Coffee House Shots
What are Sue Gray's plans for the civil service?
Before we begin this podcast, I'd like to tell you about a special deal. Subscribe today to The Spectator for just £12 and receive a 12-week subscription in print and online. Along with, here's the magic bit, a £320-pound John Lewis or Waitrose voucher. Go to spectator.co.uk/veature. Hello and welcome to the Saturday edition of Coffee House shots. I'm Cindy Yim. While Parliament is on recess, the civil service is still at work and under the new government, they've been given a new way of doing things. In a spectator's political column this week, our political correspondent James Hill writes about Starmer's plans to re-jake the civil service into a "mission-led" government. What exactly does that mean? James joins me now together with Joe Rutter from the Institute for Government and UK Inner Changing Europe, who is also a former civil servant. James, let's start by outlining the five missions and how they differ to the way government is split into departments right now. Sure, these are the pledges in which Kirsten was elected and they are very broad but different areas. I'll just quote them, which are number one, kickstart economic growth, number two, may Britain a clean energy superpower, number three, take back our streets, number four, break down barriers to opportunity, and number five, build an NHS fit for the future, so different outcomes in terms of growth, education, energy obviously. A mission-led government is supposed to be rather than having traditional supposed silos of departments where you've got, you know, maybe say 2023 or so around the cabinet table of full cabinet positions who are all fighting for their turf. This is an attempt to kind of break down those barriers by having one person leading on that single mission in a different who will report to permanent secretary but also will be able to kind of work across Whitehall on these five different tasks. We've only had one publicly announced thus far, which is Chris Stark, who's going to be turbocharging in their words. The mission for clean energy by 2030, so he'll be working with a milli-band and predominantly the problem for this NES on that. And really, it's the attempt to kind of ensure that rather than having these classic Whitehall turf walls between different departments, people are able to kind of work together, but there's a lot of questions to be worked out about this mission to try to get across in the column. And from what I'm hearing in Whitehall is a sense of perhaps frustration to a degree about how that's going to work exactly. There's a big question to answer, for instance. Are these mission chiefs who are going to be sort of director general level, we expect? How are they going to interact with the rest of the department that isn't tasked with that mission? You know, obviously energy is a huge brief. It's not just about the 2030, there'll be other things involved in that energy department as well. I'll just name one example. How, of course, are the politics going to work? Are they going to be have a direct line to number 10, or sort of going around the ministers in some way? And obviously there's some sort of talk to a few officials who are a little bit kind of skeptical about all of that. And of course, you know, you have characters as well and all this, and there's already been reports about what's happening with you've got Sue Gray, a former chief of civil servant herself, chief of staff, and also Morgan McSweeney as well, who has been someone who's championing a lot of these missions. So I'll be very interested to see how that all pans out as well. And I don't even just say that we all know, of course, lots of talks about civil affairs reform. And I just remember the cynical quote of Peter Hennessy, the great guru of Whitehall correspondence, who said that the civil service is a bit like the Russian winter. They wait for their enemies to dissolve in the snow. So very quickly, how the initial months, the honeymoon of early government can turn into year five of a parliament, and perhaps the missions haven't been the great transfer success. Everyone hoped they would be. Well, James, those are all big questions. Joe, can you shed any light on on any or all of the questions? I think one really interesting thing is I thought we might be actually clearer about how the government was going to organise around these missions by now. I think it's quite interesting that this is labour's very big idea of how it's going to govern. And we haven't actually seen huge amounts in terms of the personnel or the organisation yet. We've seen the appointment of Chris Stark, former Chief Executive of the Climate Change Commission, who's come in to drive part of the Energy Department's mission. So he's taking on this clean energy superpower and is sitting now in the Desneres building in what they're calling mission control. But another Director General in that department is in charge of the other part of that mission, which is the drive to accelerate net zero. Elsewhere, we haven't really seen people being put very clearly in charge, nor the organisation under it. And I'm quite intrigued that we haven't really seen exactly what the mission boards are going to look like, whether they're just cabinet committees, who they're chaired by, whether they're chaired by the relevant section of state. Looks as though it's going to happen, whether they're going to be chaired by Pat McFadden, the Chancellor of Duchy of Lancaster, what role here Starmer's going to play. We're told that he is going to chair quite a lot of meetings, but how is that all going to work? And we haven't seen how the government's