“This is an extraordinary opportunity,” Anthony Seldon, British historian and honorary historical adviser to No.10, tells CSW. “We mustn’t blow it.”
Major change is coming at the centre of government with the announcement of a new Office for the Prime Minister and Cabinet.
A beefed-up No.10 has been so widely advocated that it is perhaps trickier to work out who hasn’t called for it. Recent champions of the move include PACAC chair Simon Hoare, writing in Civil Service World’s latest magazine, and the just-exiled chief secretary to the prime minister, Darren Jones.
Now that the call has been heeded – CSW speaks to the experts to get their reaction and ask: what will be key to making this a success? And do the changes go far enough?
“It's great,” says Seldon, who is one of the UK’s foremost authorities on the centre of government and was deputy chair of the Institute for Government’s Commission on the Centre of Government – which in 2024 called for a department for the PM and cabinet.
“If this all goes ahead properly, then it will be seen as one of the most decisive moves in having a more coordinated government in Britain,” he says.
However, he warns: “An announcement is not the same as making policy. Full marks to the PM and to Dame Antonia [but] this is only the start.”
Michael Bichard, a former permanent secretary in the Department for Education and Employment, was part of another commission that urged the same move. In 2021, the Commission for Smart Government said the Cabinet Office should be “streamlined and subsumed” into a “powerful” new Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.
Speaking to CSW about the new OPMC, Lord Bichard says he “warmly” welcomes the plans.
“I think it gives the prime minister stronger support to deliver his priorities, and that's important for our democracy,” Bichard says.
“The devil will be in the detail, but the potential is there,” he adds.
“It's so terribly amateur – the centre of British government"
Sir Anthony Seldon
Hoare, who wrote in CSW’s summer 2026 magazine that he had become “totally convinced” of the need for an Office of the PM, says he is “really pleased” with the decision. But he adds that “there's a big difference, of course, between setting something up… and then actually working out how it's going to do the job that has been identified”.
Adam Terry, the new executive director of The Future Governance Forum – his predecessor Nathan Yeowell having just joined No.10 as a spad – says it is “great to see Andy Burnham committing to a stronger, more strategic centre of government, and making good on it straight away” with the OPMC announcement.
Hannah Keenan, an associate director at the Institute for Government working on civil service reform, strikes a more cautious tone on the plans.
Keenan says she “very broadly welcomes” the OPMC move. “It’s a good thing to redesign the centre of government so the prime minister actually drives government properly, and you have a strategic centre that actually works,” she says.
But she worries that it will end up being a “rebranding exercise”.
Why do we need an OPMC?
There are around 70 prime ministerial systems around the world which have “copied in different degrees the British model”, according to Seldon, and he says many – including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the Republic of Ireland – bring together the prime minister and cabinet into one department.
Seldon says he thinks the separation of prime minister and cabinet has been “unhelpful” and has “made for disjointed governing, and I think it's allowed politics to come in and cohesion to be reduced at the expense of separatism. And this is a powerful move to bring together the centre of British government.”
Britain has “suffered from chronic lack of planning at the centre, chronic capricious decision-making at the centre” and “the centre has just grown and grown and grown – there's been no rationale”, Seldon says.
“It's so terribly amateur – the centre of British government,” he adds. “No HQ of a successful international corporation would have such a higgledy-piggledy centre, which has grown through contingency rather than rational planning.”
The establishment of an OPMC is “an opportunity to stand back and think: what do you need at the centre? How do we have an efficient centre? What size should it be? Who's going to be doing what? And how is that going to work with the Treasury so there can be proper – this is key – proper costed plans that the centre can then oversee until they've been carried out,” he adds.
Seldon says the move will also “help the cabinet, which has been declining year after year since the '60s and '70s as a decision-making body… to be back as the buckle”, referencing Walter Bagehot’s 19th century description of the cabinet as a "a buckle which fastens” the legislative and executive parts of the state.
“It will give clarity of purpose,” Seldon says. “It will allow medium to long-term costed plans for government. It will reduce factionalism and political infighting. It will make the centre much more coherent because it can be properly planned.”
Bichard agrees on the need for clarity. For too long the Cabinet Office has been “silted up: a collection of services and initiatives, and not an engine for change”, he says.
But he says another “really important” aspect to the change is what it says about the relationship between the PM and the cab sec.
“My experience was that change in the civil service or in government only happened if the secretary of state and the permanent secretary, or the cabinet secretary and the prime minister, were clearly trusting each other and on the same page,” Bichard says. “And if this is a sign, and I think it probably is in the way that it's been set up, that that trust is there, then that is a very powerful statement that's being made.”
Why is it happening now?
Seldon says the UK “needed somebody like the cabinet secretary Antonio Romeo – who will oversee the OPMC’s operations – to “seize” the opportunity.
“I think that she has long thought that this has been necessary, to have a more unified centre of government,” he says. “She's been interested in the Australian model, and it's a happy coincidence, therefore, that the incoming prime minister thinks the same and has allowed this to happen.”
Terry says Burnham “clearly understands that ‘fundamentally rewiring the state’, as he puts it, isn’t additional to delivering his political programme; it’s essential to it”.
