BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007
Page 17
the work of the independent reviews discussed below. The remit of all
these units led the Treasury to take an interest in a much wider scope of
issues and the Treasury has relished this diversification.
The Brown Chancellorship was also notable for its reform of public
expenditure control. He introduced spending reviews and a new performance management framework. PSAs were set for individual
departments and for cross-cutting issues. Performance against them was
51 Treasury Select Committee, Minutes of Evidence, Annex 1, Treasury Aims and Objectives,
2000–2001, 11 May 2000, at: www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199900/cmselect/
cmtreasy/492/0051103.htm.
52 See ‘Guide to the Centre of Government’, at: http://archive.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/
roleofcentre/treasury.htm.
53 Treasury Select Committee, HM Treasury, 2000–01, HC 73-I (London: TSO, 2001), para.
39.
54 For more detail, see Paul Fawcett, ‘New Labour’s Treasury – Ten Years On’, Public
Administration (submitted).
. . .
monitored by several parts of the core executive: the PMDU in the
Cabinet Office; the spending teams based in the PSG Directorate; the PSX
Cabinet Committee; and separate bilateral stocktakes between ministers
and the Prime Minister on specific areas, and the Chief Secretary to the
Treasury on more general topics. As Paul Boateng, a former Chief
Secretary to the Treasury, claimed, the Treasury has: ‘some responsibility,
in some sense, for all PSA targets’.55
Despite this admission, there remains a lack of clarity over how the
Treasury and departments devise PSAs, as well as the incentive effects,
especially when targets are either minima or not met.56 PSAs are best
viewed as a tool providing the Treasury with a ‘legitimate’ reason for continued or extended intervention in departmental affairs. It also provided
the Treasury with a reason to demand an unprecedented amount of data
from departments.57 As a Senior Treasury official explained, the effect is
that the Treasury: ‘plays a much more proactive and strategic role in the
development of policy in Whitehall’. Of course, the Treasury would not be
the Treasury without acerbic asides, so he added: ‘This, of course, has had a
positive impact on this enthusiasm for joined-up government.’58 Given the
increased spending on health and education, the Treasury saw this role as a
natural extension of its powers and a necessary control on departments.
The Treasury was also heavily involved in public service reform through
its efficiency programme. It was a different agenda to that of the PMSU
but just as important. The efficiency programme can be traced to several
reports commissioned by the Treasury. They included the Gershon
Review, the Lyons Review, the Hampton Review, and the Varney Review.59
The overall aim was to achieve the headline target contained in the
55 Treasury Select Committee, Performance Targets and Monitoring, 2004–05, HC 331-i, Q83
(London: TSO, 2005), emphasis added.
56 Oliver James, ‘The UK Core Executive’s Use of Public Service Agreements as a Tool of
Governance’, Public Administration, 82, 2004: 397–419.
57 HM Treasury and Cabinet Office, Devolving Decision Making: Delivering Better Public
Services: Refining Targets and Performance Management (London: TSO, 2004).
58 Private information.
59 Peter Gershon, Releasing Resources for the Front-line: Independent Review of Public Sector
Efficiency (London: TSO, 2004); Michael Lyons, Well Placed to Deliver? Shaping the Pattern
of Government Service: Independent Review of Public Sector Relocation (London: TSO,
2004); Philip Hampton, Reducing Administrative Burdens: Effective Inspection and
Enforcement (London: TSO, 2005); Cabinet Office, Transformational Government –
Enabled by Technology, Cm. 6970 (London: TSO, 2005); Cabinet Office, Transformational
Government – Implementation Plan (London: Cabinet Office, 2006); David Varney, Service
Transformation: A Better Service for Citizens and Businesses, A Better Deal for the Taxpayer
(London: TSO, 2006).
Gershon Review of £21.5 billion of efficiency savings by 2007–8. Each of
the subsequent reports looked at particular ways of achieving that aim.
More recent reports, starting with the Cabinet Office’s Transformational
Government Strategy,60 have combined the efficiency drive with a
renewed emphasis on joining up front-line services.61 In the lexicon of
management speak there is little that is new. Both the Varney Review and
the earlier Modernising Government White Paper identify the same
obstacles to joined-up government while calling for better coordination.62
Clearly the efficiency programme was a Treasury-driven agenda. It
wrote the reports. It chaired the two main cabinet committees
(on Efficiency and Relocation and Electronic Service Delivery). It
was responsible for overseeing the efficiency agenda in the Office of
Government Commerce before it was moved in-house.63 The scope of the
efficiency programme was broad, so it had important consequences for
all the public sector. In short, the PMSU and the Treasury public sector
reforms ran concurrently. They co-existed. They were not coordinated,
nor could they be, because one agenda was driven by Blair and the other
by Brown.
