It is a striking facet of modern politics that the events that have the greatest consequence often go unheralded, while enormous attention is lavished on cosmetic exercises.
Cabinet reshuffles are a good example of this. While these are hugely important indicators of who is going up and who is going down, it is a rare reshuffle that has lasting significance in policy or governance terms.
Another example is the Whitehall shake-up. Every so often the media and the political class get terribly excited at the news that ministries are being abolished, created or merged.
There is little that speaks so loudly to the political incontinence of the ruling parties as the notion that moving a block of civil servants a few hundred yards down the road will have a real impact on the standard of governance of the country. (Sometimes the civil servants even remain in their existing location under new management.)
A few weeks ago the political world was abuzz with the splitting of the Home Office; now there is much talk of the destruction of the Department of Trade and Industry and the emergence of a new super-ministry of environment, rural affairs and energy.
There are only three reasons for such shake-ups. One is a strategic wish to give an issue sharper focus and priority: to create a Cabinet rank minister for the policy area.
A good example of this was the splitting of the then Overseas Development Agency from the Foreign Office in 1997 with the creation of the Department for International Development. This might be termed the benign shake-up, although even here it is questionable how much difference it really makes.
The next is the need to create a job for a Cabinet heavyweight who is not to be given one of the three big offices of state. Clearly, what might be called the ‘Prescott gambit’ is a pretty feeble reason and it is unsurprising that such creatures tend to be short-lived.
The third – and the most frequent reason – is that the existing arrangements are judged to have failed. Indeed, after a ministerial resignation there is no finer sign of a policy area in crisis than the restructuring of its governing ministry.
What conclusions should one reach then, about a government that has significantly restructured all but four of its major departments? Of the three great offices of state, only the Treasury is largely as it was in 1997. The Home Office, as we know, is to be split; the Foreign Office lost DfID and gained a chunk of trade from the DTI.
Health, culture and defence escaped major shake-ups, although culture had to be rebranded and the DoH has been reformed so that its permanent secretary is not the chief executive of the NHS.
Labour inherited a Department for Education and Employment but after a few years this was broken up, with employment policy shuffled off to the newly created Department for Work and Pensions.
Thus employment policy – in a nod to the enormous upsurge in tax credits – was reduced to managing the burgeoning array of means-tested in-work benefits.
Education kept hold of training, becoming the Department for Education and Skills. The DWP rose from the ashes of the Department for Social Security – itself one of the basket cases of the first Labour term and since then reduced to little more than an appendage of the Treasury.
Environment, transport and the regions – a new ministry created for John Prescott in 1997 – is a case study in itself. First, environment was split off and merged with the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food after the latter’s lamentable oversight of the foot and mouth crisis. Then transport was split off to become the Department for Transport (the for being a pivotal distinction from the days when it was a mere ministry of transport).
Regions, local government and other sundry bits followed Prescott into the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, from whence they were split out to become the Department for Communities and Local Government. Prescott’s office is now purely ceremonial – the portfolio for which he was perhaps always best suited.
The Lord Chancellor’s Department became the Department for Constitutional Affairs, subsuming the Scotland and Wales offices, and is now to become a ministry of justice.
The Department of Trade and Industry, long on the chopping block, now shares trade with the Foreign Office and was hilariously renamed the DPEI for all of a week until its new incumbent decided he didn’t want to be known as the Dippy minister (or worse still the productivity energy and industry secretary – or Penis). The shambles spoke, however, to the department’s utter lack of definition.
There have been a variety of reasons for all these shake-ups but it hardly speaks of good governance.
Tony Blair once espoused the merit of joined-up government. Constant joining, separation and rejoining can surely not be what he meant.
