Coffee House Shots
Welcome to Whitehall Watch
Get three months of spectator now for just three pounds. Go to spectator.co.uk/trial. Hello, and welcome to the special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots. I'm Katie Bools, and I'm joined by Henry Newman, former adviser to Michael Gove. And now, the editor of Whitehall Watch, is that the right way to describe you, Henry? Well, I started a couple of new projects since leaving government. One of them is Whitehall Watch on Twitter. And I think during the election, one of the most exciting Twitter accounts, other than the spectators. Yeah, we actually have more than one, but keep going. The spectators at Twitter feed, or X, as I suppose we're supposed to call it now, was Michael Crick's Tomorrow's MP's project. And I think it was really important in revealing who was going to stand for Parliament and where, and the whole process behind that. And I was thinking about Whitehall, the public service and civil service specifically, and how little attention gets placed on this crucial institution. It's important for so many different things that people, politicians, care about. It obviously delivers so many of our public services. And I think it's also at the heart of many of the reasons why Britain potentially isn't working at the moment. If you look at the productivity crisis or productivity paradox of the UK, actually, public sector productivity is the problem, rather than private sector productivity. And I think one of the things I was trying to do with shining a light on this was start getting into some of those ideas. So there's Whitehall Watch on Twitter, which is going to cover civil service moves and people in and around Whitehall appointed to key roles. I picked up some of the ones that you covered in your column, Katie, where Streeting has started bringing in new people to the Department of Health to sort of turbocharge his reforms there. And then there's a second side of it, which is the Whitehall project. And the point of that is to get into a bit more of the detail about what's happening in government. So I looked at what happened in the corridors of power, while the ministers were away fighting an election. And actually, civil service made some quite significant changes during that period. And I asked a few tentative questions about what it meant to make those changes without any ministerial oversight at all. And what did you find out? Well, I thought that I mean, I think everyone who's looked at this, everyone who's looked at the problem of Whitehall, it's always said we need to bring in more outsiders. We need to have kind of people with different sorts of experience coming into Whitehall. And what I think I found was that as soon as the election was called, all those people who've been brought in from outside who are quickly shown the door. I think a former special advisor to Michael Gove described special advisors and external appointments as like a mutant virus that the civil service tries to expel. And I think we saw quite a lot of that expulsion happening at the time of the election. And I think that was, I think that changes for the good. I think we need to have a more porous civil service where people from politics, from business, from different backgrounds, work in it, and then leave and do some other things, but then come back again. Now, I want to talk about the department you formerly worked in, which is the leveling up department, leveling up no more, just before we do, I suppose one of the big stories in advance of Labour's victory in the general election has been about Sue Gray, obviously a former civil servant, who is now a case non-Mr Chief of Staff, reports of a fractious relationship or at least an unwarm relationship with Simon Case, the current cabinet secretary. It's quite clear that Simon Case is going to step down at some point and there'll be a new cabinet secretary. What do you think Sue Gray will be looking for from your time in government? I think that's the crucial question. I think Sue Gray is obviously a former official, as you're describing. She's somebody who's worked her way up from the most junior ranks of the civil service to become a permanent secretary. And then she was poached by Kirsten Arman, obviously quite a controversial hire, certainly for many conservatives at the time. I think she knows white tool very well, especially the centre of government. I think her skills are much more as a sort of fixer and a people person. But she certainly will have strong views on individuals, both positively and negatively. And I'm not sure that's been appreciated enough outside of white tool, just how important she will be in deciding which officials get to the very top. And of course there's no more important position than cabinet secretary. Some voices from the outside, you mentioned I work for Michael Gove. I also work for Francis Moore, who is a minister in the early part of the coalition government, well in the coalition government, the early part of the conservatives' time in office. And he was very interested in white tool reform. And he did a report for Boris Johnson, which talks about the need to split the head of the civil service into two roles, the head of the civil service, running the 400 or 1000 people in white tool. And the cabinet secretary providing advice to the PM and the cabinet more broadly. I don't think Labour will do that. It's not necessarily impossible. I think they'll choose an existing senior person to do it. I don't think they'll like you to bring in someone from a completely different background. I think there are some frontrunners. And I think Ollie Robbins is often speculated about. And I think it could quite easily be him. Yeah, I've heard that Ollie Robbins, since too great, did get on quite well during the time in government. Notably, he did attend the Institute for Government Summer Party, despite at the time in the private sector. And then I think I'm afraid from getting too much into details of job speculation amongst the many journalists who tried to speak to him at the party. But a choice, a choice to attend in the first place. Now, you mentioned, of course, again, obviously your time breaking from Michael Gove. We've had this week and she ran her in her department. She is, in a way, Michael Gove's successor as secretary of state, saying that levelling up will be removed from the government department. What did you make of that? Well, I think the strange thing is, well, she was initially announced as the secretary of state for levelling up housing and communities. And I thought, when that happened, I thought, that's really clever. Labour have won this huge majority. And they're now wearing the Tories' clothes. They're recognised that levelling up is popular across the country. And it's a powerful agenda of change. And I thought, that's brilliant politics. They're just going to use it as their own. In fact, what happened is it was a pure mistake. The title page, which were the sort of the graphic that was tweeted out from the number 10 account, was written incorrectly. And she'd never been intended to be appointed as levelling up secretary. So by the time she got back to or got to her department for the first time, they were already discussing when and how to make the change. And she's now changed it. She's asked the name from the department. And it's gone back to, I think, what it was called in about 2018. I mean, that department has gone through so many different names and flavours through the year. Sometimes it's been a department. Sometimes it's been a ministry. I don't really understand the difference despite trying to. But what it does is