Government and Whitehall declare joint victory on reform

By Fraser Raleigh

Last week the government published a wide-ranging new ‘Declaration on Government Reform’, signed jointly by the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, after having been ratified by the Cabinet.

It is a significant moment, which marks the culmination of a great deal of work that has – for the most part – been taking place behind the scenes throughout the COVID pandemic on how the state should be re-wired to improve how it delivers for citizens.

Signs of the government’s thinking were evident in Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Michael Gove’s detailed Ditchley Lecture ‘The privilege of public service’ last July, which called for a greater willingness to learn from innovation and calculated risks. The trend continued with the decision to bring in former Cabinet Lord Maude to review government performance and the commissioning of a report from Blair-era delivery supremo Sir Michael Barber that recommended a new No.10 delivery unit. Fittingly, Gove accompanied the declaration with another detailed speech on launch day, entitled ‘The obligations we owe’.

While a number of its themes are recognisable and consistent, however, the tone of last week’s declaration is a world away from the “hard rain” that the Prime Minister’s former chief adviser Dominic Cummings promised was coming to the civil service last year (which I wrote about here).

That menacing language has been ditched in favour of cuddlier commitments that ministers and civil servants will “challenge each other candidly, co-operate intensively and be open-minded about what needs to change”.

What needs to change is identified around three themes: people, performance, and partnership.

When it comes to people, that means recruiting from a broader geographic pool and establishing a greater government presence outside of London, as well as linking civil servants’ bonuses to targets. It also means encouraging more people with private sector backgrounds into government, though in the wake of the Greensill scandal the declaration is keen to emphasise the importance of clear and transparent rules to avoid conflicts of interest.

On performance, there are promises to strengthen the principle of departmental accountability, use data more intelligently, and improve the cross-government functions that oversee core areas such as finance, digital and commercial operations. The final point was a key recommendation of Lord Maude, who has said publicly that the reforms he drove forward during the Cameron government have been allowed to slip back.

The final pillar of partnership responds most directly to the new ways of government working necessitated by both the pandemic and Brexit, encouraging ministers and civil servants to discuss and develop policy “collaboratively”. While this has long been part and parcel of policymaking, it is significant that the declaration highlights the added value of “mixed forums”, with civil servants and ministers challenging each other. This more dynamic approach to decision making could mark an interesting cultural change from the often formulaic discussions that can dominate Cabinet sub-Committee meetings. The government is keen to encourage more robust debates and, it hopes, better decisions at the end of them.

But if the declaration gives a clear indication of what the government sees as its mission for reform, one line also gives an intriguing – if unexpected - insight into how the Prime Minister himself sees himself within that mission.

For it is not the Prime Minister’s political hero, Winston Churchill, who seems to be the model, but his wartime deputy and successor Clement Attlee. “In the aftermath of 1945, Britain built back better”, the declaration states, retrofitting the Prime Minister’s key post-pandemic slogan and arguing that then, just as now, “those changes required the re-wiring, and renewal of government” in order to deliver the new houses, reformed education and, of course, National Health System that helped post-war Britain to recover.

Perhaps, then, the potential political regeneration is not as surprising as at first glance after all. For as Churchill’s biographer, the Prime Minister will be all too aware of the cautionary tale of the wartime Prime Minister failing to convince the country he was the man for the job of peacetime rebuilding.

And he will be determined to avoid history repeating itself.