https://www.politicshome.com/opinion/ar ... halls-trap
Danny Kruger on civil service reform. Painstaking work has been done by Danny the famous details man.
The work of my team in the Preparing for Government unit is focused on the painstaking, unglamorous mechanics of institutional restoration. We will overhaul the Civil Service and ministerial code, establishing clear lines of accountability, and restoring the actual, rather than merely formal, responsibility of ministers for policy delivery. We will dismantle the Cabinet Office, the bloated centre where executive decision making goes to die. We will split the conflicted role of cabinet secretary into focused, functional parts: an agile political chief of staff to advise the PM, a chief secretary responsible for Cabinet governance, and a dedicated CEO responsible for the administration of the Civil Service.
Reform rewriting the ministerial code. What could go wrong?
What does "actual rather than formal responsibility" mean? On recent evidence, it involves sacking underlings and the leader saying "I wasn't even listening, nothing to do with me".
Might be worth splitting the Cabinet Secretary job, but why is it "conflicted"? Why should being an effective "CEO' be in conflict with following correct process? It isn't at a FTSE 100 company.
And the Cabinet Office is a weird target here. Its job is to have a broad view across government, why would you seek to take that away? Of all parties, Reform need something like that. with their double life as authoritarians and libertarians.