Over on Twitter, the estimable Dr Cath Haddon is live-tweeting a talk from a former cabinet minister to the Institute of Government:
Here is an idea for a Prime Minister to have something to help him or her keep on top of what is going on in government and to push priorities.
The Prime Minister should form a committee of, say, about twenty-two individuals, each responsible for a specific government department or public function.
Those on this committee should report directly to the Prime Minister.
And the Prime Minister should be able to appoint and replace members of this committee as he or she chooses.
This committee should meet at least a couple of times a week – and this meeting should be at Downing Street chaired by the Prime Minister.
There can also be sub-committees dealing with matters where more than one government department is concerned – and these sub-committees can also be chaired by the Prime Minister or their designate.
So as to ensure that priorities are pushed – and as politics should be the language of priorities as one politician once said – these appointees should be politicians not officials.
And appointing members of parliament to this committee would also mean that the Prime Minister would have a useful direct line to what is said about the departments in parliament.
Meetings of this committee should also be attended by the head of the civil service, so that he or she can be part of the discussions and to provide advice and practical insight.
The deliberations should be confidential so that discussions can be frank and not leaked.
And there should be collective responsibility for those on the committee, so that there is a single overall direction to the course of the government.
Those on this committee should also be paid a substantial amount in addition to their parliamentary salary so as to recognise the additional work and to attract the brightest and best.
Such a model would, at a stroke, keep a Prime Minister on top of what is going on in government and for priorities to be pushed across government.
And this is the important thing…
…if a Prime Minister cannot effectively use such a committee to keep on top of what is going on in government and to push priorities, then no “Prime Minister’s Department” is going to be of any greater help.
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The only thing left is what to call this committee.
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How about the “Cabinet”?
Sometimes this blog just goes too far with way-out ideas that nobody would ever attempt in the real world.
It is baffling that this is not already being done …
Yes, what could we call it? The Government Chest? Or Cupboard?
Seriously, EVERY Prime Minister’s office, at least since Wilson, has called for more resources and powers. This is, at least in part, because every PM is convinced he/she could do each of the Ministers’ jobs better than they could, if only there was time. And this belief rubs off onto the members of the PM’s Office. But is it true?
There is an argument for saying that modern States have become so complex that they should find ways of delegating powers not so much by function – because functions always overlap or conflict – but by area: a federal system in fact.
There is a need for a serious, practical, study on whether federal States are actually more or less efficient and responsive compared with unitary ones. Also, what are the features leading to success. There may well not be an answer – I suspect there is no good way of governing, or even managing, large, diverse, educated populations – but we might discover some aspects that definitely don’t work.
But returning to the proposed Chest model, I would argue that less, rather than more, power at the centre would be helpful because that would enforce better coalitions between the different departments and, paradoxically, more joined up government. Curiously enough, there is a model for this approach not far from the UK which produces reasonable – not perfect – results for very diverse communities. It’s not called a Chest, or even a Cabinet, but a Commission.
Ground-breaking!
👍
Quite.
However 22 is too large a number. Not every departmental minister needs to be in the cabinet. If a departmental matter is on the agenda then the minister attends.
Absolutely crucial: cabinet must have at least one very competent chair of cabinet committees. RAB Butler was outstanding as was Maudling – one reason for Heath’s problems after 1972 was that he had a weak chancellor and no effective chair of cabinet committees. Heath took too many decisions personally without necessary input a properly functioning cabinet committee system would have provided.
Cabinet members had huge time pressures. They need effective deputies in their departments. EG Marples under Macmillan at Housing. (Macleod at Health throughout was not in cabinet. Powell only joined cabinet after night of long knives – initially not in cabinet). No 2;in Treasury not automatically in cabinet even after office of Chief Secretary created. Maurice Macmillan Heath’s first CST was anxious not to be put in cabinet because of lack of time to master cabinet agenda and keep grip on departmental spending especially with two great profligates Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher.
Great suggestion but isn’t that called the Cabinet? The fact that is too big at present is down to PMs using it as a form of patronage.
