Fraser Nelson has already made the point that successful reform does not just require a radical and coherent set of ideas and policies: it needs really tenacious energetic visionary and knowledgeable personalities to champion and drive it through at every level, especially the ministerial. Getting the people right matters very much indeed. Particularly in so complex and technical an area as welfare reform. Policy is one thing; making sure it is implemented is quite another. Hence the concerns already surfacing about the decision to replace Chris Grayling with Teresa May.
But the questions go a little further. Welfare reform doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's a vital component of the Party's whole agenda to mend the broken bits of our society. The central insight of IDS and the Centre for Social Justice is that this can only be done through a large raft of carefully focussed and mutually supporting reforms across a whole swathe of policy including education, family, and prison & penal, as well as tax and benefits. Reformers are needed in all those portfolios. Take Nick Herbert's speech at the 2008 party conference for example:
"I want to tell you about a policy which we launched just a few months ago. It’s called Prisons with a Purpose, and it’s one of the most radical policies which this Party is promoting. And what we’re saying is that it really does matter to us that prisons can perform a role, not just as places of incarceration, but where we can turn the lives of offenders around.
We’re going to create prisons as independent Prison and Rehabilitation Trusts. We’re going to charge them with a mission to reduce re-offending. We’re going to devolve power to prison governors and give them the authority to contract with outside services run by the private sector, the voluntary sector – organisations like Rob’s which turn the lives of offenders around. So that prisoners can go straight, [receiving] drugs services in and out of prison, teaching prisoners skills to read and write, making sure that prisoners are mentored when they’re released, giving them a chance to get into work. So they’ll be enrolled on one of Chris Grayling’s Welfare to Work schemes the moment they are released from prison."
The reasoning behind the Party's decision to park Health reform is that the Broken Society is the first-term priority and there's a limit to the number of fronts it can fight on at any given time. And with Michael Gove at Children Schools & Families, Chris Grayling at the DWP, and Nick Herbert at Justice, it was clear and reassuring to see that reformers had been placed in the key portfolios. That's now been unpicked, and Michael Gove alone is left in post.
This is a reshuffle to win the election, and here's to that. The economy, schools, crime (and immigration?) look like being the Party's chosen battlegrounds. But today also means that, if we are to be the genuine change when we get to power, a more wide-ranging personnel shift between David Cameron's last Shadow Cabinet and first Cabinet will be required than might otherwise have been the case.
As a postscript, it's good to see Greg Hands go to the Treasury - he should be excellent. And it will be intriguing to see what Nick Herbert does with the environmental aspects of his brief.