housing and levelling up. We saw earlier this week, Rachel Reeves, a new chancellor, give quite a well-received speech on some of their plans for growth. I was a little bit more cynical than perhaps some have taken her words. I thought, I don't think she said anything particularly exciting or new. I don't think she's the first chancellor. In fact, I can think of every single recent chancellor talking about growth and the need to secure it, quite a strange of a chancellor said anything else. And I think what she was really saying was not very much. They've laboured during the election, promised to restore mandatory housing targets. In fact, those targets weren't really mandatory anyway. But I understand that that is a change and it's an important symbolic change. And I think it was arguably a mistake of Rishi Sunak's government to force Michael Gove into ditching those targets in the first place. So that's important. But rather than doing it on day one, as Angelouina's team once promised, they've now softened it to just consulting over the next few months. And that means that any sort of actual change will come much later. Rachel Reeves also talked about hiring 300 new planning bureaucrats. I mean, that's a good thing. It might help speed up the system. But that's fewer than one new planning bureaucrat per town hall planning team. Not exactly a revolution. I suppose on planning, Labour have talked about a lot in advance of winning the election. They're talking about it again now. And the argument Labour figures will make as they have the majority, they have the United Party, which means they can push some of the stuff through. And that is what's missing. I mean, Boris Johnson obviously promised this big radical planning shake up and then did row back on it to some degree in the face of opposition from MPs. Now, you've been in that department where you're trying to push free things and you are coming up against a parliamentary party. Do you think Labour will have a bit more luck in terms of, I suppose, large majority and probably less fractured because they're just back in government? Or do you think when it comes to planning lots of issues are local? And it's more about local concerns than your ideology. Yeah, I don't think to that last point, I don't think backbench MPs were against house building purely from some sort of personal opposition to houses. Most people want to see more houses built. But development can be very unpopular in local areas. And I think one of the things that Michael Gove as housing secretary was trying to say was that we need to find a way of making new developments, new housing more popular with local people. We need to find a way of making sure it's beautiful. We need to find a way of making sure it comes alongside the doctors' surgeries and primary schools and road infrastructure that people expect. So I think all of that is important. I think the argument around restoring inverted commerce mandatory housing targets is a slight side show. Labour have also talked about potentially releasing more of the Greenbelt. Well, it was already the case that the Greenbelt could be released in accordance with local wishes as part of a plan. So I think the actual reality of this is a little bit more complicated than most people want to get into. My concern is that if you want to really change the dialogue on house building and on planning, you need to look at some of the environmental rules we have in this country. Now, those rules are typically very well-intentioned. A lot of them are EU legacy rules, things like neutrality rules, nukes and bats famously, and also the rules around water. And these have actually caused a lot of the problems in the current planning system. Rachel Reeves also talked about infrastructure more broadly than just housing. And if you look at the debacle over the lower Thames Crossing, which is a proposed bridge over the Thames, there's an extraordinary amount of regulatory documents, several hundred thousand pages that have had to be produced. And that's because of environmental regulations. I think any serious attempt to grasp the problems of planning would have to be willing to open up that mess and also look at the whole process of judicial review, where planning decisions get fought over endlessly in the courts and commercial rivals of a different company that's putting forward a development use the courts to attack their rivals. And I think that whole problem is an area which Labour just don't want to touch. We saw in the last parliament that when the government tried to make some quite modest changes to the nutrient neutrality rules, Labour voted it down. And equally, I can't imagine Kierstammer being desperate to streamline the process around judicial review. Now, maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised. I do think there's some things that Labour could do on housing that would be more important. You could take some of these decisions away from elected councillors and you could let town hall bureaucrats come up with more of the "yes, no" choices. That's controversial. It means it's less democratic, but it would perhaps speed things up. They could also move decisions away from lower-tier councils, district councils, and shove it up a level, make it a decision for upper-tier councils to take, or even mayoral combined authorities. And they might just think that a local government council with a larger geography might be less inclined to veto planning because it's sort of less in-hock for its less in-hock to local protesters. Now, that's possible, but again, it will be a slightly anti-democratic move. But I can understand that from their point of view, that would be something that could move the dials. I would be interested to see if, over the next few months, they start to take steps in that direction. And just finally, going back to Whitehall Watch, is there anything you think our listeners should be particularly looking out for in the coming weeks and months when it comes to the machinations of this new government? So, I think you already touched on the Cabinet Secretary. That's one of the most important jobs in Whitehall. I think the second most important job that almost no one's heard of is the principal private secretary to the prime minister. Now, this is the person who basically runs number 10. One former occupant of that job, Martin Reynolds, came to a degree of notoriety, I think some of that unfairly. But nonetheless, it's a very important job. You're essentially the head of Downing Street, working to the prime minister and working alongside the chief of staff, Sue Gray. I think that will be an absolute crucial appointment. I've speculated about some of the people who could be in the frame. The current front-runners largely seem to come from a treasury background. That's not particularly surprising in Whitehall. But people who've worked in the treasury tend to come with a very treasury-ish mindset. They worry a great deal about balancing the books, not necessarily a bad thing. But their primary concern is the funding, the process of getting the money agreed. And I wonder whether that, if I was choosing the new PPS, the new principal private secretary to the PM, would that be my top sort of person to go for? I don't think so. I think what Keir Stummer needs, if he wants to really drive change, is someone who's a doer who can get things done. But I think that's one of the key choices that he'll have to make over the coming weeks, because it's widely expected that the competent lady who's currently doing the job, Elizabeth Perelman, will move on to a new position. Thank you, Henry, and thank you for listening. [MUSIC]