Ministers must “get a grip” on the civil service by slashing the size of Whitehall and doubling the number of special advisers, a report backed by Michael Gove has said.
Policy Exchange said that the Government needed to put into reverse a process whereby power had “leached away from ministers to arm’s length bodies, unaccountable advisory groups and experts, the civil service and the courts”.
In its report – Getting A Grip On The System: Restoring Ministerial Authority Over The Machine – the think-tank identifies an “imbalance of power” between ministers and an “ever-expanding civil service”, with the senior civil service increasing by 67 per cent since 2012.
At the same time, increased ministerial churn has resulted in ministers having less experience than in the past.
According to Policy Exchange’s analysis, Cabinet ministers have half as much experience at junior ministerial level than in the 1990s, and significantly less experience at Cabinet level.
The average length of Cabinet experience has declined from 60 months at the end of Jim Callaghan’s government in 1979, to 38 months at the end of Rishi Sunak’s government.
The report argues that ministers have seen their power further reduced by the rise of judicial review and an increasingly independent civil service.
To wrest back control, it recommends a series of measures including cutting the number of senior civil servants by 40 per cent to take it back to 2013 levels, with the reduction accompanied by a pay increase of up to 30 per cent.
It also calls for the number of politically-appointed special advisers (known as spads) to be increased from the 117-odd employed by the last government to between 200 and 300.
The report says that the Government should reject any notion of the Civil Service being given statutory independence or the Ministerial Code being put on a statutory footing, but it calls for the Civil Service Code to be amended to “clarify officials’ duty to comply with UK law, which does not include international law unless specifically enacted”.
The recommendation follows the attempt by the FDA Civil Service Union to take the Government to court over the Conservatives’ Rwanda scheme – which the Labour Government has now dropped – on the basis that Home Office staff might be asked to break international law.
Endorsing the report, Mr Gove said that it “pushes back hard on the pretensions of those who believe whole areas of public life and decision making impacting the population should be fenced off and left in the hands of technocrats beyond any political accountability.”
The report’s lead author, Stephen Webb, who previously worked as a civil servant in the Home Office and Cabinet Office, said: “The dilution of power and accountability has hamstrung the ability of ministers to get things done, and eroded public faith in politics.
“There is no democratic mandate or accountability for rule by experts, which can only return us to the orderly management of decline.”
Writing in The Telegraph, the former prime minister Liz Truss said that during the Tories’ 14 years in power they had failed to “dismantle the Leftist technocratic state we were bequeathed in 2010”.
Ms Truss said that Labour had “no agenda” to “dismantle the bloated Whitehall bureaucracy” and claimed that Sir Keir Starmer’s government had enhanced it “by bringing supposedly impartial former civil servants like Sue Gray and Sir Patrick Vallance into the heart of the Labour administration”.
In a separate development, a number of MPs have been elected to Parliament with a background in the Civil Service.
For example, Miatta Fahnbulleh – a former senior civil servant in the Cabinet Office – was elected in Peckham and immediately appointed as a junior minister in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.
Other MPs with civil service experience include Labour MPs Torsten Bell, Rachel Blake, Dan Tomlinson, Kanishka Narayan, Katie White, Hamish Falconer, Anna Dixon, Jeevun Sandher and Jennifer Craft, as well as the Liberal Democrats’ Calum Miller.
Alex Thomas, the programme director at the Institute for Government think-tank, told The Telegraph it was “an unusually high number of civil servants coming in”.
Mr Thomas said it was “good having people in Parliament who understand how government works” but that they would “need to pretty rapidly build up their political experience”.
“The skills to operate successfully in Parliament and in the political context are quite different to the civil service,” he said.
Iain Mansfield, a former civil servant and special adviser who is now the director of research at Policy Exchange, and co-authored their report, said: “We should welcome the fact that some MPs have been civil servants: it is always helpful if politicians have an understanding of how the sausage is made.
“Furthermore for civil servants who want to be political, it’s absolutely right that they should leave in order to pursue those aims openly, so that the impartiality of the civil service is maintained.”
