Whitehall remade
Directory of Strategy
Welcome to Re:Think, our newly-christened blog! Now that Reform has rebranded as Re:State we’re re-releasing a few of our classic products with a bit of a revamp.
Marking the launch on Monday, we also released our Re:Think essay collection, bringing together pieces from thinkers and leaders across politics to talk about why our work matters, and to give a flavour of what you can see from us coming forward.
Here are my takeaways from the five guest essays we published on Whitehall.
A new era of system leadership – Mike Bracken CBE
History often shows us how contingent the present is on a few key choices. Mike’s essay explores how, if some critical decisions had been made differently, then the relationship between technology and the British State could be radically different.
Google’s acquisition of Deepmind in 2014 stands out as a critical missed opportunity. The absence of UK-owned frontier AI companies is noticeable now that Generative AI is poised to reshape parts of the global economy. But back then very few policymakers took it seriously enough to notice.
Hindsight is 20/20, but foresight is even better. In the future Whitehall will have to contend with more generational technologies than just AI. It needs the prescience to identify those technologies and support governments in navigating the changes they will bring.
Fixing the levers – Rt Hon Claire Coutinho MP
A regrettable aspect of our system is that many Ministers leave office wishing they had known at the start how poorly the levers of power really work. Claire wrote about how resistant the systems of Whitehall are to change, and how much groupthink holds back better government, a key lesson to learn from the Covid inquiry.
I’m particularly struck by how often groupthink holds back proper accountability. Often it's impossible to track down who made key decisions, because nobody really made them. Collectively, the system just assumed that would be the outcome. Levers like personal accountability need to be “reattached” to the Whitehall machine for a better State to exist.
Risk aversion is killing the State – Chris Curtis MP
Often, risk aversion is the risky option. Policymakers commonly refrain that government is risk-averse, but looking at the state of the State that clearly isn’t true. Chris’ essay focused on how a badly-calibrated instinct for risk has led Whitehall astray, causing it to create much more risk in pursuit of risk-minimisation.
The new Building Safety Regulator is a particularly striking example — slowing down the building of vital new housing in the name of safety, often meaning that families stay put in older, more dangerous and overcrowded housing in the first place, making everyone less safe.
The kind of honest conversations about trade-offs that Chris calls for have never been more necessary than they are now.
Public credibility demands a total rethink – Rachel Wolf
Complexity is one of the great causes of organisational entropy. Without reform, many institutions decline in capability over time. Rachel wrote about how in her experience of government, the quality of the Whitehall machine noticeable declined since 2010, driven by expansion of the workforce, less predictability, and more complexity.
The marginal policy is often a tweak or a change on top of an existing policy, adding layers of complexity which hamper decision making and slow down the state. But the incentives for officials to simplify, to shrink their own personal domains, to focus radically rather than acquiring more responsibility, are non-existent.
Ultimately, the crisis of democratic legitimacy isn’t helped when the politicians elected to run the system can’t make sense of it, let alone lead it.
Remaking Whitehall from the centre – Rt Hon Lord Francis Maude
Few reformers have followed the civil service as long and as closely as Francis Maude. As a former adviser and Minister, he reflects how key constitutional reforms to the civil service are vital to making it more accountable, and fit for delivering for the government of the day.
He points out that the common refrain that the time is not right for this kind of fundamental reform will always be true. Radical change is never more feasible than it is today, and delay only makes it harder.
Reform is a choice, but change is inevitable
For my own article, I reflected on what the future of an unreformed Whitehall might look like. History is littered with institutions which couldn’t adapt to changing times, but this has never protected them from it. Change is inevitable, and the only way to protect important institutions is for them to reform themselves over time. The permanent civil service is now showing deep cracks, and isn’t fit for the most pressing challenges of today. But rather than being nostalgic for the current model at all costs, we should remember that everything we take for granted about it was a radical innovation at the time it was created. That’s the spirit we must embrace to rebuild the institution of the civil service.