How should the Centre of government (i.e., No 10 and the Cabinet Office) organise itself so that it is effective and ensures effective government more generally? A recent report, Power with Purpose (PWP), by the Commission for the Centre of Government under the auspices of the Institute for Government, reminds us of the difficulties of managing and deploying public power. 

PWP seems, at first glance, a rather technocratic report. It recommends changes to the machinery of government—that is, structures, institutional processes and functions, rather than values or people. It explicitly states it does not deal with issues like the selection and appointment of people (ministers or officials) or the quality of the PM’s leadership. But institutions and processes do matter. They can provide ballast in the never-ending storm of politics. True, a good institution will never make up for an incompetent PM; but a badly designed institution can hamper a competent one. And a well-designed institution with clear processes will attract talented people. 

PWP states that the UK has the worst of both worlds: it is a highly centralised country with a weak centre of government. Executive government in the UK is often likened to a set of departmental baronies (e.g., Guy Lodge and Ben Rogers, Whitehall’s Black Box, 2006), the central government departments such as the Home Office being enormous and the source of most legal and policymaking power. By contrast, No 10 and the Cabinet Office (the former lodged within the latter) are small and weak, lacking the power to ensure effective cross government responses or accountability within government. 

In recent years, PWP argues, the Centre has become flabby and unfocused. It has taken on too many functions and staff; it has flitted from crisis to crisis, event to event. It is ineffective, short-term rather than strategic, and the vacuum created by the weakness of the Centre has been filled by the Treasury, which has its own distorting set of fiscal priorities. All this has contributed to the blunders of our governments. So PWP proposes a number of reforms which aim to make the Centre more strategic and targeted in its approach to governing. These are informed by various principles, such as: ‘do what can only be done at the Centre’, and ‘do not let short-term imperatives crowd out long-term thinking’ (8). 

PWP recommends, amongst other matters, that the government should set a number of ‘Priorities for Government’. These would be a small set of medium to long term objectives for the government, with measurable outcomes; as well as a set of underlying principles to aid the Centre when making trade-offs between competing policies. The Priorities for Government would anchor the Centre; without them, the Centre is apt to lose direction and drift towards dealing with immediate problems.

The report recommends that the PM should appoint an Executive Cabinet Committee (Executive Committee) and a First Secretary of State (First Secretary). The Committee would consist of a small, select group of ministers including the PM, Chancellor and the First Secretary. It would be collectively responsible for the government’s most strategic decisions; and would hold departments to account for implementing the Priorities for Government. This shift of core responsibilities to this smaller body just recognises that Cabinet has for many years not been a functioning decision-making body (40). The First Secretary would work with the Chancellor, head a new Department for the Civil Service, sit on the Executive Committee, and generally free up the PM so that they can focus on the most important matters of the day. 

No 10 and Cabinet Office would be merged into a new Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC). This merger would simply recognise political reality. The Cabinet Office is a ‘convenient fiction that obscures more than it clarifies’ (77): it is not in any meaningful sense a department which has interests separate from that of the PM. The DPMC would shed a number of functions currently held by the Cabinet Office, and focus instead on a smaller number of core tasks, including the PM’s core priorities and needs (like the Priorities for Government and their delivery, providing advice on economic and fiscal policy), supporting Cabinet (e.g., the coordination of national security), propriety and ethics, and constitutional policy (a rare example of where policy should remain with the Centre). 

Finally, PWP addresses an important issue of capacity.  For too long, the ongoing corporate management of the UK civil service has been marginalised because of a lack of bandwidth, multiple lines of accountability and (of course) events.  A Department for the Civil Service (DCS) should be established, responsible for managing the medium to long term health of the civil service. The First Secretary would be the DCS minister, signalling to all the importance of the civil service as an institution in its own right. 

Much of what PWP discusses is not new. The need for a small, agile centre; the growing importance of the Prime Minister and the diminution of Cabinet; friction between the Centre and the Treasury; the lack of joined-up government around crosscutting issues; the marginalisation of strategic thinking, especially on matters of state capacity—we have been here before. PWP’s recommendations seem very sensible, especially a trimmed down Centre and the establishment of a DPMC: state power may be most effective—and accountable—where directed with tight aims through clear channels; and where concerns about the short term are tempered by considerations of the long term. So these matters and reforms are worth raising again, particularly with the possibility of a new government taking power sometime before January 2025.

