It took Margaret Thatcher nine years. It took Tony Blair seven years. But Keir Starmer has only taken five months to recognise that the machinery of UK government is bust. He now has the opportunity, time and parliamentary majority to drive through lasting reforms to the way in which Whitehall works. We should all welcome this.
It would be easy to assume that the Prime Minister is reacting to a few recent setbacks: pensioners and winter fuel, farmers and inheritance tax, Cabinet dismissals, Sue Gray and so on. Easy, but wrong. For back in August, just a few weeks after becoming Prime Minister, Starmer, to his credit, clearly made the point in a speech in the rose garden of No 10 that the governance of the UK is not working. ‘When there is deep rot in the heart of a structure, you can’t just cover it up. You can’t tinker with it or rely on quick fixes. You have to overhaul the whole system of managing government, not just the civil service. Tackle it at root.’ So his speech today should not be seen as a headline-catching gimmick to deflect attention from recent shortcomings. Rather, it is nothing less, as the Prime Minister says, than ‘a major rewiring of Whitehall’.
And this should be welcomed right across the political spectrum. The Conservatives in particular should be aware that their failure to deliver on so many of their original pledges – immigration control, building more hospitals, houses and increasing the number of prison spaces – has deeply damaged their reputation for competence. And that Starmer may have just stumbled upon a new approach that could indeed be the basis for reinvigorating the governance of the UK.
For what Starmer is going to propose could indeed be revolutionary. He is expected to announce that in six key areas – including NHS waiting lists, overall living standards, housebuilding, net zero, education and crime – he will be setting firm, quantitative targets which will be transparent and under constant public review. Never mind whether or not you agree with his targets or whether you think that they are half baked. The important thing is that this is a mechanism that will enable political leaders to set out not only what they want to do, but how it will be achieved.
This is an approach which has been so absent for too long. As Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff Jonathan Powell observed:
When you arrive in No 10 and pull on the levers of power, you discover they are not connected to anything. Tony Blair complained to me after six months that the government machine felt like a shiny Rolls Royce parked outside in Downing Street which he was not allowed to drive.
Think of the 17 reviews that have been launched since the Fulton Report in 1968 into why the UK government is not efficient, not one of which has made any lasting difference. Or remember that ONS figures show that the country’s productivity increased by 27% between 1997 and 2022 while the public sector’s declined by 8%.
Imagine what might happen if this new approach sticks: in a relatively short amount of time, quantifiable targets could be rolled out across Whitehall so that every department has clear goals for what they want to achieve. Ministers and shadow ministers – and the public – will then all be able to see whether their ambitions are being met. Even better, ministers will realise that they can set out a vision for what they want their department to achieve, with the targets becoming ‘stepping stones’ to achieving that vision.
This is all standard practice for successful management beyond Whitehall. And much else could follow: a reduction in the ‘churn’ of ministers and senior officials, resulting in far greater subject expertise being retained; bringing in professional management who can oversee the delivery of targets; and, dare one say it, real financial rewards for those who have met the agreed targets as well as far greater autonomy for those departments which have a proven record of success.
Kemi Badenoch has also recognised the problems of governance. As she made clear in her launch speech: ‘the whole system is broken… we need to reboot, reset and rewire the way that government works so that it can serve the public.’ How true. Given the recent research by James Frayne for the Centre for Policy Studies, it would be deeply counter-productive if the Tories now opposed the Government’s first attempt to reform a broken system. So how welcome it would be if, in response to Starmer’s speech, she praised and pledged to build on the structural reforms that are being proposed. Yes, she can criticise the goals and targets that the Prime Minister is set to propose. But why not enthusiastically welcome his ideas for making Whitehall work better?
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