Why plans to shake up the civil service will be filed in a Whitehall bin

Former Tory minister Lord Maude’s review is expected to propose swingeing reforms but cutting the Treasury down to size has a long history of failure, as Sean O’Grady explains

Francis Maude has some thoughts about the civil service (Justin Sutcliffe)

There’s been a leak – inevitably – of a government-commissioned review into the future of the civil service, possibly inspired by civil servants who don’t especially like being reviewed.

The review, by former Tory minister Lord Maude, is expected to recommend scrapping the post of cabinet secretary, breaking up the Treasury and letting ministers pick top civil servants (presumably from outside Whitehall). The report will be published later in the autumn.

Who is Lord Maude?

He’s Francis Maude, one of a sort of lost generation of Conservative politicians who were entering their prime just when the Tories last went into the wilderness in 1997. In the days when Tony Blair was the sun king of British politics, Maude served as William Hague’s little-noticed shadow chancellor and then in a variety of shadow roles. When the Tories got back in 2010 he was made Cabinet Office minister, concentrating on civil service reform and the machinery of government in No 10. So he knows a bit about it.

What’s his big idea?

There are three: breaking up the Treasury; allowing politicians a much bigger say in choosing their senior civil servants; and separating the role of cabinet secretary and head of the civil service. In the Maude plan, public spending management would be hived off and the Treasury left to concentrate on macro-economic policy. A Department of Public Spending would be charged with making taxpayers’ money go further and improving productivity. It’s not that novel a concept.

So the ideas aren’t new?

Not really, and the idea of cutting the Treasury down to size has a long history of failure, having been tried a few times. About 60 years ago, when the Labour Party was preparing for government and wanted to put growth first (a familiar theme), it decided that the Treasury’s habitual fiscal caution was holding the country back, so when Harold Wilson (a professional economist and statistician) became premier in 1964, he handed some of the Treasury’s functions to a brand new Department of Economic Affairs. It was headed by a powerful politician in his day, George Brown, and tasked with creating a “National Plan” for growth. A succession of currency crises and deflationary Budgets put an end to the dream, and the DEA was wound up a few years later. In the 1980s Micheal Heseltine advocated a beefed-up, interventionist  Department of Trade and Industry to counterbalance the Treasury, but by the time he himself got the job in 1992, he settled for rather less power.

More recently, and in characteristic iconoclastic style, Dominic Cummings persuaded Boris Johnson that the Treasury was too big for its boots, and sought to place it in its entirety under No 10. When this was put to the then chancellor Sajid Javid in 2020, accompanied by a demand that he surrender control of his special advisers, Javid quit and Rishi Sunak was promoted to chancellor in his place, with Cummings’s remit in his hand. Then the plan to subordinate the Treasury was quietly and mysteriously dropped and, if anything, it and Sunak grew more powerful during the course of the pandemic and its accompanying huge furlough scheme and massive deficits.

Ironically, as an ex-chancellor with a taste for economic policy, Sunak has in effect partly taken over the Treasury, albeit with the acquiescence of Jeremy Hunt.

In reality, the power of the Treasury has a lot to do with the personage of chancellor of the Exchequer rather than an organisation of work. In recent times, the Treasury under Gordon Brown and George Osborne has been a major driver of policy across government; under Alastair Darling and Jeremy Hunt, less so.

Didn’t Liz Truss try something like this, too?

Yes. In her 49 days as PM, she also tried, and failed, to curb the small-c conservative instincts of the Treasury by sacking the permanent secretary, Tom Scholar. She studiously ignored civil service advice and launched her disastrous mini-Budget with Kwasi Kwarteng almost in secret, with the help of outside advisers. “Trussonomics” was and is not a good advertisement for either breaking up the Treasury or politicising the top echelon of the civil service, still less doing both.

What about politicising the civil service?

This also crops up every so often, but it collides with the strong British tradition of an impartial civil service, able to give non-partisan advice and implement policies without political bias. This suits the British system, where power even is more centralised than, say, America where so many jobs are election spoils, but the constitution lays down limits on what they can do.

Along with parliament, the media, the monarchy, the judiciary and semi-autonomous watchdogs, the civil service acts as an informal check and balance against any government tempted to abuse its authority and conventional prerogatives in a mostly unwritten constitution.

Besides, as has been seen in successive administrations of all parties, most of the time ministers are perfectly happy with their teams and, if frictions arise, ways can be found to resolve personality clashes.

The job of the civil service is to tell ministers what is and isn’t possible, and to suggest ways in which they can achieve their election promises – mad or otherwise.

No matter how big the mandate from the voters or how clear the manifesto pledge is, ministers cannot, say, make water flow uphill, even if everyone would really like it to and they promised the electorate to do so. Politicising the service won’t bestow magical powers on stupid politicians. Nor will weakening the imperial position of the cabinet secretary, which would limit the ability of the service to make government work.

What will happen to Maude’s ideas?

They will be ignored. There’s too little time before the next election for radical restructurings, and, as he himself says they need deep cross-party backing to be workable and permanent. Given Rachel Reeves’s dominant role in the next Labour government, it seems improbable that she would volunteer to give up crucial parts of the Treasury in some Tory-inspired experiment. Keir Stamer also seems to be something of a constitutional traditionalist, despite his appointment of former civil servant Sue Gray as a political adviser.

We might also expect that current cabinet secretary, Simon Case, a Johnson-era appointee tangled up in Partygate, might be due a fresh challenge; a nice ambassadorship or a return to the royal household whence he came. A future reforming Conservative government might wish to return to the Maude agenda but possibly for all the wrong reasons.