13 July 2007
The new prime minister's plan to give Parliament greater powers sounds good on paper. But, just like his predecessors, he has made major machinery-of-government changes without involving either House
New governments nearly always reorganise the 'Whitehall Village'. More in hope than expectation, when giving evidence to the Commons public administration select committee last December, I suggested what should happen when the change of prime minister took place.
Instead of Gordon Brown turning up in Parliament and saying: 'Here's one I prepared earlier', there should be some debate and discussion before ministries are reorganised, and Parliament might even be involved.
On June 15, the committee issued a detailed and thoughtful report on Machinery of government changes. The facts they unearthed for the report are fascinating: since 1947 there have been 154 'Orders in Council' to reorganise significant chunks of Whitehall. On only 11 occasions has there been a debate in Parliament. The last one of those — about the abolition of the Civil Service Department — was more than 25 years ago.
Does it matter and who cares? It matters a great deal, for several reasons. First of all, every reorganisation costs money. No-one has a clue precisely how much, because these things are never priced. But we can be pretty sure we are talking millions of pounds, if not hundreds of millions, over the lifetime of a Parliament.
The Treasury insists as a near universal rule that departments have to bear the cost of reorganisations within their existing budgets. This almost certainly means that there is a knock-on effect on 'frontline services', as it is very unlikely that these costs can be absorbed easily in ever more tightly squeezed budgets.
It is, of course, not just the direct costs that matter. Every reorganisation means some disruption. When the committee asked former Cabinet secretary Lord Butler how long it takes for things to settle down after a reorganisation, he replied: 'Longer than you think.' He added rather ominously that: 'I have come to think, and I probably thought this when in government, that the frictional cost of making changes very often does exceed the benefit.'
The pace of frequent reorganisations also means that things hardly ever get to actually 'settle down'. Former housing minister Nick Raynsford told the committee that in his eight years in government his role had moved from Environment, Local Government and the Regions to Transport, Local Government and the Regions to Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and finally to Communities and Local Government. In his view, this had damaged both institutional memory and understanding of what policy his unit was supposed to be pursuing.
All of this might be all right if the purpose of the changes were sensible in the first place. When Professor Christopher Pollitt looked at this issue in the mid-1980s he concluded that only about half the changes were about policy — in other words making changes to better enable implementation. Almost as many were actually about egos in Cabinet and deal-making between rival factions.
Even those focused on policy were often as much about being seen to be doing something as actually doing it. And the beauty of continuous reorganisation is that nothing remains static long enough for anyone to evaluate whether it worked or not.
All of this led the PASC to conclude that what was needed was a more formal process of parliamentary scrutiny before major machinery-of-government changes are made. At the moment, Parliament is involved because Orders in Council have to be laid before it. But that procedure is largely meaningless.
The 'affirmative' procedure, which means both Houses of Parliament have to have a positive vote in favour, has been used only once in the past 60 years. The 'negative' procedure, under which someone has to 'Pray against' for an Order to be debated, has happened only a few times because the government has a simple way of getting around it. It doesn't usually lay the Order until well after the reorganisation has taken place. In recent cases, this has included the Order being laid almost three months after the creation of the DCLG. The one for the ODPM took an impressive six months.
This isn't just a New Labour problem — John Major only got around to laying an Order authorising the creation of the merged Department for Education and Employment in December 1995, after announcing it in July (it lasted five years before being broken up again).
So when PASC chair Tony Wright declared it was like a 'constitutional Christmas' when Gordon Brown made his announcement about greater powers for Parliament, he was getting a bit carried away. After all, Brown had already done just what the committee had asked him not to, and carried out a big reorganisation without any consultation.
And the new Governance of Britain green paper contains nothing that would prevent that happening again, and again and again in the future.
Colin Talbot is professor of public policy and management and director of the Herbert Simon Institute at the University of Manchester
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