planning to involve businesses, outsiders, local and devolved governments. And actually, if they're going to make mission-driven governments something very different, then they really need to be using them to galvanise activity across much more than Whitehall. So at the moment, I think there's a lot of enthusiasm of Whitehall, but perhaps a bit of a vacuum where you might have expected more direction to have been coming from the incoming government. Jill, would you have expected this so far already? I mean, they've only been in government. I mean, I guess it has been a month and a half now. Yes, actually. I think I would have done. Maybe that's unfair. Maybe that's too unrealistic, but this is a big idea. We've been talking about missions since early 2023. Keir Starmer brought in Sue Gray. As we know, Sue Gray done. She's worked most of her life in the cabinet office. And you would have thought this is the sort of thing that actually wouldn't have been too hard to come in with a blueprint about how you were going to organise this and already have identified some of the people you wanted to task with doing these missions or setting up processes to bring people in. We've had two meetings of mission boards, one chaired by Rachel Weaves, the growth mission and one chaired by Ed Miliband for the clean energy mission, but those were just meetings with other ministers. Is that business as usual? What's the routine going to be like? There are stories today in yesterday in Politico saying that they were doing a very urgent recruitment now for the head of what's going to be called Mission Delivery Unit in the cabinet office and that the preferred candidate looks to be Clara Swinson, who's been a Director General and Department of Health. So I think that assembling the pieces into place, of course, they had a lot to do when they came into government, but they did have sort of, you know, relatively few surprises. Keir Starmer appointed almost everybody with just two exceptions, the roles that they've been shadowing before they joined the government. So I'm not too clear why we couldn't have had at least some announcements of cabinet committees by now. I mean, James, uncharitably, is that because something like a mission led government with the five different things that you've already outlined sounds good on paper, but actually when you actually come into government, you know, the big questions of how does it differ to department heads, how does it differ to secretaries of state who are already existing and working on these briefs, just doesn't quite work in reality. Yeah, I think that's fair to say. I think, look, there's been a lot of big talk over the last 10, 15 years in British policy. Do you think the big society, you think leveling up really big ambitious missions, but often it tends to collide with reality. And these are very difficult entrenched problems, some of these issues. So I think that in fairness to labor, there's also the wider context of that point. But you take, for instance, foreign policy, you know, that doesn't obviously fit into any of the five missions I've just laid out. And yet you look at the first four weeks of Starmer in office, he first of all had the first week of summit where he was going to NATO, the European political community summit at Blenheim Palace as well. So that's the first week. Yes, he then had the riots, but also he's had a huge amount of his time with his diary and also meetings and some of that has been public, but also a lot of private taking up with Ukraine and the ongoing situation in Gaza and surrounding areas as well in the Middle East. So you can't neatly focus into all these things. I mean, they have Georgia Gold, for instance, the Cabinet Office, who really has responsibility in the Cabinet Office as a new minister for the emissions of the emissions of government. But also, Georgia Gold did this as a Cabinet Council leader from 2017-2024, their mission led government there in Camden. I think, obviously, it's very difficult to scale up the challenges facing local authority to a national government because, as I say, other things like foreign policy, you've got events that blow off the course of government, and also the treasury involved in all this, which Jill has written a fantastic blog I think a month or so ago talking about how you need to work with the treasury as a partner rather than as a barrier, and that's going to really be key because as I write in the column, the treasury is very often the graveyard for sort of post-war labor ambitious schemes. So we remain to be seeing how that's going to work together in the funding of all this. And really, the big question a lot of people telling me is just waiting for the spending review. And Labor said all the money will go to these five missions, but how much money? And for everything we see, for instance, on some of the pay settlements means not going towards pushing these forward. Right. And Jill, how do you think it would work? You know, if you were being consulted by the government and you're coming up with this blueprint, as you call it, how do you think something like this could work? I think the first thing, and the first thing that I think Labor has done is make clear that these are really important to the Prime Minister. There's nothing like a very clear evidence of Prime Ministerial interest and a willingness to stay involved to really kick things across. And then I think you need to work out who's going to be involved and what roles are people playing? And it's really interesting sort of, you know, some of these things with people being parachuted in from outside to run missions. And as James was saying earlier, how