Summary
JACK McConnell will use the Fraser report to modernise the civil service. John Elvidge, permanent secretary for the executive, will consider the matter internally and is asking a member of the Civil Service Commission to review the report especially on civil service staff. We have been here before.
Two great reformers of the nineteenth century, Northcote and Trevelyan, insisted on recruitment by examination which was to be literary with no technical qualifications and which would produce superior and inferior clerks. Such motivating words. The then prime minister, Lord Palmerston, would have binned it but had made such a mess of army accounts in an earlier post, considered contributory to the scandals of the Crimean war, that he set up the Civil Service Commission to prove he was doing something, hoping it would wither on the vine. It survived. Sit in your thinking-pod or winnock- bunker and read it, Jack, or a summary of it, and shudder.See the full content of this document
Extract
Some Reading Material On Civil Service Reform
Then look at the Committee on the Training of Civil Servants (1944). It e...
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