Finally, the Brown Chancellorship also played a strategic policy role
using two types of policy reviews. First, there were internal reviews focusing on cross-cutting issues of government policy, reporting to the Chief
Secretary to the Treasury, but sometimes published in partnership with
another department. There were typically six or seven reviews for each
spending review. Eight policy areas were the subject of multiple reviews.
They accounted for thirty-seven of the forty-two policy reviews, including seven reviews on young children and older people; six reviews each on
crime (including drugs), the voluntary sector and local government
finance and rural and regional policy; four reviews on science; three
reviews on employment and benefits policy and foreign affairs; and two
reviews on housing supply.
Second, there were independent reviews, usually headed by someone
from outside government and typically published with one or more
departments, but with a secretariat drawn from, and based in, the
Treasury. The reviews included the Stern Review on the Economics of
60 Cabinet Office, Transformational Government.
61 Varney, Service Transformation, pp. 8 and 31–2.
62 Compare, for example, Varney, Service Transformation, p. 17, with Cabinet Office and
Performance and Innovation Unit, Wiring It Up; or the specific example of Varney, Service
Transformation, pp. 89–90 with Cabinet Office, Modernising Government, pp. 22–33.
63 HM Treasury, Transforming Government Procurement (London: TSO, 2007), p. 20.
. . .
Climate Change (joint with the Cabinet Office); the Eddington Transport
St
udy (joint with the Department of Transport); the Leitch Review of
Skills (joint with the Department for Education and Skills); the Barker
Review of Land Use (joint with the Department of Communities and
Local Government); and the Wanless Review of Health Trends.64
In sum, the Treasury sponsored much strategic work that would normally have been produced by a central strategic unit in the Cabinet
Office. The Chancellor or the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, rather
than the Prime Minister or cabinet, were directly associated with these
reviews. The Treasury and not the Cabinet Office provided the secretariat
support for them. As the former Cabinet Secretary Andrew Turnbull
explained, the consequence was that the Treasury became a policy
department:
The reviews have varied a lot in quality. Some are actually quite good. But a
lot of them are HMV – His Master’s Voice – and are really written to order.
The Wanless report on health spending was a good example of that. And
that has changed the relationship between the Treasury and colleagues, and
changed the way the Treasury works, making it a policy department.65
These changes were as much about the court politics of Blair and
Brown as they were about public sector reform. In an unguarded
moment, Andrew Turnbull commented on ‘Brown’s ruthlessness’ and
‘the more or less complete contempt’ with which the Treasury treated
ministerial colleagues. Treasury control had come ‘at the expense of any
government cohesion and any assessment of strategy’.66 No matter how
commentators interpret either the court politics of the two rivals or
Brown’s Treasury reforms, it is clear the Treasury’s redefinition of its role
altered the way central government worked. It also illustrated the limits of
focusing on the Prime Minister and his machinery for coordination. If we
do so, we miss the problem that central coordination was undermined by
competing centres of policymaking. It caused ‘dilemmas and sometimes
64 HM Treasury and Cabinet Office, The Economics of Climate Change – The Stern Review
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); HM Treasury and Department for
Transport, The Eddington Transport Study (London: TSO, 2006); HM Treasury and
Department for Education and Skills, Prosperity for All in the Global Economy – World
Class Skills (London: TSO, 2006); HM Treasury and Department for Communities and
Local Government, Barker Review of Land Use Planning (London: TSO, 2006); and HM
Treasury, Securing our Future Health: Taking a Long-Term View (London: HM Treasury,
2002).
65 Nick Timmins, ‘Highlights of Turnbull Interview’, Financial Times, 20 March 2007, at:
www.ft.com/cms/s/7a58bfa0-d6d7-11db-98da-000b5df10621.html.
66 Nicholas Timmins, ‘Stalinist Brown’, Financial Times, 20 March 2007, p. 1.
downright confusion’ in the departments because ministers and officials
had ‘to pick their way across a minefield’.67
Conclusion – the net Blair effect
New Labour built on the reforms of previous governments and the scale
of its activity is as daunting as it is frenetic. What do our stories tell us
about the net Blair effect on central government of all this activity?
The centralisation story tells us there is often a gulf between intervention and control. Blair intervened often, but rarely to great effect. For
all the talk of a presidential Prime Minister, the most striking facts
about the heart of the machine under Blair are the continued relevance
of the constitutional verities of cabinet government and the elusiveness of
coordination.
