Awaiting the minister in the department will be a private office, a ‘life support machine’ that sustains each minister from the minute they arrive. This small group of officials plays a key role in helping each minister to carry out his or her role effectively, yet its own basic structure and role is rarely...

Last week’s decision by the prime minister to block the appointment of David Kennedy as Permanent Secretary at the Department of Energy and Climate Change has rekindled the debate on the role of ministers in civil service appointments. The debate was initially sparked by the Civil Service Reform Plan, published in June 2012, which...

In a speech at the Institute for Government on 2 October, Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude set out his case for giving ministers a greater role in the appointment of permanent secretaries, in a week in which the mishandled West Coast rail franchise decision kept the issue of civil service accountability in the spotlight....

Reshuffles can achieve a number of objectives, but they rarely solve the government’s big problems, and carry risks of their own, as we discussed in our recent discussion paper Shuffling the Pack. One problem is that reshuffles can highlight a prime minister’s weakness as much as his power. For David Cameron, the main constraint...

Yesterday’s announcements by Nick Clegg that Lords reform plans were being dropped in the face of Conservative opposition, and that the Lib Dems would veto the Tories’ boundary changes in return, has triggered another bout of speculation about whether the coalition can survive till 2015, and what can be done to avoid collapse. One...

The government’s intention is clear: to turn a page on the difficulties of the past few months and recapture the political agenda from its opponents, including those within the governing parties. But government renewal, as a forthcoming Institute for Government report will argue, is a tough task made more complex still by the pressures...

Labour under Blair and Brown tried and failed to forge a consensus over their 13 years in office. On one occasion, in 2003, the Commons (in)famously rejected all seven reform options, ranging from a fully appointed to a fully elected House. Later, in 2007, the government proposed a 50% elected chamber, only to see...

The battle over Scotland’s constitutional future stepped up a gear or three this week, with the UK Government declaring that a “legal, fair and decisive” independence referendum can be held only with explicit backing from Westminster. The SNP, unsurprisingly, demurs. A legal referendum? The Scotland Act of 1998 makes plain that the Scottish Parliament...

This week’s rebellion by Conservative backbenchers may have been thwarted, but a referendum on withdrawal from the Union is still likely to take place this Parliament. Not the European Union (though if treaty renegotiation is back on the agenda this cannot be ruled out), but the Union of England and Scotland, which has lasted...

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is in the process of appointing around half a dozen additional special advisers (SpAds). This will apparently take the overall number of SpAds across Whitehall to around 80, above the level at the end of the Labour administration (and not counting other political appointees within the civil service, let...