Appeal tribunal for whistle-blowers urged
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Your support makes all the difference.AN ETHICS tribunal for 'whistle blowers' in the public services was demanded by the civil service unions, including the First Division Association, which represents permanent secretaries.
They called for the tribunal as part of a new code of ethics for civil servants, which could be introduced in the wake of the Pergau dam affair and the Scott inquiry into arms sales to Iraq.
The unions, representing thousands of civil servants, told the Commons select committee on the Treasury and civil service that civil servants should have the right to appeal outside the departmental and agency machinery when they were faced with dilemmas over their duties. A tribunal of three privy councillors, drawn from across the political parties, should be set up to consider ethical dilemmas raised by civil servants as a result of actions they had been asked to undertake as part of their official duties.
'Civil servants should be able to raise these difficulties with members of the ethics tribunal outside the glare of publicity . . . No civil servant should suffer any detriment whatsoever, professionally or in any other way, for raising such a matter with the tribunal.'
The unions said the current rules were 'not clear cut' for reporting to Parliament the objections over spending, for example in the Pergau dam affair.
The unions proposed that a new code of conduct for civil servants should include clearer rules about ministerial accountability through Parliament, the political neutrality of the civil service, and fair and open competition in recruitment and promotion of civil servants.
They criticised as inadequate the code of conduct set out in 1985 by the then head of the home civil service, Sir Robert Armstrong, and revised in 1987.
It said a ruling that a civil servant's duty to the law was subsumed in the responsibility to the minister 'has been a cause of concern among some civil servants . . . It does not address what should happen in those cases where ministers do not behave in a way which is consistent with their own legal responsibilities.'
Civil servants were also unsure whether to be responsible to individual ministers or have a greater duty to ministers collectively.
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