There is a witticism shared around Whitehall on the following lines. If you are invited to a meeting in Downing Street or at the Treasury, you send your head of department or perhaps their deputy. But if you are invited to a meeting at the Cabinet Office, you send an apology.
The Cabinet Office is not taken very seriously by civil servants and by many of those who want to lobby them. This is because of what can be called the laws of physics of the United Kingdom’s bureaucratic state. It is not a spending department, and it is not responsible for front-line services, eye-catching or otherwise. It controls no purse strings, and it has no significant power over the parliamentary timetable.
Instead, it is a department that continually has to justify its existence by trying to influence what other departments are doing across what is known as “civil government” (that is essentially Whitehall minus the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence). It seeks to “coordinate” and to “promote best practice”, and other nice-sounding action-verbs.
And every so often you will hear the proposal for a “beefed-up Cabinet Office”, which one imagines is always accompanied by vigorous nodding. For who could be against a beefed-up Cabinet Office? It would seem to be the solution to so many governmental problems.
It is often not clear, however, what this up-beefing actually means. More money? If so, for what? Higher salaries? Higher spending on consultancy? More offices away from the Cabinet Office’s prestigious building at 70 Whitehall? There are no front-line services to pay for, so it cannot be more money for those. To put more bills before parliament? And if so, on what? Or just yet more meetings, for other departments to send—well—their apologies to?
The inescapable problem is that the Cabinet Office has no weight—indeed, almost no mass—in the universe of Whitehall. It has no legal powers of compulsion over other departments, in contrast to the express legal powers of, say, the National Audit Office or the various ombudsmen regimes.
By reason of the doctrine of the indivisibility of the Crown, almost all central departments share the same legal identity, though most are also corporations for transactional and property-holding purposes. The fiction is that central government departments are all emanations of the monarch, and as such have no legal powers (or duties) as between themselves.
This means that any meaningful reform of central government has to go with the grain of the power relationships between departments, rather than pretending they do not exist. Accordingly, calls for “beefing up” the Cabinet Office are a way of not thinking about reforming the civil service, rather than thinking practically about it. The Treasury will still have the power over budgets, and the big-spending departments such as health and education will still have control over news-site front pages and over the careers of ambitious politicians and officials.
In more concrete terms, there should be greater transparency as to the power relationships in Whitehall. The Freedom of Information Act 2000, whose stated aim was to increase public sector transparency, is deliberately weak and effectively unenforceable, with a process that can be easily gamed and with no real sanctions for non-compliance. The doctrine of individual ministerial responsibility means that even senior officials and autonomous units in government can hide behind ministers and yet not share information with that minister. Large government contractors benefit both from reliable flows of money and effective “commercial secrecy”.
Transparency by itself will not break these power relationships, but by making the relationships visible it will ensure that those involved will be genuinely accountable: that is, they will have to give accounts of what they do, and do not do.
And if there are entities to “beef up”, they should be those with structural and legal independence, such as the National Audit Office, which have (or should have) no conflict of interest in holding Whitehall departments to account.
Individual officials with personal responsibility for policy and administration should also be directly and routinely accountable to parliament generally, and select committees in particular, rather than such accountability being the exception to the rule that everything should go (or not go) through ministers.
And as for coordination between departments, that can only be done by the departments with power being directly coordinated between themselves at the highest level, through committees and sub-committees of ministers and officials, rather than by bolstering a third-party department that the other departments will ignore and internally deride.
None of this is to deny there are problems of coordination and direction in central government. Those problems are real and they need addressing. But stating a problem is not the same as solving it. The power relationships between and within government departments need transparency, with actual rather than theoretical accountability. And it will require open processes with real lines of tension—with which ministers and officials are anxious to engage, and to which they do not send apologies instead.
The writer is a former central government lawyer at HM Treasury.
