Burnham is right to create an Office of the Prime Minister and Cabinet

Some of Andy Burnham’s cabinet picks will work out well, others will struggle. But the decisions he has taken about the centre of government are vital, long overdue and welcome ‘machinery of government' changes.  

Burnham is creating a new Office of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (OPMC), as recommended in 2024 by the IfG’s Commission on the Centre of Government. Our concern now is that his changes do not go far enough, and that a spectral Cabinet Office will endure, leaving high profile reform as more a branding exercise than a new way of governing.

The need to reform the centre has been obvious for a long time

We have long argued that No10 is underpowered but compulsively involved in detail, with ambiguous structures that undermine the clarity of instruction from the prime minister and encourage in-fighting. No10’s structure, location and staffing lead to an inward-looking bunker mentality, which make it too closed to the external expertise and outside perspectives that Andy Burnham says – rightly – are necessary to make the best decisions.

As the departmental host of No10, the Cabinet Office has become bloated and unfocused. It has accrued a mess of functions because they could not be found homes elsewhere and overseen a baffling growth in human resources and other corporate teams. Despite the talent of many of its people, it has failed in its core role of supporting the prime minister and cabinet of successive administrations.

Burnham must ensure his new centre of government is more than a branding exercise

The new OPMC is welcome. It will contain teams in the centre of government, housed in “No10 Downing Street” and “No10 North”, as well as prime-minister facing groups in the current Cabinet Office – notably the policy brokering cabinet secretariats. We await more detail on exactly how this shakes out, but the structure makes sense. No10 ‘classic’ should include private secretaries, press officers, and policy direction-setting and delivery oversight functions. No10 North can then build new functions, on devolution strategy and the economy.

The arms-length delivery agencies currently housed in the Cabinet Office – that provide services to the whole civil service, on pensions, property and so on, will be spun out into a new arm’s length body to be called ‘OneGov’. This also makes sense.

But the Cabinet Office lives on, in a hollowed-out form. Some functions, that are not obviously prime minister-facing, or delivering operational services, will remain sitting in, and described as, the Cabinet Office. And all of the above – including the OPMC – will be part of a ‘Cabinet Office family’. The diminished Cabinet Office remains open for business.

There is a tempting administrative logic to maintaining this shadow of a Cabinet Office. Some functions currently in the centre do not sit neatly in a prime minister’s department or a spun-out agency.

But it means some of the core questions, benefits and opportunities of sorting out the centre of government have been ducked. Part of the point of creating a new OPMC is to abolish the Cabinet Office. Doing so would force the prime minister and cabinet secretary to take healthy decisions about what sits facing the PM, and what must reside elsewhere.

The danger of the model Burnham and cabinet secretary Antonia Romeo have adopted is that it limits what should be a major redesign of the centre of government to a branding exercise and a missed opportunity.

Focus on only doing at the centre, what can only be done at the centre

It is hard to slim down and restructure organisations, especially under the heat of public scrutiny. But Burnham and his team have the opportunity and political capital to take some real decisions on what happens next. In doing so they must apply the first of the ten principles we identified in the Commission on the Centre of Government:

“Only do what can only be done at the centre, and delegate everything else”

The persistence of a shadow Cabinet Office shows that there is more to do to work out what can only be done at the centre. Big decisions about the management and leadership of the civil service rightly sit close to the PM and cabinet secretary, and – under Burnham’s model –  should be led by a small team and folded into the new OPMC. The prime minister is, after all, the minister for the civil service.  

But how those decisions are implemented must sit elsewhere. The infected blood compensation scheme – important as it is – should be moved away from the centre. The vast civil service human resources function needs to be dramatically cut to become a controlling brain instead of a management swamp. And many other functions must be reallocated to departments and moved away from the centre.

The new OPMC is an opportunity not to waste

The new prime minister has recognised that the centre needs to change, and has made a good decision that all his predecessors ducked. That is exciting for those working in No10 – north or south – and for those core teams that are essential to setting direction and ensuring that the Burnham government’s agenda is transmitted throughout the civil service and the public sector.

But at his time of maximum power, Burnham cannot let this moment go to waste. He needs to show what is different about the OPMC, and how it can turn Whitehall as it currently exists towards his priorities and his agenda. To do that it needs clarity of purpose and administrative authority, none of which will be served by giving historical deference to a discredited Cabinet Office.