tim's experiment

Much attention has been bestowed – well it has been wasted – on analysing the composition of the new Executive Council. This is based on a serious misunderstanding of the way committees work..

It is axiomatic among anthropologists who have taken an interest in this area that the most important decision you have to take about a committee is its size. The number of people who can talk together in an informal way round a table with some minimum guidance from a chairman to keep things on topic and orderly is about ten. You can creep a little above this number if some of the people present are in effect non-participants – secretaries or nodders (a nodder is a yes-man who is too frightened to speak), but soon after passing ten an inexorable change takes place. People stop talking and start making speeches. They identify with the body they represent on the committee rather than with the work of the committee as a whole. People write scripts which they read out, rather than responding to what other people have said. In discussions, intrigue and interest replace more constructive motives. Undser these circumstances the committee is a ritual, not a decision-making body. This process can be observed over a majestic historic scale in British history as the Great Council, which sufficed for Saxon Kings, was surmounted by the Council, then by the Privy Council, and then by the Cabinet, as each body grew too large to carry on any real work. The British Cabinet is now, of course, well over the limit and it is commonly observed that all the real work is done in its committees, which are smaller.

The Executive Council, actually, is not even (as commonly described) the Chief Executive’s Cabinet. It has no real power except to give advice. A British Prime Minister who cannot carry his Cabinet with him is in serious danger of compulsory resignation; Mr C.Y. Leung, on the other hand, can ignore any advice he doesn’t like, and people who work at City U tell me that this is not inconsistent with his personal management style.

The thing which should be a cause for some concern here is that if the Executive Council is too big to wield its own powers, such as they are, then these powers will have migrated elsewhere. Somewhere in the government machinery will be a small group or groups who hold a meeting before the Exco meeting at which there is real lively discussion and real decision-making. And we do not know what this is or who sits on it. Of course the arrangements for this vary. In government consultative committees there is usually a pre-meeting between the secretary (who is a government official) and the chairman (an appointed non-official sycophant). The secretary explains the items to be discussed and the government’s suggestions for what should be decided. I was bemused by the little dust-up over whether the chairman of the Antiquities Advisory Board had “colluded with the government”. What do people expect?  In other places there are more formal arrangements. When I was a member of the Senate of the University of Lancaster it had a Senate Steering Committee comprising about eight people including representative of all the obvious interest groups, including the students. The Steering Committee, whose minutes were public, met before each Senate meeting to decide which items should be held over, which might be offered for passage en bloc because they were uncontentious, and which should be debated. It occasionally asked for more information to be provided or for some named expert to attend. The point is not that there is one right way of doing this sort of thing, but that it must be done by someone. If we do not know who that someone is then it is probably the chairman and secretary putting their heads together. The material over which they ponder will come from the people doing the real work. My experience of University Senates is that attempts to improve it in a large deliberative body are rarely successful, though occasionally necessary. Executive Concillors will no doubt, as is traditional, agonise over small bus fare increases and pass gazillion-dollar railway schemes on the nod. So it goes.

Anyway the upshot of all this is that it does not matter who sits on the Exsecutive Council. This is perhaps just as well because the list recently published did not inspire a great deal of confidence. Mr Leung’s plan to have his Secretaries grouped with a Deputy Secretary for something else in charge of each group is much more interesting. It may solve the problem presented by government departments which ignore each other except when they are looking for someone to pass a buck to. But it has not been approved yet. Which pretty much goes for the Leung set-up as a whole.