Large-scale institutional reform of the executive is often talked about, and occasionally attempted. Looking back over the past 30 years of such efforts, Alan Page and Terence Daintith argue that because longstanding constitutional practice assumes a plural executive, attempts at institutional reform seem ‘doomed’ to produce disappointing results unless those involved properly consider the implications of a change between ‘the centre’ and departmental ministers.

Sometimes what doesn’t happen in government is as important as what does. When the Labour government was returned to power in July 2024, the Institute for Government (IfG) must have been congratulating itself on having brought out its blueprint for central government reform – the report of its Commission on the Centre of Government – just a few months earlier, at the right time to influence the thinking of the new government. Labour’s commitment in its manifesto to ‘mission-based government’ also seemed to give a fair wind to the Commission’s proposals for stronger central institutions, like a small executive committee of key ministers, the splitting of Cabinet Secretary responsibilities from those of the Head of the Civil Service, and the creation of a powerful Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. Nine months into the government’s term, IfG’s progress report on the implementation of its Commission’s proposal reads as a litany of regrets. Apart from a few tweaks – enhanced accountability for senior civil servants, a review of quangos, simplifying regulation – this government seems to have decided that its missions can be achieved without extensive institutional change to ‘strengthen the centre’. 

Readers who wonder why may get some enlightenment from the analysis of attempts at such institutional change that we offer in a new book, Executive Self-Government and the Constitution and summarise below. In Executive Self-Government and the Constitution we extend into this century the analysis of the structure and internal operation of the UK’s executive government that we provided in The Executive in the Constitution (OUP 1999). That book emphasised an important feature of our constitution, the primacy of departments in a plural executive, and the corollary of a centre which even under the most dominant of the post-war Prime Ministers was described as ‘fragmented and lacking a single voice of authority’. The efforts that have been made to strengthen the centre of government since then have been a significant feature of the last 25 years.  

New Labour and the centre  

‘The little secret of the British constitution’, Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, once wrote, ‘is that the centre of government is not too powerful but too weak.’ If the New Labour government was going to succeed in delivering, he argued, ‘we couldn’t rely on the old ways. We needed to have greater coordination at the centre on both policy development and implementation.’ Proposals to strengthen the centre, however, quickly ran into opposition. Project Teddy Bear, which was drawn up before the 2001 general election, would have seen the Cabinet Office and Number 10 merged to form a Prime Minister’s department. It was strenuously opposed by the Cabinet Secretary, Richard Wilson, who feared it would undermine Cabinet government.

A compromise was eventually reached which saw a number of new units created, including the Prime Minister’s Delivery and Forward Strategy Units, all reporting to the Prime Minister, although some were based in the Cabinet Office, and the ‘double hatting’ of the heads of the Overseas and Defence and European secretariats so that they also became advisers to the Prime Minister. The impact, however, was limited. ‘Despite more than a decade we spent trying’, Powell concluded, ‘the Cabinet Office is still not a command, control and communications centre for the government as a whole, and some in the Civil Service do not accept it should be.’  

The other element of Project Teddy Bear would have seen the Treasury split into two parts – a Ministry of Finance and an Office of Management and the Budget that would manage public spending from inside the Cabinet Office. Opposed by the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, it was finally killed off after the 2005 general election.

The coalition and the centre 

In preparing for possible government ahead of the 2010 election, the Conservatives disavowed New Labour’s efforts to strengthen the centre. Ministers were to be left to run their own departments so long as they implemented the manifesto commitments and played ball with the new ‘corporate centre for government’ – the Efficiency and Reform Group that was to be set up in the Cabinet Office to give ‘structure and coherence’ to the policy aim of reducing spending. The Prime Minister’s Office was therefore cut back following the formation of a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, with the Strategy and Delivery Units both abolished and the Policy Unit left with only a handful of people in it. 

This ‘hands off’ approach was not to last. Potential problems were missed, and Downing Street struggled to work out whether departments were effectively implementing the coalition government’s priorities and to intervene where they weren’t. The size of the Policy Unit was therefore increased, and finally prime ministerial frustration at how slowly policies were being implemented saw the Delivery Unit restored. It was renamed the Prime Minister’s Implementation Unit to distance it from its New Labour predecessor. ‘In opposition we got into all this “we’re going to scrap all this stuff when we get in”, which we did’, George Osborne, who served as Chancellor at the time, recalled. ‘And then we spent years trying to recreate it but never actually calling it that’.

The Johnson government and the centre   

The ‘get Brexit done’ Conservative government elected in December 2019 revived the push for a more powerful and effective centre that was the hallmark of the Blair governments at the beginning of the century. Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, was reported to want a ‘smaller, more focused and more elite centre’. ‘A massive restructuring of the machinery of government was the Cummings-led plan… [t]he centre of government was to be brought under the closer control of the Prime Minister, and the key No.10 functions were to be transferred into a new “command centre” in the Cabinet Office’. The Treasury was also to be split into finance and economic ministries ‘as a way of diminishing its leverage over departments, thereby realigning Whitehall incentives away from parsimonious policy-making intended to balance the books in the short-term, and towards cost-effective investment which could sustain long-term growth’. But by the time Cummings resigned in November 2020, there was little to show for his plan other than the setting up of a NASA-style ‘mission control’ centre – the National Situation Centre (SitCen) – in the Cabinet Office. 

The Commission on the Centre of Government  

The Commission’s judgement was that more than 25 years of strengthening exercises have produced little in the way of positive results.  

‘No.10 is too weak to set direction; the Cabinet Office is too large and has a confused remit. The Treasury fills the vacuum left by the two, which results in whole-government strategy being set according to its own priorities, rather than the collective conclusions of the whole centre. Nobody runs the civil service from the centre, which means the institution is less effective than it should be and crucial capability necessary to deliver the government’s agenda is missing. The centre struggles to manage its own talent effectively, with high churn and too few expert outsiders. Combined, these problems are a big part of why UK government is struggling to meet the moment, and will continue to do so until changes are made.’

The Commission did not repeat earlier proposals for splitting the Treasury, recommending instead that the government’s priorities should be fully reflected in a ‘new, shared strategy, budget and performance management process owned collectively at the centre of government’. But should the Treasury not commit to a more jointly owned approach, it thought, more structural solutions should be revisited.  

The Commission’s proposals have been the subject of trenchant criticism, and one may sympathise with the reluctance of a government to spend political capital on yet another replay of an institutional reform agenda. This is especially the case given that such agendas have consistently failed to recognise that our longstanding constitutional practice assumes a plural executive, not one dominated and controlled by the ‘core’ institutions. As the then Cabinet Secretary, Richard Wilson, told the Commons Public Administration Committee nearly 30 years ago, ‘There is a will to have a stronger centre without encroaching on the formal constitutional position’ – the formal constitutional position being one in which statutory powers and duties are laid on ministers, not the Prime Minister. As we argue in Executive Self-Regulation and the Constitution, until would-be reformers inside and outside the executive are prepared to confront this contradiction and think seriously about the implications of a change in the legal relationship between ‘the centre’ and departments, between the Prime Minister and departmental ministers, institutional change seems doomed to continue to produce disappointing results. 

Executive Self-Government and the Constitution, by Terence Daintith and Alan Page, is available now.

About the authors 

Alan Page is Emeritus Professor of Public Law at the University of Dundee.

Terence Daintith is Emeritus Professor of Law and Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London.