The Government has now passed its first 100 days in power, rocked by the departure of Sue Gray and the sense of a crisis reset with a critical budget ahead.
Setting aside the politics or the rights and wrongs of any of the policies the Government has been pursuing, how successful have Ministers been in getting their way, and what opportunities could the post-Gray reset hold out?
I co-authored for Policy Exchange a paper Getting a Grip on the System – working as a former senior civil servant with co-authors who had worked as Labour and Conservative SpAds.
We described the ways in which Ministerial power has waned over the past forty years; to courts, arm’s-length bodies and to the Civil Service, and how it needs to be restored. Ministers can give power away, and delegating to experts can seem tempting, but the results have been mixed, and, whatever happens, Ministers can never escape accountability when things go wrong.
We urged Ministers to reject calls to upend the traditional constitution by giving the Civil Service statutory independence or strengthening independent accountability arrangements. Ministers’ prime accountability should be to Parliament and MPs’ accountability to the voters directly. We urged more Special Advisers, both political and policy focused, to help support Ministers, who are vastly outnumbered by an official machine with entrenched perspectives of its own.
We noted how Ministers could extend their ability to influence key appointments in the Civil Service and recommended statutory changes, increasing Ministerial power to give strategic direction to arm’s length bodies. We called on them to be wary about committing to plans and targets they inherit, and to put the spotlight on public sector leaders to explain and come up with plans to reverse the collapse in productivity which poses such a dire threat to the Government’s delivery ambitions.
So how do the first 100 days match up to this? It is fair to say the picture is mixed, and at times contradictory. The reset holds out a significant opportunity.
The start of a new government is often a period of maximum danger, with Ministers feeling obliged to mark a new course and honour promises they may have made in opposition. Both 1997 and 2010 saw governments implementing changes like Freedom of Information, fixed term Parliaments and restrictions on SpAd numbers which Ministers subsequently came to regret.
The run up to this election saw a whole series of commissions making recommendations about statutory independence for the Civil Service, new ethics regimes and suchlike. It is encouraging that little of this made its way into the manifesto and even less into the Kings Speech; we will see what the promised Ethics and Integrity Commission looks like.
The Kings Speech was surprisingly thin, dominated by technical legislation carried forward from the last government. It did see some depressing continuity in the fondness for new bodies and regulators; an Industrial Strategy Council, GB Energy, a Football Regulator and an Armed Forces Commissioner. The role of the OBR has been further strengthened, introducing yet more external scrutiny to government spending plans.
The new, much vaunted, ‘mission boards’ seem to have had a slow start, and the top Whitehall roles are still in the process of being filled. In a couple of areas, however, the Government did move rapidly to undergo the sort of ‘bring out your dead’ exercise we recommended. The Treasury work on the inherited ‘black hole’ is a possible example, though details of the exercise are sketchy and its prime focus is political. More striking has been the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Rt Hon Wes Streeting MP commissioning the Darzi report on the NHS. This has cast a grim light on the state of the service, with Streeting declaring the NHS ‘broken’. It has also started the debate about productivity, enabling Ministers to push back at the idea that additional resource is all that is needed. The fact that senior NHS figures are already briefing their unhappiness at the language used, but that the Secretary of State is not retreating, looks encouraging. In contrast, other areas like policing have seen a reversion to old input measures – promising 13,000 new officers with little curiosity about why police productivity has crashed in recent years.
Ministers have shown some ruthlessness in ensuring they get their people rapidly into post; aided by some inept late stage decisions from the last Government, like leaving two vacancies in the Equalities and Human Rights Commission unfilled. Non-Executive Directors have been removed from many departments, to be replaced presumably by those with a closer relationship to current Ministers, which we support.
The Secretary of State for Education, Rt Hon Bridget Philipson MP, secured the removal of the chair of the Office for Students, and also abolished ESFA, which oversaw school academies, bringing the work into the department. We also welcome the fact that the new Skills England will be based within the Department under close Ministerial control. She has even been prepared to hold up the commencement of inherited legislation on free speech on which she had doubts, demonstrating some ruthlessness in the process, though the final decision remains apparently subject to consultation (and a judicial review). The Secretary of State for Justice, Rt Hon Shabana Mahmood MP, meanwhile, has ‘started the process’ of removing the Chair of the CCRC in whom she has declared no confidence. This may prove to be a test case; Policy Exchange recommended clearer powers for Ministers to be able to remove leaders of arm’s length bodies.
The biggest appointment issue has obviously been the series of controversies about individuals with Labour links, either as activists or donors, appointed to roles in the Civil Service through the ‘exception process’. This has given rise to a rapid review by the Civil Service Commission.
The people appointed seem highly credible individuals who would have been suitable to be brought in as SpAds or appointed as Senior Policy Advisors to the sort of extended private offices we recommend in Getting a Grip on the System. If the internal briefing is to be believed, the incoming Government, perhaps Starmer and Sue Gray personally, seem to have been sceptical about the number of SpAds and have allowed some pretty ungenerous financial terms to be offered, in many cases less than Advisers had been paid in opposition. Ministers, however, want people they trust supporting them, and an artificial constraint in one area just led to more pressure to have these people appointed anyway, putting excessive pressure on Civil Service processes. This is another example of how politics cannot really be banished from the system, and it would have been better to welcome the contribution these individuals can make and create a distinct new role for them.
To sum up, for all the political gloom, administratively the first 100 days show a mixed picture. There are some important precedents for a future government, and some lessons learned about the risks of trying to depoliticise government business. Power may not have shifted dramatically back to Ministers, but the past pattern of concessions early on in a new administration has not yet been seen either. For those who prefer politics to technocracy, it could have been worse.
Stephen Webb is Head of Government Reform and Home Affairs at Policy Exchange. He was formerly Director at the Home Office and Cabinet Office