd years” during which DWP accounts had been qualified by the Comptroller and Auditor General as evidence that invigilation of his department’s spending had not accomplished much.

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So which decisions bore the permanent secretary’s fingerprints, rather than those of Duncan Smith? Wasn’t Devereux under the supervision of a departmental board? Many might feel he was exonerated when Duncan Smith, aided by then Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude, made a cack-handed attempt to get rid of him in 2013 and was rebuffed after cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood went to Cameron.

After one PAC appearance, the Institute for Government’s Julian McCrae observed it hadn’t shed much light on accountability. And there lies the problem.

Until Devereux moved to the DWP in 2011 he was at transport, another department that hasn’t had a glorious track record in recent years. He was also head of profession for policy – a curious part-time role now held, even more curiously, by the permanent secretary for health, Chris Wormald.

It’s not that policy is ill-made – of course it is – but that no one ever says out loud which bits are down to ministers and which come, in any moral or accountability sense, from senior civil servants.

On Devereux’s watch that fog has got denser. He may have been a brave and effective permanent secretary at the DWP; he may have been a lickspittle, unwilling to stand up to crass and cruel decisions. We simply don’t know.

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