7th February 2023
Today we were supposed to have had a ministerial reshuffle.
But there was little ministerial shuffling or reshuffling.
Instead we had yet another exercise in creating and renaming government departments.
In reality, not a great deal changes when this happens. The same civil servants will sit in the same buildings doing much the same things. The signage on the doors will change, new email addresses will be created, and somebody somewhere will get a lot of money for a rebranding exercise.
The belief seems to be that changing the name of a department – no doubt to something more “eye-catching” – is a thing that by itself means something significant.
Yet it is not even rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic – it is more like changing the names on the back of the deckchairs.
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And sometimes, in the longer term, such reorganisations make things worse.
The creation of a “Ministry of Justice” – by combining what had once been the small Lord Chancellor’s Department overseeing the court system and the prisons part of the Home Office created a mid-sized spending department which, when austerity cuts were inflicted, meant that the court system became increasingly underfunded.
The supposed “synergies” from a “holistic” and “beginning-to-end” approach to the justice system never converted from management-speak waffle to hard policy implementation.
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At the start of Brexit you may recall the sudden creation of two pop-up departments: the Department for Exiting the European Union and the Department for International Trade.
Both must have seemed such really good ideas at the time.
But both were useless.
DExEU soon got dragged back into the Cabinet Office, which had a natural centre of gravity in Whitehall for the relevant negotiations.
The Department for International Trade had nothing to do for a couple of years, as trade deals could not be finalised and executed (and thereby meaningfully negotiated) until the United Kingdom actually left, and then the department spent its time doing what any business department (or foreign office) could have done with the rollover agreements and the few other opportunities.
Both were an exercise in pointlessness – as well as both illustrating the fundamental lack of understanding of the nature of Brexit by the then-government.
And from today the Department for International Trade is no more, even though we are now “free” to strike our own trade deals.
What a waste of time.
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Some wag once said that, in an office job, meetings are the practical alternative to work.
Similarly, reorganisations are often a manager’s practical alternative to, well, management.
It is perhaps not even worth learning the new departments’ names, and their acronyms, as soon they will change again, with little useful having been achieved in the meantime.
At least the Prime Minister will nod to himself as he thinks he has done something, while all around nothing substantial has changed.
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And the government has announced the ending of the limits on employing management consultants, too.
All too often, these “consultants” bring spreadsheets requiring competent staff time to collate data into new & ever more odd formats and then disappear “upstairs” to explain to managers that the data isn’t good enough so the model will not work.
Generally, they bring ideas that have been shown not to work in the private sector, which are then offloaded at a discount to government, to be trickled down to local authorities where they achieve even less.
No doubt these new departments will offer fresh meat to be picked over by these jackals.
I thought DexEU and DIT where prizes awarded to people who had won, and therefore must be in Cabinet, therefore must be Ministers of something, otherwise their wings of the Party would arise and overthrow the PM.
Competence was no more expected or at issue than the presence of actual work for them to do, never mind be the most appropriate organisation to do.
So looking at this shuffle I see that it shows the PM demonstrating an ability to make a change – which wasn’t certain – and then look for signs that some of the gang are in the ascendant and others being deprecated. Internally.
But I know nothing.
We’re watching the slow death of a government that has run out of ideas, the country needs a general election as a matter of urgency. It’s almost the same as the demise of the Major premiership, the longer this goes on the more our stock in the international community will continue to decline.
“We trained hard—but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we were reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising, and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while actually producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralisation.”
― Charlton Ogburn, Jr.
New departments need advice so a good time for this- https://www.gov.uk/guidance/commercial-spend-controls-version-5
Relaxation of consultancy spend controls.
Some reorganisations work. I don’t think anyone would demerge HMRC back to Inland Revenue and HM Customs and Excise. And creating DWP brought together the value chain for helping people back to work, and has been markedly successful.
It seems to be to be a particular folly to embark on a reorganisation at a time when departments are supposed to be reviewing EU-derived legislation to a stupidly short self-imposed timetable.
“We trained hard—but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we were reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while actually producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.”
― Petronius Arbiter
“And from today the Department for International Trade is no more, ….”
Perhaps this is in anticipation that soon International Trade will be no more.
As someone who has made part of my living from reorganising bits of the civil service as a civil servant and as a consultant, you might expect me to take exception to your blog today.
But you are absolutely right. Most reorganisations don’t achieve much and cause insecurity, confusion and even chaos while they are taking place. Too often they are a substitute for good policy, good leadership or good management, or all three.
With less than two years until the next general election Sunak and the rest of us will only see the negatives from these changes.
I hope that the next government won’t try to solve the problems this reorganisation will cause by proposing another one.
Another example of “The Law of Triviality – briefly stated, it means that the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.”
C. Northcote Parkinson
A waste of time, money and Human Resources in what is essentially “displacement activity”. The only people to profit from this vacuous exercise will be the “brand consultants” and the sign manufacturers.
A retiring Vice-Chancellor gave some advice to his successor. “Here are three numbered envelopes. When you hit a crisis, open the next one.”
First crisis, the message was ‘Blame your predecessor.’
Second crisis, the message was ‘Restructure.’
Third crisis, the message was ‘Prepare three envelopes.’