The Administrative State

The three most senior tiers of every government department — Permanent Secretary, Director General and Director — should become political appointments, serving at the pleasure of the Secretary of State. Ministers should be free to appoint whomever they judge most capable: outsiders with relevant expertise, figures from industry or the professions or career civil servants whom they know and trust. The restriction should be on the role, not on the pool from which the appointment is drawn.

Below these tiers, the Civil Service should remain a professional and politically neutral body. The great majority of civil servants — the policy officials, the analysts, the operational staff — do work that is and should be independent of which party holds office. The purpose of political appointments at the top is not to politicise the entire machine but to ensure that the people directing it share the government's objectives and can be replaced when they fail to deliver them.

The objection to this is well known and should be taken seriously. The Northcote-Trevelyan reforms of 1854 replaced a system of patronage that was often corrupt and frequently incompetent with a meritocratic civil service recruited by open competition. That reform was a genuine achievement, and the principle of a neutral professional service below the leadership tier should be preserved. But the extension of neutrality to the very top of each department — to the people who advise ministers, shape policy and determine what is and is not operationally feasible — has produced a class of permanent officials whose institutional interests do not always align with those of the elected government. A Permanent Secretary who knows he will outlast the minister has little incentive to deliver what the minister wants if it conflicts with what the department prefers.

The American system, which replaces several thousand senior officials with each new administration, goes too far — it produces instability and a loss of institutional memory that damages the quality of government. But the British system, which replaces none, has the opposite fault: it gives the permanent bureaucracy an effective veto over the pace and direction of reform. The proposal here sits between the two — political control at the top, professional continuity beneath — and it reflects an arrangement that served England well for centuries before the Victorians reformed it.

The senior Civil Service has developed a culture that is remarkably uniform and largely self-reinforcing. It rewards caution over initiative and the management of process over the delivery of results. A permanent secretary who prevents a minister from doing something foolish is quietly celebrated; one who drives through a difficult reform that succeeds is barely noticed. The incentive structure produces exactly the behaviour it rewards: officials who are skilled at explaining why things cannot be done and unskilled at finding ways to do them.

There is also the problem of ideological homogeneity. The senior ranks of the Civil Service draw overwhelmingly from a narrow band of educational and social backgrounds, and the revolving door between Whitehall, the charity sector and the policy think tanks ensures a continuity of outlook that operates independently of electoral results. Officials leave the Department for Education for an education charity, return two years later with a promotion, and nobody remarks on the fact that the same assumptions have travelled with them throughout. The effect is a permanent policy consensus — liberal, technocratic, instinctively sceptical of disruption — that persists regardless of which party is in power and which manifesto the electorate has endorsed.

Political appointments at the top would begin to break this pattern, because leaders chosen for their willingness to deliver a particular programme will recruit and promote differently from leaders whose careers depend on fitting into the existing culture. Geographical dispersal would accelerate the change by removing departments from the social ecosystem of central London. But these are structural interventions. The cultural shift will take time, and it will not be complete until a generation of officials has grown up in a system that rewards delivery rather than the elegant management of inaction.

The Civil Service employs approximately 510,000 people. This figure rose sharply during the pandemic and has not returned to its pre-2020 level, despite the end of the emergency that justified the expansion. Some of this growth reflects genuine new functions — digital services, for example, or the post-Brexit assumption of regulatory responsibilities previously exercised from Brussels. But much of it reflects the natural tendency of any bureaucracy to grow, and the absence of any sustained political will to reverse it.

The old observation that a few thousand administrators once managed a global empire is a red herring. The modern state does things that no Victorian government attempted, and the world in which it operates is more complex than it was in 1900. But the fact that the comparison is crude does not make the underlying point wrong. The Civil Service has grown because the state has grown, and both have grown beyond what is necessary or useful. A government that simplifies its tax code, abolishes its quangos, reduces its regulatory footprint and devolves more functions to local authorities will need fewer people to administer what remains.

Reduction should not be pursued as an arbitrary headcount target imposed from above — that approach produces salami-slicing, in which every department cuts the same percentage and the least important functions survive because they are the cheapest. Instead, each department should undergo a rigorous functional review: what does it do, which of those functions are genuinely necessary and which have persisted simply because nobody has questioned them? Where functions are found to be redundant or duplicative, the posts that support them should be eliminated — not redistributed, not repurposed, but abolished. This is a harder exercise than across-the-board cuts, and it requires ministers who are willing to make specific decisions about specific activities rather than delegating the pain to officials. Political appointees at the top would help with this, because they would arrive without the institutional loyalty that makes career officials reluctant to abolish the work of their colleagues.

The administration of the state should be distributed across the country, not concentrated in Westminster and Whitehall. Germany has operated a divided model since reunification: the Berlin-Bonn Act of 1994 kept six of fifteen federal ministries headquartered in Bonn, and after three decades roughly half of all federal officials still work outside Berlin. The arrangement was born of political compromise, but it has produced real benefits — lower property costs, a broader recruitment base, and a federal government that is physically present in more than one city.

Britain has made gestures in this direction. The Treasury has an office in Darlington; the Ministry of Defence has a presence in Bristol; various agencies are scattered across the regions. But these have mostly been satellite outposts — secondary offices whose real authority remains in London. The goal should be more ambitious: to move the primary seat of entire departments or major divisions to cities outside the capital, so that the senior officials who run them live and work in the communities their policies affect.

