The Institute for Government’s ‘Power with Purpose’ Report

Endsieg for CABOFF

In March this year, the Institute for Government released a paper, Power with Purpose, laying out the case for what it calls “seven recommendations for radical reform” of “the centre”. Dominic Cummings has described the IfG in an arresting turn of phrase as the “in-house lobby” of the deep state; while the recommendations are addressed (in faintly mafiosi language “the next government will need to urgently implement these reforms” — nice little army base you have here colonel) to “whoever” might form the next government, it is pretty clear this is a thinly veiled manifesto for Gray/Starmer. It must be viewed in concert with 2022’s New Britain paper, which details how the constitution and legislature will look under Starmer, with Power with Purpose focusing on the executive branch.

The first thing to note, is that the Establishment now recognises the need to ‘reform’ the commanding heights of the state; this recognition is, of course, entirely insincere, what it signifies, rather is the determination to hijack the language with which Progressives have criticised the British state for a decade. The same thing is happening with Housing, an issue on which Starmer has successfully seized the baton of reform from the Right while splitting the enemy coalition using social housing. Dominic Cummings is liberally quoted in PwP, it is admitted that “the centre of government has failed successive prime ministers”. Reformists must have a counter to these sorts of tactics which will define the Starmer years. PwP does not address what is actually wrong with the civil service: implementation, procurement and lack of meritocracy. It runs in the tradition of SW1 of tinkering around with ‘vision’ and ‘strategy’ while leaving the boring nuts and bolts of how contracts are signed, and people hired, to more diminutive servants. Civil service reform is ultimately not something which can be solved within democratic politics (including right-wing democratic politics); the institution of the civil service, a cadre of spiritual aristocrats set apart from society by examination, is a philosophically sensitive organism which requires the application of careful thought to remedy its ills.

Democracy is stupid. There is no getting around this fact. As has been described in J’accuse before, there is an intrinsic problem with separating policymaking from policy implementation. As long as elected politicians, most of whom have no experience managing large organisations, are expected to make policy; the civil service will always fulfil a bastardised function in which purely contingent constraints are imagined to be necessary i.e: it is likely politicians will continue pandering to pensioners, so we must include the ever rising cost of state pensions in all budgetary forecasts. The civil service neither does what the elected government tells it to (for good reason), nor does it govern of its own accord. Most of the problems identified by ‘Power with Purpose’ have their cause in this essential fact. The fact that ‘the centre’ is bad at ‘long term planning’ is an inevitable side-effect of Democracy, the only reason a new government will ever be elected is because people dislike the current government, ergo, the new government will have different goals to the old government. 

The civil service tries to get around this by the careful use of selective determinism; where some, properly political, choices are construed to be diktats of necessity. The instrument most commonly used to achieve this purpose in the past has been E.U law; since leaving the E.U, most dysfunction in British government comes from the rapid scramble for a new selectively deterministic God politicians cannot circumnavigate: for a while, Human Rights law seemed to fit the bill, until the Tories worked out you can simply get rid of Human Rights and nothing will happen. The reason Labour are so desperate to tinker with the fundamentals of the British state is to create fail-safe replacements for the function once played so admirably by the E.U: preventing any overthrowing of the 1997 settlement. 

The Recommendations

Some recommendations of the review are simply the formalisation of de facto practice, for example, the idea of an ‘executive cabinet’ of key ministers reflects how most British governments have chosen to organise themselves: with Blair’s ‘sofa government’ and David Cameron’s ‘quad’ being two examples. It is unclear how making this an official post would improve collective decision-making, given that such discretion of choice is already available to the Prime Minister. There are some perfectly predictable things we must get out of the way. Power with purpose repeats the patent untruth that the U.K is “one of the most centralised countries in the world”; British subjects may currently vote for their local council, their local mayor, their local M.P and local assemblies, yet there is no Presidential forum in which national issues, like immigration, may be discussed independent from the tedium of bins, dogs and potholes. During Lockdown, the power-mad ‘devolved administrations’ established internal borders within the state and sent people to prison. Being ignorant of this, Power with Purpose repeats the tiresome shibboleth about giving “local and devolved government” an “advisory role” which, mercifully, is never given concrete shape. The omnipresent Stakeholders, the ruling class of Britain, are also included in this; the report abounds with praise for the role of “civil society”. In a foreshadowing of citizens assemblies, the following is written:

“The centre should also have more capacity to draw in evidence and expertise directly from citizens. It should use methods of democratic participation and deliberative engagement models to understand the perspectives of people affected by policy and input these perspectives into strategic decision making.”

