The Cabinet Office is the seat of this Government’s radicalism – but it’s stuck in several ruts

By Peter Hoskin
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Here’s a question for this sullen Monday morning: which minister presides over the most radical department in Whitehall? I put the same question to some political sorts the other day, and wonder whether your answers will be the same. As they saw it, there were three main contenders: Michael Gove, with his department helping establish so many free schools; IDS, for working towards the Universal Credit; and George Osborne, for overseeing all those cuts. As for the answer I would have considered giving myself, it didn’t come up at all. No-one said Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office.

Perhaps this is because the Cabinet Office is such a peculiar, unknowable creature. It sits there at 70 Whitehall, its corridors of power winding towards Downing Street, and fulfils a role quite distinct from that of any other department. It’s meant to give shape and direction to the Government of the day, which has traditionally meant supporting Cabinet committees in doing their work. But the looseness of that role has seen it accumulate responsibility after responsibility. From helping out the Whips’ Office to changing royal succession laws, from organising honours to defending Britain’s computer networks from malicious interference, all this falls under the Cabinet Office’s purview. It’s like the Swiss Army Knife of Government: multi-purpose, but what’s the connection between a compass and a toothpick?

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IDS and universal credit. "They lied to him." Trouble with the civil service

By Paul Goodman
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In "Yes Minister", Sir Humphrey is infinitely more intelligent than Jim Hacker, and invariably tries to frustrate whatever changes the politician wants to make to the system - but, if given an instruction, he follows it: it would be against his sense of his professional pride for him not to do so.  Although I have been a politician, like Hacker, I have never - unlike him - been a Minister, and have presumed that the Jay & Lynn portrait of the civil service is broadly unchanged.  In other words, it may be an oligarchy in awe of its own self-perpetuation, but it is also an efficient and able one, in which the spirit of Northcote and Trevelyan still lingers.

Furthermore, I suspect that some of the reported problems with the civil service are actually the fault of politicians.  Too many Ministers don't seem to sail with a clear sense of direction.  This being so, they get pushed around by the wind and the waves: indeed, some seem more preoccupied by their image with journalists than delivery in office.  And those who complain about civil servants are, arguably, setting back reform rather than furthering it.  This is because the Government can't enact its programme smoothly and efficiently without the co-operation of the civil service, and picking a public scrap with it is, on the face of it, counter-productive.

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A Government website has won a design award?! It’s true and, what’s more, it’s deserved

By Peter Hoskin
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Mike Bracken, Nick Hurd MP, Ben Terrett and Rohan Silva with Gov.uk's award.

If I told you a Government IT project had won an award, you might be surprised. If I then added that the award was a design award, your surprise might turn into shock. And then if it was for Design of the Year as chosen by London’s Design Museum… what the Hell?!

But that’s exactly what happened last night, when the Gov.uk website – which collects information that was previously spread across numerous other websites – beat off competition from the Shard, Louis Vuitton and others to land the Design Museum’s top award. And much deserved it was, too.

Why so? Well, in truth, the website isn’t exactly a paragon of beauty. As designed by Ben Terrett (pictured above) from inside the Cabinet Office’s Government Digital Service, it’s more about clarity and functionality – and that’s precisely the point. The idea is that ‘most anyone should be able to use the site, from someone starting up their first business to a granny checking up on her pension. As anyone who’s struggled against Government websites in the past will know, that idea, and its execution, was precisely what was needed.

And it delivers benefits for the Government, as well. By making it easier to write and administer to things such as passport applications, Gov.uk is expected to save taxpayers around £50 million a year. Not much, perhaps, against a deficit of £120 billion – but it’s only a start, with more to come. Last year’s Digital Efficiency Report suggested that the “greater digitisation of transactions” could save around £1.8 billion a year.

