The Brexit department should never have been created

Government departments have permanence baked into them. But apart from a few great offices of state—the Treasury, the Foreign Office, the Home Office—many end up as flashes in the pan. Vultures are already circling over the Department for Exiting the EU (DExEU). This does not come as a surprise. This is a department that should never have been formed in the first place.

So why was DExEU created? A large part of the answer is institutional habit. Whitehall rearranges departments more often than most of us rearrange our living rooms. With its new logo, website and doorplate the new Department of Pencils may appear to be made out of rock-solid marble. Yet as the political waters close in, it turns out to have been fashioned out of Rennies.

One problem that arises from the chaos of throwing together large organisations at speed is the human casualties on the way. Recent figures from the Institute for Government put DExEU at the bottom of Whitehall’s staff wellbeing charts. No other department reported greater staff anxiety; only the perennially grumpy HMRC and Ministry of Defence were less satisfied with life in general. Lest anyone think this comes down to officials acting up as a bunch of grumpy liberal elites, the Department for International Trade, DExEU’s Brexit sibling, comes top on an average of the same measures.

The case against DExEU does not begin and end with the fact it made some civil servants angry and anxious. The bigger problem for the department is that there was never a coherent argument for creating an organisation with the trappings of a ministry in the first place.

However interminable the process may seem, Britain will only leave the EU once. Parliamentary sovereignty may return, but the basic policy choices a UK government has to wrestle with will remain largely the same as before. Departments which have long been charged with addressing those choices—on the environment, business, transport, and so on—will carry on doing so. They already have the experience, expertise and relationships. The areas where DExEU might have had a small chance of building a permanent toe-hold are those where maintaining relations with the EU is basically an end in itself. Before DExEU was created, these jobs were largely the domain of the Foreign Office, plus a handful of coordinating responsibilities passed to the Cabinet Office. It is hard to imagine DExEU winning any long-term bid for control against these two big beasts.

All of this was clear in the aftermath of the EU referendum two years ago. Yet DExEU still came into being as a department of state. It did so for two reasons; the internal politics of the Conservative Party and the internal politics of Whitehall. The first is obvious enough; DExEU offers a firebreak of sorts for Theresa May and Number 10 on Brexit.

In terms of the Civil Service’s own politics, DExEU is a product of two things. As a rule, Whitehall resists the idea of powerful departments in the centre that oversee all the others. The Treasury is tolerated as a necessary evil. But any further meddling from the likes of the Cabinet Office would be viewed with wariness. Departments prefer to get on with pursing their own interests, uninterrupted.

This is a pity, because strong centres are more effective coordinators. The Cabinet Office could have done the head banging DExEU was tasked with. However, that would have meant making it much bigger, disturbing the power dynamics between Whitehall’s centre and other departments. Wary of this, civil servants allowed DExEU to be fashioned as a separate fiefdom. This preserved power bases in the big departments at the expense of hobbling Brexit coordination.

The second reason for senior civil servants creating DExEU was more prosaic. It gave them something to do.

Whitehall does not idle well. In the Brexit maelstrom, officials clung to the comfort of building a new organisation with familiar institutional trappings. As soon as the government made the decision to go with creating DExEU, civil servants could happily immerse themselves in something that looked like productive work, and felt like productive work. In truth, it was all a mandarin operating in a political vacuum could do.

Left to their own devices, civil servants will dutifully find displacement activity to keep themselves feeling busy and useful. Top civil servants are highly pressured overachievers, driven by fear more than ego. In virtually every case, however much they may personally disagree with a political choice, they detest personal failure far more. And so they get on with the work they can.

Theresa May has already missed one chance to dissolve a department that was never required in the first place. It would be no surprise if her next opportunity came along soon.