Sunak’s Cabinet of Curiosities is notable as it’s curious how any of them reached cabinet rank given their woeful lack of ability.
It is a problem when you try building a cabinet not so much from barrels but the scrapings left long after the bottom of the barrel has been reached.
This is true… An unforeseen [possibly] positive consequence of Brexit perhaps?
The powers-that-be no longer have the luxury of hiding behind and blaming their inadequacies on Europe. I’m sure its going to be a painful process for all, but might we actually get some good politicians just in time for the Climate Change End of the World Party (& Mingle)?
Modest proposals have always been welcome, ever since my namesake wrote the first.
You give two advantages of having politicians as Ministers. Here are some disadvantages.
It sets up a career structure for MPs that takes them away from their most important rôle of scrutiny of the Executive. The payroll vote and the hope of joining that payroll are far too dominant in Westminster.
It detracts from that scrutiny. The Select Committees show how it should be done but it all seems to fade away on the floor of the House. Ministers who were not fellow MPs of the majority in Parliament would be exposed to much greater scrutiny.
It reduces the opportunity to have experts as Ministers. This should be possible without concocted lifetime appointments to the House of Lords.
It tempts the Prime Minister to spend far too much time and effort on favouring and balancing their fellow party politicians rather than looking to the needs of the Departments of State. This is as bad now as I have ever seen it. And the consequent rapid churning of Ministers makes it far too difficult for those Departments to develop and institute policies over the timescales that really matter.
I wonder, should the PM hope to fill this “cabinet” with individuals of fundamentally compatible outlooks, drawn from from a larger pool that at core shares some communal goals for the country and has agreed to talk through its differences to find acceptable compromises?
The preconditions for this working include that the roles of the members of this team are well defined. Roles should be properly appointed and incumbents not changed on a whim just as they are getting used to the role. There must be a good selection of potential incumbents with, if possible, good analytical and managerial skills as well as political ones. The leader must be able to trust the team, not just from a political perspective, but from a competency one also. And the leader must be good enough to be able to delegate. Hard. Not seen much of that in a while.
Yes. None of this works without competence. And representation can be handled elsewhere. And it’s easy to develop policy as there are so many experts. Competence in execution is much harder to find. And there’s no particular reason why it should be abundant in MPs.
😂👍
What a ridiculous suggestion from DAG. It will never work. After all, you would need to have members of this committee that are competent and on top of their briefs. You would need a top civil servant who was the best civil servant around. And you might need a PM who had confidence in the committee members, trusted them to run their departments well, and didn’t want to micromanage everything himself, and make sure that the underlings weren’t plotting against him.
No, it will never work.
Very droll. Sadly each cupboard is marked ‘too hard’, ‘no votes’, ‘no donations’, ‘not my problem’ or ‘impossible’.
No one actually wants to do the job of running a successful country.
Quite. However, the importance of having the best people cannot be overstressed. If members are chosen to plicate factions of a party, despite their shortcomings, the whole process may unravel.
One of the most difficult problems is that our adversarial system results in power being regarded as a zero sum game. Power is dragged towards the centre and has to be guarded at any cost, in order for the PM not to feel under threat.
Efficient and effective government requires power to be distributed to those who need it to be able to deliver.
Others may beg to differ, but to this observer much of modern Europe seems to do it better than us. Could our adherence to First Past The Post be relevant?
Very droll.
But Javid is pointing to a problem which has existed for a long time.
It’s difficult for a PM to push a policy or address an urgent issue via the cabinet since ministers are preoccupied by the business of their own departments.
The cabinet is a pretty archaic institution, though it was reformed in the 20th century.
A Swiftian notion might be to dine on retirees. A well nourished couple would feed well and liberate a nice house too.
Amend the property inheritance and tax rules and the money rolls in.
If a person has a tool, or indeed a whole box of tools at their disposal and they fail to utilise the tools in the box effectively to accomplish the task they have set themselves, then it is not necessarily the tools that are at fault, rather, it is the old complaint of a bad workman blaming his tools. Now to be fair the workman in question isn’t, to my knowledge, blaming his tools, it is commentators around the scene who are making this claim. It would, on the basis of the above argument, seem that it is their argument that is in error.