Ghastly stuff. 

The most significant recommendation in the review is the abolition of the Cabinet Office and its replacement by a ‘Department of the Prime Minister’ and a ‘Department of the Civil Service’ headed by a minister. The report is correct to note a consensus among all observers that the Cabinet Office is not fit for purpose, the Cabinet Secretary functions as both the head of a massive organisation, a trouble-shooter for the P.M and an occasional policy unit. The imagined ‘Department for the Prime Minister’ is basically a beefed up secretariat for the P.M allowing them to conduct research necessary to win arguments with other departments and the civil service. It is probably true that, what the authors would no doubt call, ‘the operational capacities’ of the Prime Minister should be much more powerful in contrast to the expertise held by the Bank of England and the Treasury. This is by far the most sensible part of the paper and the comparisons made to the Singaporean PM’s strategy group were interesting. However, creating a new Department of the Civil Service is a tellingly dangerous move with dire implications for British democracy.

The Head of DoCS will, almost certainly, be themselves a Civil Servant. It is also likely that most incoming ministries will be discouraged from changing the DoCS honcho, who will end up serving for ten-year terms with some internally controlled order of succession. Something the Cabinet Secretary does do well is give, at least one civil servant, ‘buy in’ to implement bits of a Prime Minister’s agenda. The Cabinet Secretary is a prestigious job, they get to sit in Cabinet and talk to the P.M daily; and while they are, for sure, infected with the corps-mentality of the civil service, this station does incentivise some cooperation with the government. The Minister for the Civil Service’s prestige will rely entirely on defending the perceived interests of the Civil Service, they will very rapidly develop a ‘culture’ of their own separate from the formal executive. Here is how the powers of DoCS are described:

“The department will take on the leadership, management and capability of the civil service, including the teams responsible for setting and enforcing functional standards of practice, civil service talent, learning and development, and modernisation and reform. It will also have a remit to ensure that policies and budgets take delivery considerations into account.”

This last sentence is the killer, the Head of DoCS will, effectively, have veto powers over any action, by any other part of government, based on a metric (“delivery considerations”) nobody but themselves can determine. The added research capabilities of the P.M’s office are immediately redundant because the new ministry can take whatever output is thereby generated and add an arbitrary price tag for ‘delivery’. The Head of DoCS will easily be the most powerful person in any future government once the office is established. They will have been around for far longer than any minister, they will have the ability to enforce ‘standards of practice’ and ‘talent’; thereby gaining significant clout over any and all civil service appointments. In negotiations with the Treasury and BoE, the PM is often outgunned intellectually and in terms of resources (both time and personnel); however, they retain the trump card of being able to pass a budget through Parliament. If the Treasury wags its head and repeats there is no money for x; the P.M can always immediately pass an Act of Parliament raising taxes so the money is now there. There is no such argument with the sinister ‘delivery considerations’. If the civil service claims something will cost 4.5 billion pounds and take thirty years, all the P.M can do is say ‘No it won’t.” 

To fully see how this will work, we can move onto the next recommendation which catches our eye:

“At the start of each administration the prime minister should take the lead in the development of a set of Priorities for Government. The aim should be to translate manifesto promises and other policy ambitions into a coherent programme that directs government activity and frames priorities that cut across departmental boundaries.”

These ‘priorities for government’ are absolutely essential to the vision of Power with Purpose. They will serve as the scaffolding within which the ‘delivery considerations’ take force. Every incoming party will, in ‘a modernised King’s speech’, be forced to submit its desired policies to a cross-panel including the Treasury, key departmental secretaries and the new Head of the Civil Service. The incoming government will have to argue against these career-bureaucrats, who hold all the information, in order to prove that its policies are ‘workable’ within limits which are, quite possibly, arbitrary. Once agreed upon, these ‘Priorities’ will become permanent targets the civil service, media and dissenting ministers may use to circumnavigate the executive: “The Prime Minister’s tax cut breaks his own bloody Governing Priorities on Fairness for All.”