If there is market competition for the ears of ministers and their advisers, will the public service be drawn into competing in that market by increasingly telling ministers whatever it is that they want to hear? Some ministers will continue to be convinced of the long-term benefits of impartial advice but, like public servants, they will have to maintain that conviction in the face of Dr Shergold’s ‘think-tanks, research institutes, consultancy companies, private sector lobbyists and community advocates’—not to mention academics, employer associations and unions—‘each pursu[ing] their particular interests with increasing professionalism, [and] vying with public servants for the ear of ministers and their political advisers’. The professionalism most pleasing to ministers may not always be of the apolitical persuasion, and the motivation to ‘please’ the minister, always a powerful driver, has been reinforced by institutional drivers intended to enhance the contestability of agencies. In a devolved environment, agency heads are now able to deploy performance assessment and pay (see Chapter 3), individual employment contracts, attraction and retention policies, and agency remuneration strategies (Chapter 5) to develop and reward staff who are comfortable with ‘steadily increasing political oversight and expectations of responsiveness by the bureaucracy to the elected government’.^[51]

These agency systems can be used to make particular organisations look and sound to the minister as if they were a lobby group in public service clothing, responsive to ‘the belief on the part of governments—all governments—that they want not only support but passion from their public servants’.^[52] The result is an increase in the numbers of ‘hybrid’ public servants, people who, as a job ad from one agency would have it, will be apolitical and yet ‘like minded’, impartial and yet ‘passionate’.^[53] From an agency perspective, this kind of competitive edge may only last as long as the government of the day retains power. However, once a government has become the Opposition, the reputation of a particular agency is not a matter of pressing concern for them anyway. Acceptable parachutes may even have been found for the relevant agency heads and senior managers. It is the work of the agency and the public service more generally that are damaged, and the trust of the new government and the public that is compromised.