It is a well-known cliché that a week is a long time in politics. Andy Burnham’s first week in power felt like an age given the relentless pace of change. In just a few days there was a new cabinet, the abolition of an entire government department, alongside the wholesale restructuring of the centre of government including an Office for the Prime Minister and the Cabinet incorporating No.10, a slimmed down Cabinet Office, and a new No.10 North, which will lead on devolution strategy and local economic growth. In the past, there has been understandable scepticism about government reorganisation which often imposes financial costs without adding value to state capacity. So it is worth asking what past reorganisations tell us about how to reorganise the machinery of government effectively.
The Institute for Government has put the upfront cost of a new department or mid-sized merger at around £15m, with a productivity cost of roughly 20% for a fifth of staff lasting ten months or more. The FCDO merger cost at least £24.7m by the NAO’s assessment, while turnover among its Grade 6 staff nearly doubled. The Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, created in 2007 to solve a cabinet management problem for Gordon Brown, was reabsorbed within two years. Yet some changes have definitely endured.
In particular, HMRC, the DWP, and the MoJ survived because they had a robust institutional rationale, and so survived the shifting tides of short-term politics. The OPMC may have greater longevity not least because so many experts and think-tanks looking at the centre of government in the UK conclude that a beefed-up Prime Minister’s Department is needed. The ideas behind this design have advocates inside 10 Downing Street as well as beyond it. No.10 North is a more personal project of the prime minister. Consideration should be given to how best to institutionalise No.10 North, preferably with its purpose enshrined in statute, so the new body survives the transition to a new PM when that inevitably comes.
The Department for Exiting the EU offers a further lesson. That department struggled because a line department will never be in a position to direct its peers; anything that touches the whole of government has to be run from the centre, leveraging the political authority of 10 Downing Street. Similarly, devolution touches everything, so the instinct to consolidate the relevant functions in No. 10 North is sound.
The abolition of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology also has historical antecedents. The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research ran from 1916 to 1965; the Ministry of Technology from 1964 to 1970; and DIUS from 2007 to 2009. There is a clear pattern that once in a generation, a prime minister decides that science and technology should have their own department. The Government Digital Service has been through the process on a faster cycle: created in the Cabinet Office in 2011, moved to DSIT in 2024 so that digital transformation would sit in one department as a single digital centre of government, and now, two years later, expected to move again as the digital function passes to DCMS. Given the impact digital will continue to have on government, this decision has been cast as a misstep – perhaps prematurely. The concern is that while the AI Taskforce announced this week is a positive step alongside the appointment of a cabinet level minister for AI, it is not the same as establishing a single, cohesive department dedicated to technology.
Who leads the new centre matters too, because the success of delivery from the centre is intrinsically linked to political clout. In the new structure, Louise Haigh as first secretary of state and chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster will oversee the OPMC with the prime minister. This will be the government’s political engine room, while Antonia Romeo will run the operations as cabinet secretary, reflecting the most successful approaches of the past in which a political principal with cabinet rank worked alongside a senior official.
As reported elsewhere, Sam Lister goes to No.10 North and Clive Maxwell to the new OneGov Delivery Agency, perhaps analogous to the USA’s General Services Administration, which will consolidate recruitment, pensions and vetting. The lesson from the FCDO reorganisation, however, is that incompatible IT and the loss of the people it most needed lost time, money and created change fatigue.
These are clearly experienced insiders with solid delivery records, which helps with standing the structures up. Yet the recent paper by Re:State argues that No.10 North will add little if it becomes a regional office with the same culture as Whitehall. Re:State argue that the key roles in No.10 North must go to skilled outsiders.
A century of technology departments, three AI taskforces and three homes for the GDS offer valuable lessons for future alterations to the machinery of government. The new government has promised a ten-year programme. The task now is to articulate and embed – preferably in the form of a written constitution – a core purpose for the reconfigured centre of government so that the new structure endures beyond the current generation of politicians, while the UK political system has the institutional stability it so badly requires.
Patrick Diamond is professor of public policy at Queen Mary University of London and a former head of policy planning in No.10. Vijay K. Luthra is a public service transformation specialist and former civil servant, local government councillor, school governor and NHS NED