This clever use of IT was always one of this Government’s most promising ideas. Indeed, in an article for The Spectator in 2010, Neil O’Brien (now an adviser to George Osborne) and I suggested that – in the guise of the “Post-bureaucratic Age” – it could even count as David Cameron’s Big Idea. What’s happened since then is that Mr Cameron has spoken about it less and less, but the Cabinet Office, supported by folk such as Rohan Silva (also pictured above), has kept on working at it, programming code while the rest of Whitehall sleeps. And it’s got to the point where the PBA, as a public concept, has rather come back to life. There was last night’s award, of course, but ministers such as Jeremy Hunt are also eager to deliver reform by keyboard and mouse.

Of course, it’s not all perfect: Gov.uk itself isn’t yet complete, and there are still dark question marks over the Government’s ability to deliver bigger, trickier computer systems (here’s looking at you, Universal Credit). But at least progress is being made. Whatever happens at the next election, future governments will have a better operating system installed thanks to the efforts of this one.

Theresa May splits up the UK Border Agency

By Peter Hoskin
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Forget what your calendars say, this has been the month of May. It began with Theresa May’s department boasting that net migration has fallen by a third. It continued with her speech to ConservativeHome’s Victory 2015 conference. And now, today, it sees her make an important announcement in the Commons. The dysfunctional UK Border Agency is effectively going to be abolished, and two new organisations will take its place. One will deal with immigration and visas. The other will deal with law enforcement.

The timing of this announcement is rather opportune: only yesterday, the Home Affairs select committee released a report that was damning about UKBA’s performance – particularly in building up a backlog of cases that could take up to 24 years to clear – and about Lin Homer, its former boss. But that’s just a coincidence. In her statement and the discussion that followed, Theresa May emphasised that this decision had been taken over many months, and because of longstanding concerns. How longstanding? “In truth, the Agency was not set up to absorb the level of mass immigration that we saw under the last government,” she said. 

Yvette Cooper half-welcomed Theresa May’s announcement and half-attacked it. Her point was that May herself should take some of the blame for the UKBA’s failings, thanks to the 30 per cent cuts, etc, etc. But here's the thing: May will take more of the blame – or praise, as the case may be – under the new system. The new organisations aren’t being set up as agencies but will report directly to Home Office ministers, and that’s before we get onto the work the department will now undertake to “modernise IT across the whole immigration system”. In future, the chain of accountability will stop at the Home Secretary.

Is Michael Gove in the vanguard of another revolution?

By Peter Hoskin
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Gosh, Michael Gove likes shaking things up. First it was the schools system, now it’s the Department for Education itself. Yesterday’s newspapers reported that 1,000 of the department’s civil servants are to lose their jobs over the next few years, as part of a Govian drive to cut administrative costs in half by 2016. This is thanks to a “zero-based” review of the DfE’s functions — published here — which suggested that there was more spare capacity to be trimmed all-round.

Before we get carried away, however, it’s worth noting that some of this work has already been done. Mr Gove had previously committed to cutting his department’s administrative costs by 42 per cent, in real terms, between the financial years of 2010/11 and 2014/15. And, as part of that process, he’s already cut those costs by over a quarter — 26 per cent — to date. Now that he’s aiming for 50 per cent by 2015/16, it means that there’s another 24 per cent to come.

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The Post-Bureaucratic Age comes back to life

By Peter Hoskin
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Forget the huskies — computers were a considerably more important part of the early Cameron leadership. The man himself could barely stop talking about them, about the Internet, about data and technology. And much of this fell under the banner of the Post-Bureaucratic Age, the idea that ordinary citizens, armed with little more than keyboards and information, could take greater control over the services they receive. It was all part of the Google zeitgeist.

Sadly, some of this fell away with the birth of the Coalition. The very phrase “the Post-Bureaucratic Age” was subsumed underneath the bigger umbrella term, “the Big Society”. And Mr Cameron stopped enthusing about computers so much, as he turned to the austere business of deficit reduction. It wasn’t so much that his Government had turned away from post-bureaucracy: it hadn’t, as its continuing efforts to free-up government data amply demonstrate. It's more that was talked about less.

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Where now for civil service reform?

