Watchdogs set up to oversee the ethical standards of the UK Government should have more independence and not be appointed and funded by Whitehall, a report said today.
Watchdogs set up to oversee the ethical standards of the UK Government should have more independence and not be appointed and funded by Whitehall, a report said today.
The House of Commons Public Administration Committee called for action to ensure the independence of the regulators which scrutinise standards of behaviour in public life, appointments to public office and ministers' acceptance of posts in business after leaving office.
While welcoming plans to put the Civil Service Commission and House of Lords Appointments Commission on a statutory footing, the committee said these moves "suggest a piecemeal and potentially inconsistent approach" to the issue so long as the other watchdogs continued to be sponsored by the Cabinet Office.
MPs stressed that all the ethical regulators are appointed and funded by the UK Government. Pointing out that ministers could, accordingly, reduce the watchdogs' funding or abolish them altogether if they wished, they said: "This is not what we had in mind when we concluded that the ethical regulators needed to be robustly and conspicuously independent.'"
The committee called on the Government to adopt a "coherent and principle-based approach" to ethical regulation which is "designed to secure the independence of ethical regulators from the executive".
It also warned: "It is unacceptable and incompatible with genuine independence for the ethical regulators, which were created to regulate Government, to be appointed by Government and funded by Government."
In an April 2007 report, the committee called for full independence not only for the Civil Service Commissioners and House of Lords Appointments Commission but also for the Committee on Standards in Public Life, the Commissioner for Public Appointments and the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments.
The report recommended the creation of a statutory public standards commission to take over as sponsor for all ethical regulation bodies, freeing them from any form of dependence on the executive of the day.
Tom Watson, the Cabinet Office minister, kicked the proposal into the long grass in a much-delayed official response, published today.
"The Government is not ruling out the possibility of further reform in the future," Mr Watson wrote. "However, the priority in the context of constitutional renewal proposals has been to focus on the arrangements for the Civil Service Commissioners."
The committee said Mr Watson and other ministers had failed to make clear whether they agreed with the committee's "key point of principle" that it was fundamentally important to ensure ethical regulators were "independent of the executive, given their crucial function of scrutinising the executive's actions".
The committee also expressed disappointment that no firm commitment was made in this year's Queen's Speech to bring forward a bill putting the civil service on a statutory footing and urged the UK Government to make time available for this as soon as possible.
