It’s now just over two weeks since Theresa May settled into Downing Street and slightly less than that since she restructured government. Jill Rutter explores what progress to date we can discern from the window on Whitehall that is Gov.uk.
The front-runner: Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy
It may or may not have been the impact on energy prices that caused ministers to blink at Hinkley Point C – but the department that seems to be making the best fist of its integration so far is the new Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS).
It rapidly moved to signal its interest in energy and climate change policy and the ministerial portfolios announced on 1 August show a real attempt to integrate the two strands – more than was the case when energy policy was within the remit of the old Department of Trade and Industry.
But, according to Gov.uk, it still has two locations – though staff in the old Department of Energy and Climate Change are on notice that they will move down to BEIS HQ in 1 Victoria Street – and a rather awkward joint permanent secretary arrangement.
Slow off the mark: Department for Education
No name change at the Department for Education (DfE) – but there have been big responsibility changes, with its remit expanded to include skills and higher education policy. A week after DfE’s top management changed, the website also still featured the newly departed Nick Boles (former Minister of State) and Nicky Morgan (former Secretary of State for Education).
21 July 2016
1 August 2016
The website has since managed to update the personnel – but its featured links have barely changed. It still looks every bit a department for schools – not one that does universities, Further Education and is taking forward the apprenticeship levy, though it does feature a visit to an FE College by its new secretary of state, Justine Greening.
Rebranding underway: Department for International Trade
Of the new departments, the Department for International Trade (DIT) was fast out of the blocks with a ministerial visit to the United States and Canada. The building blocks for DIT are the old non-ministerial departments of UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) and UK Export Finance (UKEF). UKTI always had a minister in practice – but it now has a secretary of state and three other ministers.
Its heritage as UKTI rebranded is pretty clear from the website – where it has taken over ready-made content from its predecessor.
Ministerial portfolios for DIT were announced on 4 August. But, beyond that, its official management is pretty opaque. For its first couple of weeks, Gov.uk had still not named DIT’s senior management (though both the Chief Executives of UKTI and of UKEF are accounting officers in their own right). Now Sir Martin Donnelly is named as acting Permanent Secretary (as well as still being joint Permanent Secretary at BEIS). No other senior appointees are currently named, however.
It does give DIT’s address as 1 Victoria Street – the home of BEIS. And if you were a trade negotiator looking for a job at DIT (this is, after all a department which needs to develop capacity to negotiate all those new free trade agreements), there is nowhere encouraging you to apply.
Just getting started: Department for Exiting the European Union
According to Gov.uk, the Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU) has four ministers and one top official. There is no division of responsibilities between the ministers announced. Click on ‘All our public announcements’ and the only one is the appointment of the Secretary of State, David Davis. However, the website managed to get together a statement on what DExEU is responsible for. Rather disappointingly, however, given DExEU’s need to increase staff capacity, the ‘Jobs’ link just goes to the generic Civil Service jobs page – and its webpage is coy about where to find it. In the last few days, they have given an address and email for correspondence – 9 Downing Street (a backdoor to the Cabinet Office).
Let’s hope they start communicating a bit more on what they are doing soon – and not spending all their time on the distractions we warned often accompanies the establishment of a new government department.
Getting there?
It is now almost a month since Theresa May became Prime Minister and announced her machinery of government changes. But what this brief stroll through the pages of Gov.uk reveals is that the process of getting new government departments or big responsibility changes to work takes time and remains very much a work in progress. Whether the upheaval was worth it will only be clear in the months and years to come.
