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Andy Burnham’s idea for a new Office for the Prime Minister and Cabinet – a dedicated department of enforcers, overseen by loyalist Louise Haigh, the “northern power woman” whose job is to ensure that civil servants do what they’re asked, and to crack skulls if they don’t – suggests that the PM understands the machinery of government is broken.
He has seen how Keir Starmer never managed to get Whitehall to deliver, and instead accused Whitehall of being “comfortable with failure” and having a “declinist mentality”. The infamous “rubber levers” of state – Tony Blair’s phrase to describe the frustration when you pull the handle, only to find nothing happens – have contributed significantly to his predecessor’s downfall. Burnham is clearly determined to avert the same fate.
This is welcome. We absolutely need stronger mechanisms to enable the prime minister of the day to actually deliver his priorities. The last PM that really managed to achieve this was Blair. Burnham’s planned new office will oversee No 10 and the to-be-established ‘No 10 North’, as well as the Cabinet Office, giving Haigh sweeping control over the delivery of Burnham’s agenda.
There is good reason why No 10 and the Cabinet Office are referred to by civil servants as the “Centre” – they are the engine room of Whitehall, and the one bit of the machine that all departments look to for marching orders.
If Burnham wants to succeed, he will need to ensure he and Haigh maintain a relentless focus on the operation of this new office and how it interacts with all the other government departments. It is not enough for a PM simply to announce a policy and then assume it will be implemented. Whitehall is notoriously poor at implementation: almost all ambitious civil servants want to put their brains to the formulation of new policy, turning departments into ideas factories rather than well-oiled delivery machines.
Starmer and Darren Jones, his erstwhile Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (the role Haigh has now assumed), sought belatedly to remedy this through the creation of new “delivery units” in every department, in a classic case of reheated Blairism (the first No 10 Delivery Unit was created in 2001 under the direction of Sir Michael Barber). This prompted plenty of eye-rolling at the decision to hire yet more civil servants to deliver the thing that every civil servant is meant to be there to deliver.
Starmer’s mistake was not in failing to recognise the structural weaknesses and cultural problems afflicting our civil service – he spoke early on about the too many officials being “comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline” – but in not having the stomach or the bandwidth to do anything serious to fix it.
Will Burnham’s new No 10 operation work? Perhaps – though there are signs it is more symbolism than substance.
It is not clear how having two No 10s is going to help, and may well cause problems of coordination and general dysfunction. It is also, of course, going to cost the taxpayer, with civil servants already being offered handsome relocation packages and “away days” to get a feel for the new northern HQ in an attempt to entice them to move.
The other major stumbling block may be the further power that is being vested in the Cabinet Office and the cabinet secretary, an unelected civil servant. Many would argue that is a role that already wields too much power – power which should be shared with, for example, a respected business leader drafted in to be a CEO of a new Department of the Civil Service, as Reform UK are proposing.
More generally, the gaping gap in Burnham’s plans so far is a plan to widen the talent pool, bringing in more talented outsiders into the upper echelons of government – from FTSE100 CEOs to tech entrepreneurs. It is hard to see meaningful improvements without drawing on the full range of talent available in the private sector.
The usual story of incoming governments is that reform of the machinery of government quickly becomes a second-order priority. There has never appeared to be many votes in it, and it has therefore been relegated to a “nice to have” rather than an essential driving purpose of governments.
But Labour and Burnham seem to have woken up to the fact that the machine needs urgent reform – and that without effective delivery mechanisms, none of the other bits of a government’s agenda can be achieved.
Morgan McSweeney was notoriously frustrated and amazed at the inability of civil servants to make decisions or embrace new ways of doing things. If Burnham’s plans signal that he is finally planning on taking these issues seriously, that would be a welcome and long overdue thing.
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