“There is still a lot of work to do to stand this new office up effectively, but after years of ‘make do and mend’ approaches to the heart of the British state, it is hugely encouraging to see a prime minister fully appreciate that if you want to renew the nation, you first need to transform the state,” he adds.
What is needed to make this a success?
Bichard says the plans “will be resisted” in parts of Whitehall, “which is why the prime minister-cabinet secretary relationship is so important” to drive it through.
He also warns of a potential danger – “if we start with a slim centre and then it gets things added to it all the time because there's nowhere else that looks like they should take ownership of a policy or a service, that would be a problem”.
For Seldon, the integration of AI will be key. “Unless AI is at the very heart of every single aspect of this, it will not work,” he says. “You don't solve AI by having an AI minister. That’s meaningless. AI needs to be at the heart of every single facet.”
“Only do what can only be done at the centre and delegate everything else,” Keenan says.
Keenan says her “fear” is that the Cabinet Office still exists in the new model. She says one of the main reasons the IfG’s Commission on the Centre recommended breaking up the Cabinet Office and setting up a department for the PM and Cabinet “was because the Cabinet Office is so large and it's so unfocused”.
“It's very hard for it to provide the support that it needs to for the prime minister,” Keenan says. “The risk here is that it stays reasonably large and unfocused.”
Had they abolished the Cabinet Office, they would have had to go through everything the Cabinet Office does and decide where to put it, Keenan says. “But because they've got the OneGov Delivery Agency, OPMC, and Cabinet Office, you can dodge doing that. I think that's a big risk.”
Hoare says it is critical that Whitehall understands that OPMC is neither a “gimmick” nor an arbitrary announcement “to keep the headline machine churning out stuff”.
He says the “quality of the people who will be in and around it” will also be “fantastically important.”
Hoare adds that PACAC will be keen to find out what mechanisms the OPMC will have “to effectively convene, coordinate and compel secretaries of state and permanent secretaries to get on and do whatever it is that No.10 wants it to do”.
He says the key question he wants to ask first secretary of state Louise Haigh, who will oversee the OPMC alongside the PM and cab sec, is: “Precisely what powers does she have?
“The committee will want to ask: “What do you want to do? How do you want to do it, or how do you propose to achieve it? And when do you believe you can achieve it by? And who is setting the timeline for delivery? And who has the whip hand to hold the at-the-chalk-face deliverers to account on a daily basis?”
Hoare says “perm secs, DG, and others” will need to be told that “there's a new sheriff in town, there's a new way of doing things, there's a greater expectation”.
"Only do what can only be done at the centre and delegate everything else"
Hannah Keenan
And disseminating that message in Whitehall will be a “really key challenge” for Romeo, Haigh and civil service chief operating officer Cat Little, he says. “I think it's got to be put to them very brutally…’If this offends anybody's amour propre of how civil governance is delivered in this country, tough, sling your hook’ would be my very clear message.
“I hope this will turbocharge a retuning, so that we can go back to having that Rolls Royce civil service.”
Seldon also has a warning. “If the PM and the cab sec then, having launched this, become – I'm not saying they will – but if they allow themselves as previous PMs to then become distracted by Ukraine, by immigration, by prisons, by growth, by social care, by all these things…This needs to happen despite all these other things, as it will allow a much better quality.
“Trust is being lost in this country in democracy because democracy has been so poor at delivering. Once you get this right by having a unified centre at large, then the quality of decision-making, the communication to the public, will enhance and improve, and respect and trust for politicians and politics and government will improve.”
And how will we know if the OPMC has been a success?
For Bichard, the test of its success should be whether it delivers devolution, economic growth and better standards. “Others may want to add to that, but it shouldn't be too long a list.”
On devolution, he says “the centre has frankly failed. I've been going on about this for 15 years. If you want to deliver devolution, you've not only got to change the way in which local authorities, health authorities, and others work locally, you've got to change the way in which the centre works. And to do that, you need to have an office which has credibility with every department and works with every department to see through devolution. It does not happen naturally. People don't give away power naturally. So this office has got to be seen as a really credible force in government.
“When I was permanent secretary all those years ago, after the '97 election, the prime minister came along to the permanent secretaries’ meeting and talked to them about devolution insofar as Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales were concerned, and made it absolutely clear that this was going to happen. And some colleagues said, "Well, exactly what does it mean?” He said, "Well, it means everything is devolved unless you make a case for it not being devolved.”
Keenan says if it's "more than a rebranding exercise and it actually works”, you should see “long-term strategic thinking being set by No.10 and the Cabinet Office together in this OPMC in a way that holds and actually directs what the rest of government is doing”.
On that same note, Seldon recalls Jeremy Heywood telling him that the one thing the centre of government is “very bad at is long-term planning”.
“If this is done properly,” Seldon says, “then it will allow the long term to be thought through, probably medium to long term, which is beyond the life of the next general election so that everything is properly costed and planned for the next general election. Beyond that, we need to be thinking purposefully, and Whitehall is terribly bad, or good – depending how you want to look at it – at balkanising, at separating functions…health affects every single department, education affects every single department, science affects every single department. We separate these things out in a way that is profoundly unhelpful.”
The OPMC, Seldon concludes, offers the opportunity to “at last get a proper, rational, grown-up, professional, serious-minded centre – not just for England, for the whole country.”