Re:View 5 September 2025
Chief Executive
Welcome back - as the new school year kicks off, so does the latest Government reset.
On Monday, Politico published an article entitled “Keir Starmer wants to fix Britain. He’s still working out how.” It detailed the latest set of changes the PM has made to his No10 operation — including moving Darren Jones from Chief Secretary to the Treasury to a newly created Chief Secretary to the PM. That article needed an update by Tuesday, when we learnt that the PM’s mission unit was being scrapped.
I am not the first to say it, but it all looks very much like moving the deck chairs while the ship is sinking.
Quite a few people have made the point that it’s hard to deliver when you’re not clear what it is you’re trying to achieve. But while that’s clearly a truism ( and polling shows that the public don’t know what the PM stands for), I think the problem is much more rooted in our sclerotic State. Right now, even the most laser-focused, visionary PM would struggle to delivery with the current machinery of government.
We really mean it here at Re:State when we say we need to remake the State and we back it up with bold ideas for how to do that, but while I believe the PM really means it when he says he wants to “rewire” the State, I am not seeing the actions to back it up. It’s those actions that will enable the ever elusive ‘delivery’.
Two articles this week highlight this very point. First, the ever sensible Paul Johnson writing in The Times on Monday made the case for higher pay for public sector leaders. “I know that pay isn’t everything… but nor is pay nothing. If the pay offer is set wrong then we will miss out on people who could make a big difference and there is a great deal at stake here.” It’s an unpopular opinion that we at Re:State make on a regular basis: government is grappling with the most critical and complex challenges, we need the best and brightest to solve those, ergo we need to be willing to pay them properly. Simple — and within the PM’s gift to sort.
The second article, also in The Times, is by Juliet Samuel. In it she argues that “most liberal democratic governing apparatuses” have become paralysed by their own behaviours: “the generation of huge documents, the running of consultations and the fighting of legal battles”. We would add to that to that the suffocating impact of quangos — a driver of a decent portion of those documents, consultations and legal battles. And, again, all within the PM’s gift to sort (speaking of which, where is the radical plan for rationalising public bodies and bringing accountability back to ministers?).
If the PM really wants to deliver for the British people, he would seriously, and ambitiously, overhaul the nuts and bolts of how the government works. I’ll say it again: a handful of different advisors will not cut it, we need nothing less than a total remaking of the State.