Who's in charge around here, Secretary?

I worry when I read stories like the business secretary Kemi Badenoch complaining that she cannot deliver her party’s manifesto plans to scrap all EU laws due to Whitehall intransigence. It makes me wonder who exactly is in charge of public policy: elected ministers or their unelected officials? 

There is an attitude among senior officials that they know better than these' here-today-gone-tomorrow' ministers. The old dictum of ‘advisers advise, ministers decide’ seems reversed. We have unintentionally ended up with a self-propagating bureaucracy who are either averse to change, or who feel they are above the democratic decision-making process. 

Past governments are much to blame, of course. It’s nice to create new ministries that give your colleagues nice jobs and chauffer-driven cars. It’s easy to create new quangos and agencies, with their associated bureaucracy, to address every new issue that the media get agitated about. But if ministers are going to manage the bureaucracy, they need principle and long-term vision.

Luckily we have such a plan, in the shape of a new book, Shrinking Whitehall by management guru Tim Ambler. He recommends that Whitehall departments should have a small core group dealing with policy, plus as many executive agencies as needed to deliver those policies. That was, indeed, the Next Steps plan created in the 1980. But decades of bureaucratic drift, the civil service has morphed into an unfocused blob of confused structures, functions and priorities.

At the last count, there were 636,786 UK civil and public servants. Of those, says Ambler, 105,291 belong in public corporations, since they work in things like museums, the BBC and other units which are not part of governing at all.

Scrapping all quangos — ministers can take advice from whoever they like, without needing permanent bureaucracies to advise them — and ending duplication in both policy and executive functions, means another 193,998 of the remaining posts could be lost, as and when their present occupants retire. That would shrink Whitehall numbers by 53%, cut the number of departments from 43 to 11, and reduce the size of the cabinet by a third. 

Saving staff and costs would be welcomed by over-taxed citizens but Ambler's recommendations are more important than that: government need to re-focus on what it really needs to do and re-structure to deliver it.

Then, perhaps, ministers might be able to get a grip on this turbulent beast.

Buy Shrinking Whitehall here.