You could call such a committee a Cabinet – do I win the spot prize, a few free spins perhaps?
This could be called a prime minister’s department.
But it is nevertheless lacking in organising, operational, design, communication, strategy formation, leadership, innovation, training and learning principles. Where are the project team selection skills? Who sets the specification of competences, processes, bandwidth, governance design attributes, Ethos, culture and risk appetites? Too much is expected from chairing of too many meetings by one dictatorial, exhausted, untrained prime minister. There is in short no appreciation of how to reach the implicit desired outcome of successful governance by a cabinet government, ruled by a prime minister.
And yes this is irksome for the citizens of a supposed democracy being ruled by a troop of amateur governance actors throughout Westminster and Whitehall.
Norman Strauss, co-author of Stepping Stones with John Hoskyns. Former adviser to Margaret Thatcher and deputy head of her first No 10 policy unit.
I absolutely agree. Like much else within our dysfunctional attempt at democracy, we cling to archaic practices on the grounds that (a) we have always done it this way, and (b) that our parliamentary system is the envy of the world, and thus we have nothing to learn by examining other possibilities that work better elsewhere.
I hope you weren’t so absolutist in your views when advising Margaret Thatcher. To say that Whitehall is lacking in the principles relating to so many skills lacks credibility. I think that most of us former civil servants would agree that Whitehall could do these things better, but so could most (maybe all) politicians and much of every part of the private and public sectors too.
But I agree that you’re right to focus on skills rather than structures. Changing structures introduces uncertainty and is a way of slowing down improvement in the short term.
Alternatively, you could be disruptive and take the woke opposition blob by surprise through total incompetence.
I’ve worked in various parts of government under most political parties at one time or another.
In the UK we have rough 6 million people working in the public. If the Prime Minister wants these people to do something, you can’t possibly use normal management techniques to tell them what to do.
Instead, you need some sort of framework so that people know what you want.
I started out under John Major, there was complete clarity that they wanted markets and privatisation. Whether you agree or not with that policy, nobody could argue that it wasn’t clear.
The Blair government was also pretty clear, modernisation and targets were all the rage.
What was unusual about the May and Johnson governments wasn’t so much that government policy was objectionable but more that nobody knew what government policy actually was.
Things are superficially better under Sunak but there’s still a complete lack of clarity about the government wants to do.
Wouldn’t government have been more complex before so much was privatised, so many former functions contracted out to the private sector, significant powers devolved to national and regional bodies and ever more overseas territories surrendered?
“Wouldn’t government have been more complex before so much was privatised, so many former functions contracted out to the private sector,”
In a word: No! Contracting out a function to the private sector might reduce head count in government, certainly on number of ‘doers’, but these will be replaced, certainly in terms of cost, by the army of lawyers and clerks needed to set up and monitor the activities of the private sector replacements.
Management by bureaucracy may not be more efficient than sub-contracting to the market but the latter is certainly not simpler – assuming government doesn’t just wash its hands of the whole business as in the US health sector – and even that is not known for its efficiency.
Indeed. Not to mention the added complexity of some of the privatisations, for example the multiplicity of train operating companies, train leasing companies, the track owning company and the rail regulator.
Following the IKEA model, perhaps “RABBLE’ or “DISFUNKSHUN” would work?
Competence above all, yes. It has always struck me as bizarre that while we (rightly) demand training and testing of those with our lives in their hands (doctors, pilots, mariners etc, etc) no such demand is made of our political masters. 230,000 Covid deaths are but one consequence.
Our current PM, too, ascended to the post riding a wave of public discontent. So he does not know where to go now, only that he wants to go in a nice way. He also established several quasi advisory bodies, thus adding several new directions and priorities to the generally acknowledged ones. I think the trick is to get a boss that knows where she (or he) wants to go.
Yours truly
andrej klemencic, ljubljana