Five ways for Keir Starmer to fix the centre of government

This is far from unique to the Starmer government. Successive prime ministers, from Thatcher to Blair to Johnson, have faced similar problems. But few have been confronted by it as early in their tenure. Lurid reports of infighting in Downing Street, centred around chief of staff Sue Gray and head of political strategy Morgan McSweeney, are likely to be exaggerated. But they speak to a lack of cohesion in Starmer’s core team, frustration in some quarters with Gray and McSweeney, and the familiar but arguably worsening problems of overlapping remits and structures unfit for purpose.

The prime minister needs to get a grip on the centre, and quickly. With a budget and multi-year spending review on the horizon, more could be done to articulate an overarching strategy for change – and, crucially, the trade-offs the government is willing to make to get there. Without this, the Treasury will be left to fill a strategic vacuum at the heart of government, a status quo from which Labour’s missions were meant to signal a break.

There are five changes the prime minister should make to address the weak centre of his government.

1. Appoint a cabinet secretary and principal private secretary

Getting the right top officials in place, and getting them working well with Gray and McSweeney as part of a cohesive team, is crucial to the success of Starmer’s administration. 

The cabinet secretary is the most important figure in aligning the resources of the state with the objectives of the prime minister. Simon Case, the incumbent, is planning to depart in January and his exit – widely reported but not officially announced – has made it harder for him to transmit the prime minister’s priorities across Whitehall. The situation is unsustainable and the government needs to properly announce Case’s departure and move swiftly to replace him. 

There has not been a full open competition for cabinet secretary since 2005 and, particularly given the profusion of credible candidates, one should start straight away, with the successful candidate starting as soon as possible. 

Similarly, Starmer needs to appoint a principal private secretary (PPS). The No.10 PPS leads the officials in the building and heads up the prime minister’s private office, the transmission mechanism between the prime minister and the rest of the government, both structuring decision making and acting as an informal sounding board. 

Johnson, Truss and Sunak all brought a PPS they knew and trusted from a previous role into No.10 with them, but Starmer does not know any of the key contenders. An open recruitment process is said to be (belatedly) underway and, just as with the cabinet secretary, that is the right approach, particularly given the importance of finding someone who has good chemistry with Starmer. But we are now three months into Starmer’s premiership: the prime minister must take a decision soon to get the government machine moving for him.

2. Separate the corporate functions from the Cabinet Office and move towards a Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC)

Personnel changes are important. But getting the right people into the right roles is not enough. There are structural problems with the centre that mean even the most effective operation would struggle.

No.10 looks much as it did during the latter part of Tony Blair’s time in office, just with more people. Blair’s No.10 worked well for him, but is no longer the right model. As Blair himself told our Commission on the Centre of Government: "Today I would have a completely different skillset at the centre of government.”

In particular, No.10 does not have sufficient economic or analytical expertise. As usual, there is no heavyweight economic unit in the building (Patrick Maguire has even reported in The Times that there is not a single economic adviser) and 10DS, a data science unit created in 2019 to provide direct support on the prime minister’s priorities, has been moved to the Cabinet Office. ⁴ https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/only-one-woman-can-rescue-starmer-now-ptb666sfx  

The Cabinet Office itself is structurally unsound, housing a hodgepodge of secretariats, policy teams, and the government’s corporate functions. Back in 2010, one director general told the IfG that it “is like working in pre-Garibaldi Italy. It’s a set of principalities of varying quality and differing character and a very transient workforce.” Things have only got more dysfunctional since then. 

Our Centre Commission, published in March 2024, interviewed more than a hundred people and while there was little criticism of the many excellent officials the Cabinet Office employs, there was plenty directed at the incoherent structures within which they work. 

Effort is increasingly duplicated between No.10 and the Cabinet Office, or different parts of the Cabinet Office. It is too often unclear with whose authority officials in the Cabinet Office are speaking. At its worst the department claims to be the voice of No.10 to line departments and the voice of line departments to No.10, speaking for both and neither and making it harder to achieve collective agreement. At this point, treating the Cabinet Office as a separate department has become a convenient fiction that confuses more than it clarifies.

The prime minister needs more firepower, and responsibilities at the centre need to be clearer. Big structural changes are disruptive and the government must tread carefully ahead of the budget and spending review. But separating out the parts of the Cabinet Office focused on the civil service can be done immediately, improving the department’s clarity of purpose while also giving the important topic of civil service reform its own home. 

Starmer also need not wait to recruit a proper economic and finance unit to provide him with advice both about how his economic priorities could be delivered and how the government’s budgets should be allocated. The aim should not be to replicate the Treasury, but to give the prime minister the opportunity to go into discussions with the chancellor with an equality of information and advice.

No.10’s analytical capability also needs beefing up. 10DS should be returned to Downing Street, and we have previously recommended building a Joint Analysis and Assessment Centre, which could function as an umbrella organisation which covers both 10DS and the Joint Data and Analysis Centre (JDAC) in an eventual DPMC.

At the same time as these immediate changes, Starmer should re-emphasise that Pat McFadden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, has the authority to lead the remaining parts of the Cabinet Office on the prime minister’s behalf – the cabinet secretariats, policy teams on the constitution and the union, and more. After the spending review, the remainder of the Cabinet Office should be formally merged with No.10 into a single organisation – the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. The prime minister is the executive leader of the government and, for the government to be successful in the medium- and long-term, should be supported as such.

