So to provide a stronger evidence base about the role and impact of special advisers, this project, which ran from - , asked: who are special advisers; how are they appointed; what do they do; and how can their role and effectiveness be improved?
To answer these questions we constructed a database of all special advisers then appointed, and conducted semi-structured interviews with special advisers, their ministers and civil servants. We intended to move the policy debate on from a negative attitude to accepting the presence of special advisers in government and discussing how to improve their effectiveness.
Special advisers exist for a reason: Ministers need them. Ministers can feel overwhelmed by the civil service and the information overload. That is why, in spite of calls for a cap, the number of special advisers has continued to rise: from 70 under Blair to just over under Johnson. The project looked at the work of special advisers under three different governments: the Conservative governments of ; the Labour governments of ; and the coalition government We found that special advisers needed better induction and training, and far more support and supervision once in post in order to improve their effectiveness.
To help with this we produced a Handbook for Special Advisers, and a book which reported our main findings and conclusions. For other resource materials, articles, database and research notes, see Outputs below. This project was funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. The latest product of our Special Advisers project is a package of online resource materials for Special Adviser. During our research on Special Advisers, one heartfelt plea was for better induction and training materials.
This cache of resource material aims to help meet that demand. It is certainly worth talking to them before putting up any major submission, and it is usually a good idea to give them a chance to comment on your draft. However, do not make the mistake of letting a special adviser steer you in a direction which seems unwise. Maybe the special adviser's advice will be different to yours, and maybe the Secretary of State will not take your advice, and maybe the Special Adviser will accurately foretell the Secretary of State's decision, but that should not stop you putting up advice in which you believe.
One difference between permanent civil servants and Special Advisers is that the latter are usually fiercely loyal to their Minister, on whose career they themselves depend, and sensitive to what they perceive as disloyal criticism. For instance, it is quite OK to ask a Private Secretary what on earth caused the Minister to say such and such a thing to a visitor.
The Private Secretary will explain what went wrong, or acknowledge that the Minister made a mistake, and then you can get on and loyally sort out the resultant problem. So it is best to give SpAds the clear impression that you believe that their Minister walks on water.
They will suspect that you are lying but respect you for it. You should also watch out for demarcation disputes with Special Advisers. Many Ministers thrive on a steady diet of witty or barn-storming speeches, which civil servants are not equipped to provide.
And although we should stand ready to rebut factually incorrect stories, we are not equipped to provide a political rebuttal service which swings into action whenever the Minister is criticised in the media.
Both of these tasks should properly fall to Special Advisers, but they are often under enormous pressure and cannot see why they should not get help from the massed ranks of the department. There is usually nothing for it but to stick to your guns. You must certainly never ever start writing political speeches. But holding the line is much easier if you have first established yourself as someone who is keen and highly able to help Ministers achieve their objectives.
Individuals within the unit can be very influential. You should therefore work closely with the member of the unit assigned to shadow your department, whenever your subject comes to their attention. They may well be doing so, but they may also be giving their own views which may not be shared by others. Indeed, departmental Spads as well as officials have been known to express concern when Special Advisers at the centre have seemed to want to drive the detail of the policy without the necessary knowledge and evidence.
Similar frustrations could be linked to the work of the blue-sky thinkers. As one departmental adviser, quoted by David Laughrin , put it:.
The other thing that really irritated me were Special Advisers in Number 10, particularly, or the Treasury, who had no understanding whatsoever of the policy, or the detail, and were trying to impose a particular political solution to a problem that would create other difficulties down the line. It is worth bearing in mind that individual Spads are unlikely to have received any training in public policy, the management of bureaucracies, HR, finance, economics Above all, they are not trained nor encouraged by their ministers to think as a team.
There is no need to criticise individual Spads for this - it is a system fault, not an individual one. Overall, however, the Special Adviser role is one which often exercises significant influence though rarely absolute power. Special advisers who clearly have the confidence and trust of their Ministers can significantly influence the direction of policy, the priorities chosen and the way they are implemented and presented. Boris Johnson's arrival as Prime Minister saw also the arrival of Dominic Cummings as a sort of super-Spad, who immediately became line manager of all the departmental Spads.
It was also decided that the Treasury Spads would in future be managed alongside, and so form a single team with, the No. Chancellor Sajid Javid resigned in protest. He also became Lord Frost. There was much concern, in late , that a weak Prime Minister and an even weaker Cabinet were allowing government policy to be dictated by a group of Special Advisers in Downing Street.
Chris Grey commented as follows, following the Northern Ireland Secretary's statement that the Government would be willing to break international law:. The advisor, Oliver Lewis no relation, I assume , is one of several central figures from the Vote Leave campaign — he was its Research Director — who, led by Dominic Cummings, are now installed special advisers and seem to have been allowed by Johnson to become the de facto government.
The report stresses that Boris Johnson was barely involved, but perhaps even more shocking is the idea that a member of the Cabinet should, apparently, be taking orders of this sort from an advisor.
But it is a measure of the extent to which this under-achieving but over-empowered cadre are able to wreak havoc, whether through abrasive arrogance or plain incompetence. Eventually, and almost inevitably, , it all ended in tears with the November enforced departure of Dominic Cummings and his friend Lee Cain, the political appointee as Head of Downing Street Communications Rather surprisingly, Lee Cain's successor was James Slack who was already the PM's official spokesman i.
More detail about Messrs Cummings and Frost is here. And it was reported that day-to-day management of Spads was transferred back from No. Interesting Comment Speaking in , Andrew Turnbull, then Head of the Civil Service, seemed quite relaxed about civil servants working alongside Special Advisers and other "outsiders":- " We have increasingly a permanent Civil Service but not permanent civil servants ".
He was reportedly happy that civil servants have lost their "monopoly of policy advice". Financial Times 1 May Others are less sanguine about the possible politicisation of the civil service:- see the Civil Service Reform section of this website. In France or other countries with a cabinet system, advice will go to the member of the Minister's cabinet for approval and, if necessary change, before being sent to the Minister.
Cabinet officials often have considerable decision-making powers in their own right and many issues never make it to the Minister. One implication of this system is that it requires many fewer junior Ministers. Another is that inter-Ministerial coordination tends to function on two separate levels — political and official - leading to a higher risk of policy incoherence and conflict over resources.
The Whitehall model ensures that official advice is seen directly by the Minister. Additional comments can be provided by Special Advisers and by the Minister's private office, but they do not change the advice itself. It is this direct access, together with career progression which does not depend on Ministerial patronage, which allows honest and occasionally unwelcome advice to be provided.
Professor Colin Talbo t has pointed out that Governments have, for many years, recruited eminent outsiders to lead particularly high profile campaigns or initiatives. Taken together, however, Professor Talbot points out that SpAds and Tsars represent a significant shift in the way in which the policy-advice function operates in central government. There were in probably well over SpAds and Tsars engaged in policy-advice roles in British central government.
Given that there are about Ministers in British central government, this means there are or so politicians and politically-appointed policy-makers operating within the core executive. Compared to the total Senior Civil Service, the political and politically-appointed elite remains small — or so compared to the 4, plus in the whole SCS. But that comparison may be misleading. It might be more appropriate to compare the politically-appointed elite with the very top of the civil service — maybe strong.
This group has arguably equivalent status to the political elite — and is slightly smaller in number. Civil Service World reported as follows:.
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