Sir Nicholas Macpherson, permanent secretary at the Treasury, has said that civil servants should be looking at what to do in the case of a minority government.
Speaking at the inaugural meeting of the Strand Group – the signature seminar series of the Policy Institute at King's College – Macpherson said that if election poll results stay the same, officials must start preparing for a number of scenarios.
Although he admitted that he is “not a great fan of the civil service doing endless war games about different outcomes of elections”, he acknowledged there could be a need to do this.
Speaking about the logistics of minority governments, he said: “‘If you’re in the Treasury, you’re always worried about what minority governments lead to, and who pays for it. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it’.”