Jordan Urban is a researcher at the Institute for Government, and has been lead researcher for its Commission on the Centre of Government over the past year.
In 1981, Margaret Thatcher had a problem. Frustrated at being blindsided by departmental proposals and feeling that she was not receiving enough information to properly insert herself into decision-making processes, she concluded that her support in Number 10 was too weak. As one of her officials recorded at the time, she felt “there was a need to strengthen the centre for it was here that the guardians of the strategy were located.”
Proposals were drawn up for a Prime Minister’s department. But they were not to her satisfaction. “No”, she wrote in the margins of a paper prepared for her on the topic, “this system would produce a strengthened bureaucracy. I want a strengthened strategy section.” Before long the idea was dropped. The change never made.
If the system of a handful of key staff in a converted 17th century townhouse was already showing the strains of supporting one of the world’s most powerful heads of government in the 1980s, today it is at breaking point. Thatcher’s operation ended up working effectively, partly because of her indefatigable work ethic.
But the complexity of the modern world – with more information available more quickly and problems becoming increasingly interconnected – means that Downing Street is an analogue operation in a digital age. The Prime Minister has evolved to become the undisputed executive leader of the government. However, the support they receive has not kept pace with the responsibilities of their office.
As Thatcher identified, the Prime Minister is the guardian of the strategy. The centre they lead is the only part of government able to look across domains and make trade-offs between them. This makes its task to support the Prime Minister to set the Government’s direction. But it is currently ill-equipped to do so.
There are plenty of reasons why, over the last 14 years, Conservative prime ministers have not been as successful as they could have been. One of them is because the machinery around them has not been effective enough.
Over the last year, the Institute for Government has been running a Commission on the Centre of Government. 16 commissioners, drawn from government, business, and academia – including Sajid Javid, the former Chancellor, Ben Warner, a former Number 10, special adviser Ben Warner and Lord Finkelstein, the Conservative peer – have been examining the problems with No.10, the Cabinet Office and the Treasury.
Our intensive research process has involved talking to former Prime Ministers; eminent scientists; current and former civil servants; and some of the best business people in the country. This week we have published our solutions.
Our central contention is that there is a strategic vacuum at the heart of government that must be filled. Without a proper plan to underpin the Prime Minister’s objectives, government activity is poorly structured and tends towards dealing with immediate and circumstantial pressures. The powerful Treasury, set against the weakness of the Prime Minister’s support in No.10 and the Cabinet Office, ends up filling that gap, setting a de facto strategy by allocating the Government’s budgets.
To fill that strategic vacuum, we make some key recommendations. The Government should announce a set of Priorities for Government at the start of its term, translating manifesto promises and other policy ambitions into a coherent programme that directs government activity and makes sure that cross-government priorities do not get stifled by bureaucratic siloes. The Prime Minister should appoint an executive cabinet committee made up of a few key ministers, to shape decisions in a smaller and more functional group before they go to the 30 of more ministers who attend the full cabinet.
A modern, compact, and agile Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC) should be established, to give the leader of the government the support they deserve. The DPMC should be smaller than the current headcount of No.10 and the prime ministerially-focused parts of the Cabinet Office and laser-focused on pushing the Priorities for Government through Whitehall – reducing bureaucracy and increasing strategic capability, as Thatcher demanded in 1981.
A first secretary of state – acting as the Chief Operating Officer to the Prime Minister’s Chief Executive Officer and Chancellor’s Chief Financial Officer – should be appointed to support the prime minister in the DPMC and lead a separate Department for the Civil Service.
These are bold proposals, but the problems with the centre of government are too acute to be left unaddressed. A coalition for change is building. Lord Kempsell, Boris Johnson’s former political secretary, has endorsed our proposals, saying our report has “incisive recommendations gleaned from recent and historic efforts to reform the centre of government.”
Nick Clegg has said it should “serve as a guide for much needed reform of the centre of Government” and that during the Coalition he saw that “change is possible – from the ‘Quad’ taking collective budget decisions to a transparent programme of government agreed between two parties.” Lord Maude, the erstwhile civil service reformer who has put forward his own recommendations on this issue, has warmly welcomed our proposals for a DPMC.
Prime Ministers have a natural inclination to avoid the disruption that re-organising the centre of government would bring. But to govern effectively, change has become necessary. A future government, focused on getting things done, should make reforms to the centre an immediate priority.
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Author: Jordan Urban
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