Indeed, PWP echoes some of a report commissioned by the Conservative Government and published last year, the 2023 Independent Review of Governance and Accountability in the Civil Service (the Maude Report). The Maude Report was far more political in content, and more broad ranging, but it too was critical of the unwieldy nature of the Centre and the failure of successive governments to improve and strengthen the civil service: what the Report called the ‘stewardship function’. 

PWP wears the politics of its recommendations rather lightly. The allocation or reallocation of resource at the Centre is not a technocratic matter; it can be deeply political. Witness, for example, Dominic Cummings’ attempts to restructure part of No 10 with a Nasa-style control centre during covid, and the response that received. How, in practice, will the PM choose the Priorities for Government; or select a First Secretary and members of the Executive Committee? If an Executive Committee is established, how prepared will it be to allow key decisions be unpicked by the larger Cabinet, and by the governing party? How will the Treasury respond to the DPMC as a separate, competing source of advice to the PM on economic issues? Many PWP proposals just shift the politics of decision-making to the beginning of a government; and generously presume a fair amount of civility and consensus amongst ministers, and between departments. 

So far, PWP has not received much attention from the media, perhaps because it is such a long report: 150 pages. The Maude Report was 140 pages long. Sadly, these are reports meant for a select few in Westminster and Whitehall, and anoraks of a particular kind. Members of the public were never going to read these reports, nor understand what they might tell us about British government. Maybe this doesn’t matter: the history of machinery of government reform is a history of buried, or half-implemented reviews. Anyway, if Labour comes into power, the executive-minded Sue Gray will have firm views about how to organise the Centre. 

Still, it would be good if the public law academic profession also examined such issues. Of course, we can never have too much work on human rights, judicial review and the theological disputes of courts. But as Terence Daintith and Alan Page reminded us a quarter of a century ago, how the executive organises itself internally will determine the extent to which it can be held accountable externally by Parliament and the courts. So these proposals are potentially quite constitutionally significant.

Public lawyers have, however, mostly conceded the ground of public administration (with some exceptions, of course—e.g., Daintith and Page on the Executive in the Constitution, Janet McLean’s work on office, or Robert Thomas’ Administrative Law in Action) to the often bloodless research of political scientists. There are many reasons for this retreat—public lawyers’ inbuilt fear of the executive; being caught in Manichean theories that divide the world into Parliament and the courts; as well as methodological (how to document and evaluate executive action, let alone effective executive action) and conceptual anxieties (how to understand the internal workings of the executive). 

But some of the matters suggested by both PWP and the Maude Report are big public law questions. Some are about accountability: e.g., if a DPMC is established, how is it to be held accountable, and for what? (PWP suggests a new DPMC select committee, coupled with the First Secretary sitting with the PM at the Liaison Committee.) How does collective Cabinet responsibility work where the Executive Committee is making decisions on some core matters of government, and Cabinet on others? Other questions are about capacity, constraint and effectiveness. How is state power best channelled to be effective? What should we make of the apparent Westminster consensus that Cabinet is not a functioning decision-making body? How can institutions best support the PM and the government, and to what extent—if at all—should they constrain? How far should the shape and form of executive institutions be determined by the needs of democratically elected office holders?  

The effective deployment of state power is as much a public law matter as are its accountability and constraint. Do we not want a functioning state with clarity of structure and purpose? A state that delivers on its priorities is a state that will enjoy political authority with its citizens. It should be possible to explore how to make public power effective without endorsing executive aggrandisement. And if we as public lawyers do not engage, then the vacuum will be filled by those with fewer scruples about the uses of public power. 

I am grateful to the UKCLA editors for their careful and thoughtful comments. 

Ben Yong is Associate Professor in Public Law and Human Rights at the Durham Law School.

(Suggested citation: B. Yong, ‘Making Government Work, or ‘How I learned to stop worrying and love the Centre of Government’’, U.K. Const. L. Blog (28th March 2024) (available at https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/