3. Set strong direction ahead of the spending review

Combined, Labour’s missions cover large swathes of domestic policy but some of them have yet to be sufficiently defined. A central plank of the opportunity mission, for example, is to eradicate what the government calls a ‘class ceiling’ in the education system. But with no specificity about what this means, it feasibly captures most of the changes that any government would want to make. 
 

There is still time for No.10 to lead an exercise which more precisely defines the metrics which matter to the missions, uses this to produce a set of core priorities for government and crucially, makes explicit the trade-offs the government is willing to make to get there. It is important to get collective buy-in for this exercise and the priorities should be debated and signed off by the emerging ‘quad’ – Starmer, chancellor Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Pat McFadden – before going to full cabinet for a rubber stamp. This would give the government a set of ‘north stars’ they can use to give Whitehall (and the country) a clearer sense of what they are trying to achieve.

Conducting this exercise is vital to ensure that budgets follow priorities, not the other way round. Boris Johnson’s Levelling Up agenda is a cautionary tale as a big idea that remained ill-defined for too long. The policies in the Levelling Up white paper, intended to finally nail down what the slogan meant in practice, ended up having to be retrofitted to what was achievable within the budgets defined in the 2020 and 2021 spending reviews, leading to a less ambitious and ultimately broadly unsuccessful agenda. The new government starts from a stronger position as their missions are better defined than Levelling Up was at the same stage, but there remains work to do to avoid the same fate.

It is now too late for any collectively agreed priorities to meaningfully affect the October budget, but they should be the crucial determinant of the allocations decided in the upcoming multi-year spending review. Work on the spending review is already starting, and it is urgent to get the right approach in place.

The chancellor should present the ‘quad’ with proposals for a spending envelope, with all information shared with the prime minister’s economic and finance team. McFadden should support the chief secretary to the Treasury’s (CST) bilateral negotiations with departments over their bids and plans to ensure maximum coherence with the government’s priorities. Current CST Darren Jones noted at a recent IfG event that the way negotiations are done is outdated and this should change – the Treasury should expect to receive more detailed, standardised information from departments, so they can surface links and contradictions in departmental analyses. And more use should be made of collective discussions with rotating casts of secretaries of state for each of the government’s missions, similarly to find interactions between their departmental agendas.

Even when the prime minister and chancellor are fully aligned in their views – which Starmer and Reeves say they are – the existing spending review process can make it more difficult to translate priorities into the right budgets for action. Using an approach like the one above would improve the institutional alignment between the prime minister’s department and the Treasury, aiding the implementation of a genuinely ambitious version of the missions. 

4. Clarify and improve the way the missions are managed

The architecture around the delivery of the missions also needs refining. The ‘mission boards’ are too similar to traditional cabinet committees. There are, of course, times where it makes sense to have discussions with only ministers and their officials in the room, particularly when sensitive decisions are being made. But part of the point of the missions was to find a way of ‘crowding in’ innovation and expertise from outside government. It is not yet clear this is happening. 

More discussions should be had with leaders from the wider public sector, third sector, and business, who can contribute outside perspectives to help ensure what the government is doing will work. A board on economic growth might include presentations from senior figures in the sectors crucial to growing the economy – financial services, life sciences, artificial intelligence and the like – so ministers can subsequently make decisions informed by the perspectives of those they will affect. They should not be captured by those perspectives, but creating a proper space to engage with them is important.

Mission boards are also being chaired by the lead secretary of state for each mission, with energy secretary Ed Miliband chairing the clean energy board, for example. This helps clarify who is politically leading each mission and makes it easier for the department chiefly responsible to get done the things they want done. But it also risks undermining the extent to which they are genuinely cross-cutting. Allowing secretaries of state the power to sum up collective agreement on their own policy area risks them using it to bulldoze through their department’s agenda at the expense of trade-offs, and leaves those secretaries of state holding themselves accountable for their own mission’s progress. 

The government should create a Mission Strategy Board that oversees and brokers between the missions. It should be chaired by Pat McFadden, who would be able to take a clearer-eyed view of the cross-cutting consequences of decisions and make sure that different missions are not creating contradictory incentives. Without this board knitting the missions together, there is a risk that they become just another set of departmental policy agendas, rather than the genuinely and consciously cross-government attempts to solve big problems that they are supposed to be.

5.    Get reactive communication right and enforce rules about leaks

While there are some deep-rooted reasons for the government’s current difficulties, there are also some simpler ones. Starmer’s operation is struggling to rebut negative stories. His Downing Street communications team has to do more to quickly assess the government’s vulnerabilities and find the right lines to take.

More seriously, the origin of some of those stories are leaks from within the government, seemingly including from Downing Street itself. Both the special adviser and civil service code make clear that leaking is unacceptable. But it is clear from the tone and content of recent media coverage that it is happening widely, particularly when it comes to stories about special advisers’ pay.

Starmer should have zero tolerance for this. He has already asked the cabinet secretary to investigate leaking from the building, and should be unafraid of dismissing any special adviser, or asking the cabinet secretary to dismiss any official, who is found to have materially damaged the government’s interests. It might transpire that Starmer needs a few scalps to get a grip on the problem, to ensure that his staff resist the siren call of WhatsApps with journalists.

Conclusion

Starmer and his team will be bruised by their early difficulties galvanising the government machine to deliver Labour’s agenda. That many of the problems can be traced to failures at the centre of government itself will be especially frustrating. But it is early enough in his premiership for him to be able to make the tough calls that solve those problems, and he should treat these early bumps as an opportunity to fix them at the outset of his time as prime minister. 

If he doesn’t, he risks making it far harder for his government to deliver the missions and other core elements of the agenda he was so recently elected to deliver.