An excellent tweet from a guy called Andrew Cooper about the government’s impending destruction of the civil service:
It’s worth bearing in mind that although Boris Johnson’s senior advisor Dominic Cummings is on a mission to take an axe to MOD defence procurement, his ‘reforms’ will affect just about every government department. As Mr Cooper suggests, entire departments will be closed down and merged with other departments, some will be privatised in entirety and others merely ‘reformed’. It will be carnage.
What Cummings wants, Cummings gets. Whatever you say about him, he is a very smart operator and it was under his watch that Britain voted to leave Europe. But that was never likely to be Cummings’ end game. It was his means to an end. If he wants to take a sledgehammer to the civil service, you can bet that he will.
New governments make a point of implementing the biggest and most controversial policies early in their terms and I suspect the civil service will be among the government’s earliest ports of call. I would be very surprised if we were not made aware, perhaps in the coming weeks and months, that major changes are afoot.
Work out for yourselves which government departments can easily be merged with others and those which are ripe for privatisation. It’s easy enough. We used to have the Department of Health and Social Security, then the DSS, which later merged with the Department of Employment and became the DWP. Departments change all the time.
The Times recently reported that Cummings ‘will tackle military procurement as a priority for next year. He is expected to audit recent purchases and review the development of costly military equipment, having previously described MoD procurement as “disastrous”.‘ I know next to nothing about the MOD procurement system so I am not in a position to say whether it is incompetent or not. But what I think doesn’t matter because the most influential political advisor in the land says it is. And with the Conservatives certain to be in power until at least 2024, and probably for long after that, it’s worth getting ready for the huge changes that are coming.
None of this will be news to people who actively follow politics, who saw how Cummings steered though the actual Brexit decision and then the operation to elect Boris Johnson’s government to get it done. Until now, even the Conservatives were loathe to more than tinker with the civil service. Those days are over now. My former civil service colleagues had best strap themselves in for the bumpiest rides of their lives.