By Peter Hoskin
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It’s been quite a week on Whitehall. Not only was there — as Tim highlighted yesterday — the whole West Coast Mainline debacle, which resulted in the suspension of three civil servants. But there was also Francis Maude’s speech on Tuesday, which emphasised that senior civil servants had, on occasion, “blocked agreed government policy from going ahead”.

I’ve written about the aftermath of both for today’s Times (£): a sort of politics-focused post-script to the article I wrote for them last year (£) on the policy of civil service reform. Here, for those who cannot climb beyond the paywall, are five of its points in digestible form. I apologise for yet another five-point summary, it’s just how my brain is wired:

1) The anger. Behind this week’s brouhaha is a fair amount of pre-existing resentment between ministers and the civil service. Here’s how I begin my article:

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Another escalation in the battle against Whitehall’s permanent government

By Peter Hoskin
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Outside of Manchester, the most significant political speech of the day is being delivered by Francis Maude to the Institute for Government. Indeed, it could actually be more significant than “the most personal speech ever given by a British political leader,” too. For Mr Maude’s subject is the structural relationship between government and the civil service, and how it should be altered. His words will mark an escalation in the struggle against Whitehall.

And, judging by this report in the Financial Times, what an escalation it will be. Mr Maude is set to claim that senior civil servants have blocked government policy or advised other officials not to implement it. And while that will be no surprise to Whitehall watchers, and while Mr Maude will describe these cases as “exceptional”, it still amounts to an accusation that some civil servants don’t just fail to do their job, but succeed in the doing the opposite of it. It’s another sign of what I’ve written about before: Mr Maude’s growing impatience and determination on civil service reform.

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The Coalition is not doing enough to end the equalities industry - tackling it would be a social and economic good

By Matthew Barrett
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Amidst all the talk of "going for growth", Lib Dem "hate taxes on the rich", and difficult decisions for Ministers having to reduce their budgets, there is one large, flabby area of government which has been insufficiently tackled, but which could be cut down to size easily, popularly, and with huge benefits for society: the equalities sector.

As people working in the private sector - the real economy - knows, hundreds of millions of pounds are wasted on having to comply with equalities regulations, and millions more are spent on funding equalities professionals - unproductive individuals. The Treasury ought to see cutting down on this pernicious aspect of the Whitehall establishment as a priority, not just to save money on those employed to collect meaningless data, but to create the conditions necessary for small and medium-sized businesses to power the recovery.

The idea of having an equalities sector is out-dated. In the 1940s, '50s and '60s, when race relations were considered poor, and legislation like the Race Relations Acts of 1965 and '68 were passed, one could see there was some logic in ensuring government adhered to the principle of racial equality it had legislated for. Race relations improved in the second half of the 1980s and 1990s (when, un-coincidentally, a Conservative immigration existed), but, perversely, the 1980s Labour left saw "diversity", "equality", and other such Guardian buzzwords, as a fundamental part of what Labour should believe in, which led to the expansion of the equalities sector when Labour entered office in 1997.

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The seven government departments David Cameron should scrap at the next reshuffle

By Matthew Barrett
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At the last reshuffle, David Cameron did something quite unusual: he didn't change the name or purpose of any of his government's departments. During the Blair and Brown years, changes like these were rather common. People may remember the poor Department for Constitutional Affairs, or the old Department of Trade and Industry, or its successor, the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, which lasted for only two years.

At Mr Cameron's next reshuffle, he could consider changing tactic, and start reducing the number of government departments by merging those which have similar purposes. There are obvious spending benefits to be considered - by keeping some staff from one department, but not retaining those whose function is already performed at the newly merged department - and there are also good reasons for Parliament to want to reduce the number of departments. Many backbenchers complain about the over-mighty executive, and the ability it has to undermine backbenchers by appointing minor payroll jobs like Parliamentary Private Secretaries, as well as the obviously necessary Secretaries and Ministers of State. Reducing the number of these jobs would hand more power to Parliament. 

At the very least, there are some anomalous ministerial postings which could easily be dealt with. Why should the Minister with responsibility for Universities, for example, work at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and not Education?

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