Back in the distant mists of time (Tuesday) we took a look at the policies Rishi Sunak advanced during the summer leadership election to try and gauge what his agenda might look now he has belatedly crossed the threshold of Number 10.
Perhaps we might have been better off consulting the tarot. For whether it’s the changed economic situation or the fact he no longer needs to win a membership ballot, but the pledges are already starting to be set by the wayside.
Just yesterday, for example, the FT reported that the plan for a delivery unit to fulfil Sunak’s promise to “have scrapped or reformed all of the EU law, red tape and bureaucracy that is still on our statute book and slowing economic growth” has itself been scrapped.
Now as I noted in Tuesday’s piece, there were solid grounds for being wary of this proposal. The tight timescale meant it was more likely to end up rubber-stamping vast amounts of legislation rather than doing anything useful with it. But the reason given was quite dispiriting; according to an anonymous ally quoted by the paper: “The time for changes in the machinery of government has passed.”
If that really speaks to Sunak’s attitude, that is deeply unfortunate. The machinery of government isn’t a technical nice-to-have you attend to when times are good. It’s critical to the delivery of policy. Had Liz Truss managed to remain in post more than a few weeks, she would almost certainly have found that out, to her cost, when her overhaul of Downing Street came back to bite her.
It also means that he is likely to abandon another of his pledges which would be well worth carrying through. In Sunak’s immigration plan, published in July, he concluded with the following pledge:
“10. Reforming the Home Office and Border Force; Commissioning work to look at more fundamental Home Office and Border Force reform.”
The Home Office presides over two areas of policy of vital importance to a Conservative government’s relationship with the voters: immigration, and policing. And it is badly mismanaging both. It can’t seem to stop the boats or get a flight to Rwanda in the air, but it can shake down ex-servicemen and deport British citizens because it lost the paperwork. It has signally failed to reform the Metropolitan Police or get a grip on wider policing issues.
And a big part of the reason, according to current and former spads and officials I talked to for a new paper from the Adam Smith Institute, pins the blame for that in large part on the ‘machinery of government’ side of the Home Office. Specifically, the fact that the size of the political staff (secretary of state, ministers, and advisers) doesn’t scale with their sprawling empire of a department.
The result is that even in good conditions, there is only so much political bandwidth available to get a grip on the system and drive forward change. But conditions are seldom good, and home secretaries tend to become control freaks to try and avoid stepping on any career-ending landmines – which creates bottlenecks which gum up the works even further.
But even if they manage to avoid the fate of Amber Rudd, forced to resign after surely inadvertently misleading a House of Commons committee on an issue she was mis-briefed about, her successors have scarcely covered themselves in glory. As In the Sight of the Unwise points out, whilst citing the Home Office as an example of a non-‘fake job’ in government:
“As a fun thought experiment, imagine if Priti Patel had never gone to the Home Office and had had Truss’s jobs at Trade and FCDO instead. Perhaps today she would be the ex-PM instead? It certainly seems more likely.”
In A Broken Home: Why it’s time to split up the Home Office, I suggest breaking it into two new departments: one focused on immigration and citizenship, and the other on policing, counter-terrorism, and national security.
Even if all this meant on the Civil Service side were a reorganisation of its existing directorates and other internal units, at a stroke you would have two ministerial teams, plus advisers, able to focus on delivering policy over a narrower and more coherent remit – plus an extra select committee providing parliamentary scrutiny, too.
Perhaps the Prime Minister thinks this would be a distraction from actually getting things done. But the Home Office’s recent track record doesn’t suggest it will get anything done. And Sunak presumably knows this, which is why he concluded his election pitch with a pledge to explore serious reform.
Suella Braverman might prove the insuperable barrier to doing anything so bold as splitting the department; Patel’s resistance to the implied demotion was why Johnson’s team stopped exploring the idea after 2019. But if the Home Secretary can’t find a way to match tough rhetoric with effective governance, and deliver concrete progress in time for the election, he should not rule out giving the job to two people.