The claim that bilateral, or sofa decision-making, was pre-eminent
and that cabinet government was in decline was premature. Cabinet, and
especially its infrastructure of committees, thrived. As Rentoul noted,
‘a lot of the business of government continued to be done in cabinet
committees’.68 The number of cabinet committees grew. It was deliberate
policy to give ‘a more central role to Cabinet Committees in Government’,
particularly in dealing with ‘cross-cutting, cross-departmental issues’.69 In
January 1998 there were twenty-seven committees but they gradually
increased in number until November 2004 when there were fifty-nine. In
2006, there were between forty-four and forty-nine ministerial committees, excluding the five Policy Review Working Groups. Blair also chaired
more committees the longer he was in office. He chaired five in January
1998, ten in November 2004, peaking at sixteen in December 2005, but
only dropping by one to fifteen in December 2006. He also chaired the five
Policy Review Groups. In short: ‘there has been much more use of cabinet
as a sounding board’ and cabinet now ‘regularly receives presentations on
major new policy development’.70 Blair’s critics single out the decline of
67 Michael Barber cited in Philip Webster and Peter Riddell, ‘Brown “Must Use his
Honeymoon Period to Strengthen Power of PM” ’, The Times, 15 May 2007, at:
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/the_blair_years/article1790129.ece?printϭyes.
68 See John Rentoul, Tony Blair: Prime Minister (London: Little, Brown, 2001), p. 544; and
Turnbull, ‘Valedictory Lecture’.
69 No. 10 Downing Street, ‘Cabinet Committees, Press Briefing’, at: www.number10.gov.uk/output/Page7542.asp.
70 Geoff Mulgan interviewed on ‘Looking Back at Power’, BBC Radio 4, 5 September 2005,
at: www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/look_back_at_power.shtml; and Turnbull, ‘Valedictory
Lecture’.
. . .
the cabinet’s policymaking and coordination functions for special criticism, yet it has been clear for over a half of a century that these functions
have been carried out by several central agencies of the core executive
including, but not limited to, the cabinet. The cabinet persists in four
forms: as the constitutional theory of ministerial and collective responsibility; as a set of rules and routines; as a political bargaining arena between
central actors; and as a component of the core executive.71
We also know that, despite strong pressures for more proactive coordination throughout Western Europe, the coordination activities of central
governments remain modest. Such coordination has four characteristics.
First, it is ‘negative, based on persistent compartmentalisation, mutual
avoidance and friction reduction between powerful bureaux or ministries’. Second, it occurs ‘at the lower levels of the state machine and [is]
organised by specific established networks’. Third, it is ‘rarely strategic’
and ‘almost all attempts to create proactive strategic capacity for longterm planning . . . have failed’. Finally, it is ‘intermittent and selective . . .
improvised late in the policy process, politicised, issue-oriented and
reactive’.72 In sum, coordination is the ‘philosopher’s stone’ of modern
government, ever sought, but always just beyond reach, all too often
because it assumes both agreement on goals and an effective central
coordinator.73
The management story adds the ‘central flaws’ of prime
-ministerial
‘inexperience’, ‘lack of clarity about both means and ends’ and ‘confusion
about the role of central government’ to our understanding.74 As Richard
Wilson observed to Blair back in 1997, ‘Your problem is that neither you
nor anyone in Number 10 has ever managed anything.’75 The same point
was made ten years later by Michael Barber:
All Prime Ministers face their constraints, from their Cabinets, departments and the ‘official view’, but in Tony Blair’s case there has been the
major personal one that, prior to entering Downing Street, he had
71 Patrick Weller, ‘Cabinet Government: An Elusive Ideal?’, Public Administration, 81, 2003:
74–8.
72 Vincent Wright and Jack E. S. Hayward, ‘Governing from the Centre: Policy CoOrdination in Six European Core Executives’, in R. A. W. Rhodes (ed.), Transforming
British Government, vol. II: Changing Roles and Relationships (London: Macmillan, 2000),
p. 33.
73 Harold Seidman, Politics, Position and Power, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1975), p. 190.
74 Peter Riddell, ‘Blair as Prime Minister’, in A. Seldon (ed.), The Blair Effect (London: Little,
Brown, 2001), pp. 38–9; Peter Riddell, The Unfulfilled Prime Minister (London: Politico’s,
2005), p. 41.
75 Cited in Seldon, Blair, p. 629.
never run a government department, or even been a junior minister. As a
consequence, he had a huge amount to learn about how organisations,
especially large bureaucracies, work.76
Blair’s weaknesses included a lack of follow-through: ‘He intervenes,
persuades, and then forgets’. He lacks ‘policy making and management
skills’.77 So although he wants results ‘he finds it hard to understand why
things can’t happen immediately’ and he is frustrated when ‘waiting for
the pay-off and he doesn’t have time’.78
The Cabinet Office is not exempt from this sweeping criticism.
The Capability Review commented that its ‘overall performance, particularly as seen by its major partners in other government departments,
is variable. Successes also tend to be attributed to particular units, not
to the Cabinet Office as a department.’79 It added that this critical
assessment:
reflects the gap between the current capability of the Cabinet Office and