Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee

The public appointments system seeks to reconcile two fundamental principles: that public appointments are the responsibility of ministers who are accountable for them to parliament; and that, given the scale and importance of the roles of many of those appointed, appointments should be made on the basis of merit rather than patronage. [...] The presumption of the present system is that it is for the Panel to make the choice subject to the ability of ministers to intervene, or ultimately reject, the panel’s choice in exceptional circumstances. [...] While under existing rules ministers may meet candidates prior to interview for the purpose of identifying issues they would wish the Panel to probe at interview, the open ended invitation under the Grimstone proposals to provide ‘input’ to the Panel (“the Secretary of State has met Mr Smith and, in the light of his discussion, considers him overwhelmingly the best candidate for appointment”) woul. [...] The proposal that the Panel should be chaired by ‘either an independent member of high standing, a senior civil servant, or the chair of the body to whom the person is being appointed’ raises similar concerns compared to the present position where it is the norm for the Chair to be an independent. [...] Overall it is hard to avoid the suspicion that this section of the review’s proposals is to some degree at least a reaction to the efforts of the recently retired Commissioner for Public Appointments to seek to maintain the integrity of the current system in the face of considerable pressures over recent years to bend the system to meet ministerial wishes.