Chris Wormald’s exit as cabinet secretary should lead to more radical change at the centre

It has not been an edifying few weeks for the government. The Mandelson-Epstein scandal has cast doubt on Keir Starmer’s judgment. That doubt has only grown as the prime minister lost his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, his communications director Tim Allen, removed the whip from one of Allen’s predecessors Matthew Doyle and, most worryingly for the effectiveness of government, the cabinet secretary Starmer himself appointed just over a year ago. All this comes a mere five months after Starmer’s last ‘reset’.

There is a temptation, and one that Stamer and his predecessors have all given into, to try and paper over problems at the centre with more people. Better people. To add another economic adviser to Number 10, to get a new chief of staff, a new cabinet secretary, or to carry out a ministerial reshuffle. Appointments can be good, bad or indifferent, but it is wishful thinking to believe good people can overcome a bad system. When the problem is structural, the prime minister can feed all the good (or not so good) people he wants into the machine and it will chew them up, spit them back out and deliver the same outcomes again and again. 

The centre of government needs shaking up  

The heart of the problem is an imbalance of power. No.10 is weak and underpowered while the government is over-centralised. No.10 sucks in decisions without giving the prime minister the support he needs to take them, and in doing so becomes far too embroiled in minutiae. The sticking plaster politics that Starmer promised to end remains, and into the resulting strategic vacuum comes the Treasury. Trade-offs are not made on the basis of a coherent, whole-of-government strategy. Instead, an accidental strategy is created based on which policies and departments get funded – itself a flawed process. Cross-cutting priorities and long-term investments fall by the wayside.  

Just as the current set-up leaves no room for strategic prioritisation on policy, it also makes impossible any long-term reforms to the state itself. Starmer and Wormald failed to ‘rewire the state’; instead, fundamental problems with the civil service continued to get worse. In part that is because of a lack of bandwidth at the heart of government. But it is also because the cabinet secretary is also head of the civil service – two enormous jobs that have left both under-served.

The Institute has set out seven steps the government needs to take to shake up the centre. Some have been taken up, but there is much further to go. The most pressing is now the restructure of the Cabinet Office and No.10 to form a new Department for the Prime Minister and Cabinet, with a separate Department for the Civil Service and the role of cabinet secretary once again split from that of the head of the civil service.

There is a strong consensus for radical reforms now

A succession of former advisers and ministers agree that the centre of government no longer works. We are by no means alone in calling for a Department for the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Writing in the Times earlier this week, Ben Judah – former special adviser to David Lammy – was the latest to add his voice to the calls for a No.10 overhaul. Louise Casey told the Institute’s conference last month that the Institute was right to recommend radical change – and that she had been wrong in the past to be sceptical of such moves.  

There is also no shortage of prescriptions for change, and a consensus that the centre needs rethinking. The Institute has set out our proposals. The Future Governance Forum’s In Power  ⁴ Future Governance Forum, In Power, November 2025, www.futuregovernanceforum.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/In-Power-01-Transforming-Downing-Street-1.pdf  report has set out theirs, agreeing with us about the need for a new department for the prime minister, and setting out the shifts around clarity, rhythm and culture that these changes have to bring. The chorus is becoming louder because the status quo is not working.  

Starmer is right not to rush into an immediate appointment of his next cabinet secretary. He should now split the role, and sort out the centre. Anything less is another poor judgment his premiership can ill afford.