The Prime Minister deliberately avoids the vision thing, but a gradual picture of his view of the state is emerging from his criticisms of the status quo says Jill Rutter. He needs to be clearer about where he is trying to go.
On Thursday the Prime Minister went to the Reckitt factory in Hull – not to wreck the state, but to give us a further chapter in his view of how the state needs to change.
Back in July it was all sweetness and light: we were told this would be a ‘government of service’, driven by new and inclusive ‘missions’ and where civil servants were valued advisers, respected and listened to.
By December, and the launch of the Plan for Change, the language was changing after only five months in power – too many civil servants were “comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”. After an entirely predictable backlash, the Prime Minister was forced to clarify his remarks. In a letter to the civil service he distinguished between his ‘admiration’ for individual civil servants, but pointed to the frustration which he said he shared with them that ‘Too often, needless bureaucratic impediments, silos, processes about processes, all impede your ability – and therefore also my ability – to deliver for the people we are here to serve.’ That time his de facto deputy, Pat McFadden, was sent out afterwards to set out plans for reform: “the systems and structures they work in are too often outdated and make it hard for them to deliver.”
Roll forward to March and McFadden went first, now suggesting that there was to be a crackdown on poor performers in the civil service. It was left to Starmer to paint a bigger picture. The advance billing suggested this might be his ‘chainsaw’ moment – taking his cue from the destructive swathe being cut through the US’s state apparatus by Elon Musk. Fortunately, Starmer steered clear of Trumpian rhetoric. Instead of a hollowed out state, he confirmed his belief in the positive power of an active state, that made lives easier for people, and guaranteed both national and economic security.
Beyond that though, his prescription was a mash-up of Blair-like enthusiasm for AI, and an attack on red tape and regulators that Liz Truss would have felt at home with.
Part one of his reform plan is the need to reap what the government claims (though the evidence base is hard to track down) are substantial – £ 45bn – annual savings from harnessing the power of AI and data to drag public services into the 21st century. That project, and those calculations, were first aired by the Department of Science Innovation and Technology in January. The Prime Minister picked up that theme and promised a civil service where 10% work in tech jobs (up from 5% now) and there are 2,000 new tech apprentices.
On top of a tech revolution (far from clear when and how long it will take for really substantial change to emerge), the Prime Minister then took aim at what he termed the “watchdog state”. Here he – welcomely – took responsibility for the fact that it was ministers who created the mass of regulation – and the bodies enforcing them and vowed to stop “outsourcing” decisions to people who then became “blockers” on key government policies. As the government is already doing in its Planning Bill, the fundamental need is to reform underlying regulations – for example deciding whether (at least some) bats do not merit protection – rather than attack the regulators. Whether those reforms are enough to speed up the rate of housing and infrastructure building, only time and the courts will tell.
An action plan has followed from the Chancellor and Business Secretary as a down payment on making it easier for businesses to engage with the state. Its highest profile announcements are cherry picked from its predecessors: from Jeremy Hunt and Patrick Vallance (now a Labour minister but then the outgoing Government Chief Scientific Adviser) the idea of recognising other health regulators’ approvals to fast track new medicines (though we may want to watch whether/how long we are keen to include the US Food and Drug Administration in that list) and from the last government’s Harrington review, the idea of a concierge service to make it easier for businesses who want to invest in the UK to navigate the system. Add to that some longstanding work by the Civil Aviation Authority on drone deliveries and a to-be-developed plan to have a single point of contact for environmental regulation (whether that morphs into a bigger plan to rationalise environmental regulators remains to be seen). And in what looks like a final rather desperate grasp for an announcement, a promise to raise the contactless limit to speed up time at checkouts (the link to boosting productivity is very unclear – one more minute at work/ looking after kids/in front of Netflix?).
The Chancellor has also announced that a couple of smaller bodies will be merged into bigger ones. She – and the government – need to be sure that any such rationalisations make sense, rather than just becoming another meaningless numbers game, of the sort we have seen in earlier quango bonfires, in which the abolition of NHS England is put on a par with the disappearance of the Payment Systems Regulator. They also need to make sure that they have a plan both for realising savings, but also to ensure that essential functions continue to be performed.
But beyond that Keir Starmer needs to paint a positive picture of the end state he is aiming at, rather than simply take side-swipes at soft targets. What does his dynamic, lighter touch, pro-business but security enhancing active state really consist of? Where does he see scope for removing functions as well as people? Is he prepared to invest upfront – whether in tech or redundancies to reap rewards later on? And how will any push on regulation might affect his EU reset ambitions?
The rhetoric now needs to be underpinned by concrete plans if his emerging view is to be translated into visible improvements for business, consumers and citizens.
By Jill Rutter, Senior Research Fellow, UK in a Changing Europe.