do they sit alongside people doing the business as usual? You know, they have to either work incredibly well together or you have to make clear who's reporting to whom. So I think you want to sort those things out. I actually think the missions in some ways are less cross-cutting than they might be. If you look at the health mission, although it's sort of, you know, if you like sort of situate in a more general view that the nation becomes healthier, it really is focusing on rescuing the NHS. The opportunity mission is predominantly about the Education Department. So I think it's sort of quite interesting in a sense how uncross cutting these are. I think it's a really interesting question about whether Rachel Reeves and the Department of Business and Trade, usually the Treasury, is pretty dismissive of the activities of the Department of Business and Trade. I think it's really interesting whether they can work well together. And as I said before, and James is mentioning, I do think it's really important to have a positive role for the Treasury rather than the Treasury. As a block, it doesn't mean they sort of lose their brain and stop questioning and challenging what looks like wasteful spending and making sure we get good value for all of this. But I do think you want the Treasury definitely seeing it's this as critical to the success of government rather than something that the Treasury needs to get in the way of. So I think it's early days yet. I think we can kick into action. I would hope that the government is very ready when they come back early September to really give a very clear account of what they think is different about mission driven government. Whether they think there's a sort of similar template across each mission, how that's going to work, how it doesn't all get just bogged down in micro-managing and reporting into the centre all the time. That's one of the things that departments are always complaining about when they find that they just have spent their life sending in, answering information requests and sending templates in on progress in the centre and they've got time to do things and how the centre can help them bust open, lock jam, blockages and things like that, lock jam. So I think it's really interesting to see how it is going to work. I certainly wouldn't be saying clearly it's an unworkable idea yet, but I do think you need to have a very clear plan about what it's going to look like. And I think some of the other things we'd expect to see is who's involved, who's in charge, how is it going to be overseen, what's the role as a kid, how am I going to play, how does it feed in not just to the 2025-6 spending review but to this longer term spending review, Rachel Reeves and Darren Jones have kicked off, what's different about being in a mission. And yeah, there is an important thing as well about how they're going to run the rest of government that isn't in one of those five missions. That's quite difficult message to say. Actually, you're less of a priority for the government and still keep people very motivated. Right. I think there's a huge amount of enthusiasm, both inside government and outside government, but the government needs to make sure that that's directed and positive enthusiasm that people don't become frustrated and start working across purposes and undermining each other, which is a risk if you've not got that clear sense of structure and direction. And I will say that I think that there is a huge amount of enthusiasm within Whitehall, I think for what, you know, new Labour government. And I don't mean that in the sense of a bias, but rather in a sense of normal employee-manager-style relations, which is that I think there was a sense perhaps that I think either the Conservatives really run out of steam by the end, or that they didn't really believe in the civil service and actually having someone who believes in them as a mission. As Jill says, you know, talking to Tory ministers before, if you have a clear sense of where you're going, you can get that through the department. And we've had ministers, I think, being very effective with the civil service. And I think two things. First of all, you know, the fact that there is that kind of huge goodwill and your civil servants will do, if you show them the way they will obviously work with you and lead you there is hugely encouraging. And I think that's fair to say. I think second of all, as well, the key thing for me is about the missions may have varying and success rates. If you get a very talented minister, someone like Michael Gray, for instance, who knows how the sort of system works, you can have great results. I think that some missions will be more successful than others. I think that will be the kind of key thing, but underpinning all of it for me is going to be the economy and how that works, the treasury, because of course, it's very well to say from opposition. We won't want any more sticking plaster politics. We're not going to be driven by the crises. But the problem is, if you don't get the economy growing, and this is why it's important, the choice is facing the government, get harder and harder. There's less money to spend. And frankly, that means that there's more and more kind of budget cuts. And then you have those departments, Tony, against each other. So I think that although these five missions are all very important, for me, it's clear that the number one mission is about boosting Britain's growth. It's premised into power, it's in that respect. And it really is the kind of building into I think for the rest of the government's success of failures. And Joe, she's already come up twice in our conversation