‘Whitehall reform’ needs a more coherent plan to succeed

The government has seized on public sector reform as a way of addressing all sorts of things ministers think are wrong with the state. Major changes like scrapping NHS England have been announced alongside trivial efficiencies like banning branded mugs. But the ad hoc nature of some of these initiatives makes them seem too much like a reaction to the frustrations of governing rather than a positive plan for reform of the state.

Keir Starmer and his senior ministers have targeted the civil service for cuts and efficiencies. They want to find arms-length bodies to abolish to bring decisions closer to ministers, and have been critical of regulators and advisory bodies for blocking decisions or for perceived political tin-ears.

The Institute for Government of course welcomes a strong focus on civil service and public sector reform. We have argued for change regularly and repeatedly. But by introducing proposed changes in a reactive way the government risks getting muddled .

Different problems need different solutions but presenting ideas for partial and specific reforms without an overarching, positive vision of success means that progress will be slow, and mistakes will be made.

Setting clear priorities must come first

Ministers need to be clear about their aims. For example, if they believe an effective state is one in which ministers exert more direct control, the civil service is smaller, and government functions perform better, they need to either rank these objectives or explain how they can all be achieved together.

Politicians will understandably incline towards ‘cakeist’ objectives, aiming for more efficiency alongside improved performance, to avoid or mitigate difficult trade-offs. That will sometimes be possible – leaner organisations can be more effective, and there is certainly duplication in parts of the state – but when it comes to making hard-edged decisions ministers will need to be clear whether savings, increased capacity, greater resilience, or tighter political control matter more.

And if it is policy decisions or blockages that frustrate ministers, they need to tackle them head on. Changing how Natural England approaches growth and planning is not ‘public sector reform’ – it requires the government to make the case for, and implement, a policy change to the organisation’s remit. That is not hard – it is what governments do all the time – but ministers need to accept the trade-offs that come with taking a decision.

Different parts of the state will require different interventions

The civil service – a workforce of around half a million under the direct control of ministers – is one important target for reform. But the wider public sector – including arms-length bodies, hospitals, schools and local authorities – is much larger, employing around four million people. 

The most pressing reforms to the core civil service are about management and the workforce – who runs the civil service and how to raise its performance to better advise ministers, implement their decisions and run those public services that civil servants administer directly. But even here the problems to be tackled are quite different in different areas: excessive staff turnover and grade inflation in the central policy teams, for example, but too little movement and progression in some operational areas.

Civil service reform, while essential, will not fix the wider public sector. Ministers have different levers and degrees of control over different arms-length bodies, with the distinctions often messy and incoherent. Local government, health and education all have their own workforce and leadership issues to address, but the role for ministers here is to set the operating environment, to allocate budgets and to create and sustain the accountability structures that incentivise outcomes they want to achieve.

The government needs a compelling plan to justify the cost of change

The government has been clear that improving the state is neither immediate nor pain-free. But it remains a real political challenge to invest in a system that just works better than it otherwise might do, when faced with a list of urgent and more tangible competing priorities from NHS waiting lists to trade to defence.

Major public service change programmes need a good deal of up-front investment and a tolerance for potential failure, even if there are savings to be realised down the line. Civil service workforce reforms are less expensive and can be less risky, but paying people off also comes at a cost.

AI, although not the panacea some might wish for, has its place. But its application will be totally different in different parts of the state: a tool to help policymakers more quickly see what MPs think about issues is not in the same league as fundamentally new ways of organising government services or data management. And in much of the public sector even having basic technology that works would be transformative.

The government has a massive majority and four more years of its term to run. Ministers seem to be getting into gear and are right to want to reform the state. But they have not set out the level of strategic vision that existed, say, in the 1980s when large parts of the civil service were moved into a new form of delivery body – the executive agency – led by operational experts but reporting directly to ministers.

That may not be the right vision now. But a series of piecemeal interventions does not add up to coherent view of how the modern state should work. Ministers should work with civil servants to specify at a strategic level the public sector changes they want to achieve, why, where and how. If they do not, the government will fall into yet another round of well-meaning but disruptive reforms that only partly work and only partly endure.