10 Downing Street hasn’t been this relaxed in years. But Matt Ross discovers that the prime minister is nonetheless determined to create dramatic change within government – and fast.
In an attempt to keep ministers focused on reforms as well as cuts, the PM and DPM last week spelled out in a letter to their colleagues their two key priorities: decentralisation, and “governing for the long term”.
This latter objective encompasses environmental sustainability, political accountability, transparency, the protection of capital investment, and David Cameron’s professed willingness to pursue preventive, slow-payback policies such as those being advocated by work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith and justice secretary Ken Clarke. Such policies are, though, long in gestation as well as payback – and in the meantime, Number 10’s desire to move at breakneck speed on a few flagship policies has already caused problems: the education department’s Building Schools for the Future debacle, for example, was caused by deadlines that left insufficient time for fact-checking.
Meanwhile, the decentralisation agenda involves both handing control over service provision to local politicians, communities and frontline professionals – perhaps organised into cooperatives and mutual societies – and allowing departments to make policy decisions free of central control. Many departmental officials are pleased at the disappearance of public service agreements, Treasury ring-fencing and other tools of central management; their newfound autonomy, however, is heavily qualified by their loss of spending power and control over local services.
Furthermore, in some fields of pan-government activity we are seeing a significant centralisation of power: Cameron has given the Cabinet Office carte blanche to pursue the efficiency and reform agenda throughout Whitehall (see opposite). “On head count, IT, procurement, it’s operating pretty centrally,” says one well-informed observer. “There’s quite a lot of micromanaging, and some officials are getting annoyed.”
The prime minister
For those working in and closely with Number 10, the most obvious changes since May have been in the atmosphere and working hours. Gordon Brown was moody; driven. He often worked late, and hit the phone in the small hours. But David Cameron often retires upstairs to his wife and kids at six or seven; he discovered work-life balance, former Tory leader Michael Howard told CSW, when his first son was born in 2002.
Cameron’s approach to his colleagues is also more relaxed than Brown’s. “It’s a less prickly Number 10,” says the Whitehall observer. “With Brown, there were histrionics and Number 10 was always wary of everyone else; quite insecure. Cameron is more confident.” The incoming prime minister and his advisers are reportedly impressed with the resident officials, and while in some departments relations between politicians and civil servants have become tense – a problem sometimes heightened by a lack of experience among ministers and special advisers – in Number 10, permanent secretary Jeremy Heywood is proving as indispensable to Cameron as he was to Brown, to Tony Blair as his PPS, and to Norman Lamont and Ken Clarke in the last Tory government.
Meanwhile, Number 10’s mode of operation has also been deeply affected by the arrival of coalition government, which requires much more formal decision-making. With a chair from one party and a deputy chair from the other, cabinet secretary Gus O’Donnell told CSW last month, cabinet committees have become essential in ensuring that policies are “coalition-proof”. Decision-making is also eased by the fact that nowadays Number 10, the Treasury and the Cabinet Office all point in the same direction: with the chancellor and the prime minister – in the words of one Tory MP – “joined at the hip”, the long, long battle between Numbers 10 and 11 has finally come to a halt.
One other key Number 10 objective is worth mentioning here: the desire to achieve substantive reform before the next election. “The conclusion that Cameron, [Cabinet Office ministers] Oliver Letwin and Francis Maude have come to is that in Blair’s first term he didn’t do enough on the public service agenda,” says Peter Riddell, the veteran Times journalist and fellow at the Institute for Government. “The first Thatcher term, they think, was also a learning experience. So they are determined to move at a rapid pace.” In Cameron’s opinion, a fear of scaring the electorate and inexperience in manipulating the machinery of government meant that previous reforming governments wasted precious time. Whatever mistakes he makes, they certainly won’t include that of excessive caution in pushing for change.