What do you get when you abolish a government department?
I'm not sure the answer is always 'progress'.
There hasn’t been much in the way of interesting policy announcements during the Tory leadership election. On the whole, what we’ve been treated to since July has been an uninspiring menu of culture war bullshit, tax cut fantasy and random right wing hobbyhorses.
However, during the early weeks of the contest, one genuinely meaty idea was tossed around. Kemi Badenoch’s plan to break up the Treasury, whilst unlikely to happen under either Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak, was both an interesting idea in and of itself, and an interesting thing to be announced in terms of what it tells us about where Conservative thinking is at in 2022.
We knew that the party was increasingly hostile to the sorts of old institutions whose defence was once a key cause for the right - but going after one of the great offices of state seems to me to represent a frontier beyond more familiar attacks on universities and the BBC. It also suggests that Conservative projects of the last decade, such as empowering BEIS to have more of a role in economic planning, or Dominic Cummings’s plans to bring The Treasury into a closer orbit of Number 10, have all failed to deliver the results that were being looked for by those on the right with an interest in state reform.
There are various reasons why abolishing The Treasury as we know it might be a good idea. Combining budgetary power over government tax and spend, along with responsibility for debt management and growth planning, and bundling it all onto one institution… well by international standards this is a fairly eccentric thing to do.
Most other countries have come to the conclusion that this is a dysfunctional arrangement. And if you’re going to buck a trend, ideally you want to be able to demonstrate that you’re getting some reward for it. However, there is little evidence of this with our over-powered Treasury.
In fact, the reputation that The Treasury has built for itself over recent years is as a sort of graveyard of good ideas – a veto player within our system that never tires of playing its incredibly strong hand to withhold investment, dampen ambition and prevent other parts of the state from dealing with their problems until a crisis point is reached.
Clearly then, this is an institution with deep-set problems - and as such, any proposals aimed at its reform should be taken seriously.
However, what I think is most interesting about these calls being aired in this leadership contest is the wider context. The Treasury is not the only major government department facing a movement calling for its elimination at the moment. 'Abolish The Home Office' has been a slogan on left Twitter going back many years, but in the post-Windrush world, it's now a movement that's going mainstream. Deep dives into departmental dysfunction have been published in liberal outlets like The Guardian, Tortoise and the New Statesman, and abolition is now a policy that comes with the backing of the leadership of the Green Party.
Once again, Tory voices are also starting to get involved. Whilst perhaps calling more for reform than revolution, and almost certainly biased by a desire to restore their own reputations - former Tory home secretaries like Amber Rudd now take to any platform that will have them to explain why the department is unmanageable, culturally rotten and generally full of skeletons in every cupboard, horror shows in every filing cabinet and dark secrets in every desk-draw.
If we take these calls for Treasury and Home Office abolition, and couple them with the never ending project of Number 10 reform, then we have a situation in which three out of the four great offices of state are under the microscope, and felt by a broad coalition to be incredibly dysfunctional. This is obviously a very worrying state of affairs - but it's also one that should make us pause for thought before calling for radical actions to reform (or abolish) any one individual piece of that puzzle.
Because what's more likely - that all of these departments have individual unsolvable institutional problems... or that the issues they face are common and cross-cutting? And if we conclude that it's the latter, then what could we expect breaking up the Treasury or abolishing the Home Office to actually achieve?
My suspicion is not a huge amount. In both of these departments, the basic problems we hear about time and time again are cultural. Both seem afflicted by a lack of trust in outsiders, whether that's those charged with delivering public services in The Treasury’s case, or those who advocate for the rights of migrants with the Home Office. Both seem incredibly risk averse and short-termist. Both are defensive in the face of criticism, which has led to a vicious cycle of ever-hardening internal positions on matters of pointless and destructive principle.
These kinds of cultural issues have their roots in a range of things. No doubt organisational structures play a role, but so do ideologies like New Public Management, so does pedagogy and the ways senior civil servants are trained through the Fast Stream, so does the political culture that informs the behaviour of departmental ministers... the list is long.
My fear is that if we ever tried something like abolishing the Home Office we would find, to paraphrase the management consultants' mantra, that culture eats structure for breakfast. We would create a new institution, give them a flashy new acronym and a shiny new office… and within a relatively short period of time we’d find that none of our problems have actually been solved. Power would essentially be in the same kinds of places, held by the same kinds of people, answerable to the same kinds of politicians.
Civil service reform is a good idea. Indeed, I think it's essential to seriously solving any of the myriad problems this country faces. Abolishing departments might be a useful thing to do as catalytic process if it leads us to have much deeper conversations about power, accountability and democracy... but on it's own, I'm not sure it’s the answer.
Despite appearing radical, on their own, these kinds of call actually represent an attempt at a kind of shortcut. Real cultural change would be a much broader based project, of which changing organisational structures would only form one, quite small part. We need to think bigger. We need to be prepared to do the real work, to do root and branch reform, rather than just re-potting.
To abolition… and beyond.
as I see it, and boxing off the question of whether the people at large are just bad, the three horizontals are the civil service (who show up and do the jobs), political parties (who compete to, essentially, pick ministers), and the media (the howling arena of political competition).
Obviously groups two and three can be interested in civil service reform, but they're unlikely to be interested in changing their own behaviour and even less likely to admit there is anything wrong. Group two might in theory be interested in changing group three but they're both scared of group three and increasingly complicit and intertwined - indeed, very often, intermarried - with it.
As such it's no surprise that groups two and three tend to propose structural change, which primarily affects group one:-)
super interesting thank you! I currently work for a huge aid organisation (wont say which but it may be telling soon!) which is 1 of 8 organisations the USA transfers all powers to with relation to managing migration. The organisation I work for is responsible for the biggest intake and management of migrants, in defacto we are the 'Home office'....It would be like if Oxfam were given the same responsibility...t's kind of crazy concept which helps the US govt devoid all accountability and respsobility to the organisations but then on the other hand some say, at least it is being managed by others that have better skillset then govt officials...rightly or wrongly it is the structure they use....food for thought perhaps...