so far. And that's Sue Gray. Is her being in the center of Downing Street an asset to the politicians being able to work with the civil servants. I also wonder about how the civil service sees her as it were going over to the dark side. Is she still popular within the civil service itself? Is there actually a feeling that actually she's become one of the others? I think what Sue Gray's had a long career in civil service. She certainly knows how the machine works and should be able to help the government work, the machine. And one of the things I think that's always been quite problematic with new prime ministers coming in is they've been rather frustrated because they can't immediately see their way to making the machine work. And we saw that with Tony Blair. We saw it a bit with David Cameron when he said, "Oh, I don't want very many special advisors. I don't want to deliver a unit." And then basically went back to sort of reinventing the stuff that he ditched from his predecessors. So I think having someone there who's very knowledgeable and can avoid those errors is very helpful. And she should be quite good at actually saying to the prime minister, "This is really what it takes to make Whitehall work properly for you." And as James was saying, I think it's not a particularly political thing. New governments are exciting if you're a civil servant. And there was a sense, I think, in the last government that decisions were being delayed. There was quite a lot of drift. And actually one of the things you hear from people around Whitehall is that it's very good to have people who have an appetite for information and want to make decisions. And so that decisions that have been sitting on desk for a long time are finally being made. And I think that's what you really want. And that's when it's interesting and good to work in government. I think part of the problem for Sue Grant, I think civil servants did, quite a few, did a sort of sharp intake of breath when she moved over to Kia Starmer's operation, not least because it gave a lot of people who had been attacking the civil service in the last government a bit of sort of meat to say, "Look, we knew they're all a bunch of sort of signed up laborites and this is our exhibit A." But I think actually it's arguable that some things have gone very smoothly, a testament to the benefits of having had somebody with a bit of a civil service mindset in the centre. But what you really want and what I think people in number 10 will be quite worried about are all these stories knocking around of divisions in number 10. We've had lots of dysfunctional number 10s under some of the conservative prime ministers, I don't think it's particularly dysfunctional under Rishi Sunak, but it certainly was under Boris Johnson. Boris Johnson tried about three or four different ways of mobilizing number 10, none of which really, really worked. So I think it will be, we really do need a government which has number 10 functioning very well, working well with the cabinet office, a cabinet that's working well, ministers who are working well with their departments and hopefully departments and this is the big thing about mission-based government. The department is sort of working very corporately and collaboratively with each other rather than seeing governments in a bit of a zero-sum game. And this is perhaps revealing my own ignorance here, but Joe, you alluded to these stories of number 10 fractures already. What are you talking about here? Well, yeah, there's the key big divide is between supposedly according to reports about Morgan McSweeney, who is sort of tasked with regards as his political brain, been with him, who sort of helped him run the 2020, was the campaign manager, which got his time elected and then been involved in various capacities since surviving the difference of reshuffled to labor and very, very close to Keir Starmer. And then Sugre, who of course we've just talked about, and really I suppose there are different sort of, you know, regards as being sort of different tribes and then there's sort of been reports about how supposedly Morgan McSweeney has been changed desks, obviously desks are very important, where you sit near the prime minister, you know, proximity is power in Whitehall, like all prime real estate in London. And so the allegation is the sort of divide between different gangs in sort of special advisors and who they have around them. It's led by the great contingency and the McSweeney contingency. Yeah, I think the reports have been sort of poisoned the girls. I mean, I mean, that is a sort of, but these are sort of overblown, I think slightly. That being said, I do think there's genuinely different sort of approaches, backgrounds, you know, one's a career civil servant until recently, the other is a sort of real labor fixer and thinker and schema. So I think that they'll be really interesting. I think, ideally, you get the best of both governing and campaigning and the politics of it all. Obviously, a lot of people around Morgan McSweeney have been working on the missions for a very long time. Sugre has a different perspective. I've been at the centre and the cabinet office will be so key to all of this talk about in the piece and rewiring the cabinet office to the centre of it. And it just depends on who's going to win out. And if it does get to that position, I mean, who knows, maybe we'll have five, 10 years of harmonious government and sort of West Wing style. The cynics would suggest otherwise, but are you hear different predictions about how the fates will go and how the chips will go? Chill, Rutter and James Hill. Thank you so much for joining Coffee Outshots.