Following recent comments from the prime minister concerning excessive bureaucracy, another senior government representative has declined to place the blame on officials, who he said are equally supportive of reform
Cabinet Office minister Darren Jones has said that civil servants are eager to be “radical in delivering change” across government.
Last month, prime minister Keir Starmer told members of parliament’s Liaison Committee of his frustration at the barriers that exist to delivery in government.
“Every time I go to pull a lever there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations, arm’s-length bodies that mean that the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be,” he said.
Speaking at the Institute for Government’s annual conference last week, Jones was asked for his thoughts on where the blame lies for the situation. He refused to blame civil servants, and suggested that officials are also frustrated.
“Every civil servant I’ve met has wanted to be as radical in delivering change I want to be,” he said. “But over the years we’ve ended up with a system that doesn’t enable them to do their work, in the same way that politicians might express their frustrations, as effectively as you might want it to be.”
Jones said he believed part of the problem was because the civil service had become “kind of bloated” over time.
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“As a consequence, in terms of permission and mandates and risk-taking, we have a lot of internal discussion but not enough doing,” he said. “I’m not going to criticise civil servants, and I’m not going to criticise departments, because ultimately it’s for ministers to reshape that in the way that we want to. I’m much more interested in owning the future as opposed to commenting on the past and I feel quite positive about that direction of travel.”
The minister said he plans to speed up the work of government by empowering civil servants to act on their own initiative and rely less on their political masters for approval.
Speaking at the Institute for Government’s annual conference, he said that officials sought permission to act from ministers too frequently and that a culture shift could speed up the work of government.
“One of the changes I’m making is the mandate we give to civil servants to resolve issues without it escalating too quickly up the senior rankings of politicians,” he said. “I think that too often things have ended up in the prime minister’s box that really shouldn’t be there.”
Jones added that the same was the case in relation to permissions that were sought from him.
“My sense is that’s because we as politicians haven’t necessarily given some of our officials the authority themselves, or for the rest of Whitehall, to know that they have fully the authority to just fix a problem,” he said.