This is not principally a cost-saving measure, though the savings in property and salary costs would be real. It is a measure to change the character of government. A department whose officials walk the same streets, send their children to the same schools and use the same public services as the people they govern will make different decisions from one that operates entirely within the Westminster bubble. It would also contribute to rebalancing the economic weight of the country's cities — a stated aim of every government for the past two decades, and one that will never be achieved while the entire apparatus of the state is run from a single square mile of London.

The proliferation of quangos — quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations, arm's-length bodies, executive agencies, non-departmental public bodies — is one of the most corrosive features of modern British governance. There are currently over 300 such bodies, spending tens of billions of pounds of public money. They are created with good intentions, usually to insulate a particular function from political interference, and they accumulate because no government ever manages to abolish as many as it creates. Every incoming administration announces a bonfire of the quangos; none delivers one.

The fundamental problem is accountability. A quango is, by design, at arm's length from the minister. Its chief executive is not answerable to Parliament in the way that a Permanent Secretary is. Its board is appointed, not elected. When things go wrong — when Ofwat fails to prevent the sewage crisis, or Natural England blocks housing that is desperately needed — the public discovers that no minister can be held responsible, because the entire structure exists to ensure that no minister is responsible. This is convenient for ministers and disastrous for the public.

The presumption should be reversed. Every arm's-length body should be required to justify its existence against a single test: does this function require independence from ministerial direction, and if so why? Some will pass — the Bank of England's monetary policy function, the Electoral Commission, the judiciary's administrative arm. Most will not. Where a quango performs a function that properly belongs to a government department, it should be absorbed into that department and its work placed under the direct authority of a minister. Where it performs a function that nobody can convincingly justify, it should be abolished.

The Office for Students, for example, has failed conspicuously in its stated purpose of protecting the interests of students in higher education; its functions could be performed by a division within the Department for Education at lower cost and with greater accountability. The Arms Export Licensing function, currently split between the Department for Business and the Export Control Joint Unit, could sit within the Foreign Office. The quango archipelago is not a system; it is the accumulated debris of decades of ministerial reluctance to take direct responsibility for difficult decisions.

Government departments should be prohibited from funding any organisation that engages in political campaigning or policy advocacy. The practice of using public money to fund nominally independent charities and campaign groups, which then lobby for policies that the funding department already wishes to pursue, is a corruption of democratic accountability. It allows government to manufacture the appearance of public demand for its own proposals, and it obscures the extent to which the "third sector" is in reality an extension of the state.

The scale of this problem is substantial. Hundreds of charities and NGOs receive a majority of their income from government. Some deliver genuine public services under contract — drug rehabilitation, housing support, refugee resettlement — and there is no objection to paying for services rendered. But many others exist primarily to campaign: to produce reports, to brief journalists, to give evidence to select committees, and to create the impression that a particular policy enjoys broad support among "civil society." When the money trail is followed, what looks like a grassroots consensus often turns out to be a circular arrangement in which the government funds an organisation to tell the government what the government already believes.

If the government wishes to make the case for a policy, it should do so openly, through ministers and through Parliament. The laundering of policy advocacy through a network of state-funded proxies degrades public debate, misleads voters about the true source of the arguments they are hearing, and wastes money that could be spent on actual services. A clean ban — no public money for any body that campaigns — is simpler and more honest than attempting to draw a line between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" advocacy. Charities that wish to campaign are free to do so, but they should raise their own money.

The Human Rights Act 1998 should be repealed. It incorporated into domestic law the European Convention on Human Rights and required British courts to "take into account" the jurisprudence of the Strasbourg court. The effect has been to graft onto the English legal system a body of rights derived from a continental tradition that is fundamentally different from our own — a tradition of codified, judicially enforced rights that places the court above the legislature and the individual claim above the collective interest.

England has its own tradition of liberty, and it is older and more robust than anything the ECHR provides. It runs from Magna Carta through the Petition of Right, the Habeas Corpus Act and the Bill of Rights of 1689. It is a tradition of procedural protections — due process, trial by jury, the prohibition of arbitrary detention, the requirement that the Crown may not tax or legislate without the consent of Parliament. These liberties were not granted by a court; they were wrested from the Crown by Parliament, and they are maintained by Parliament. That is the crucial distinction. In the English tradition, liberty is protected by the sovereignty of the elected legislature. In the continental tradition, it is protected by the authority of an unelected judiciary. The Human Rights Act chose the continental model, and in doing so it weakened the very institution — Parliament — on which English liberty has always depended.

The practical consequences are now widely felt. The Act has been used to prevent the deportation of foreign nationals who pose a serious risk to public safety, on the grounds that removal would breach their right to a family life. It has been used to frustrate immigration enforcement, to complicate counter-terrorism measures, and to extend procedural protections to people who are not British citizens and who have no prior connection to this country. The beneficiaries have often been those least deserving of the law's solicitude; the losers have been the public, whose safety is subordinated to rights claims adjudicated by judges with no electoral accountability.

Repeal should be accompanied by serious consideration of a British Bill of Rights — a short, tightly defined instrument that restates the historic liberties of the subject in modern language, grounds them in Parliamentary sovereignty rather than judicial supremacy, and makes clear that the ultimate authority in this Kingdom rests with the elected representatives of the people and not with any foreign court. The detail of such an instrument requires careful thought and is not set out here. But the principle is plain: the rights of the people of this country should be defined by the people of this country, through their Parliament, and not by an international tribunal whose jurisprudence reflects traditions and priorities that are not ours.