Alex Barker at the FT Westminster blog has the details:
The plans are not quite finalised. But it looks like the Strategy Unit — which is staffed by a few dozen civil servants — will broadly be split in two.
Some staff will join Steve Hilton and Polly Mackenzie in the Policy Unit, which is mainly staffed by special advisers in Downing Street. The remainder will be joining Nick Clegg’s small but growing cadre of wonks. The Office of Civil Society, meanwhile, is to be beefed up to become The Big Office of Civil Society*. Gareth Davies, the current head of the strategy unit, will be its new director general.
Shifting policy specialists from a Strategy Unit to a Policy Unit will only set pulses racing of the most devoted Whitehall-ogist. But there is a genuine point to be made. These two teams were set up to do very different things…
New Labour wanted the Strategy Unit, staffed by civil servants, to instil a culture of long-term evidence based policymaking in Whitehall. Given the heavy day-to-day firefighting in government, Geoff Mulgan and others wanted to make sure that somebody, somewhere had a strategic overview of policy.
Over at the Institute for Government blog, Jill Rutter echoes the point, recalling her time in the Number 10 Policy Unit under John Major:
What became clear then was that it was too small to do anything other than get drawn into day-to-day fire fighting on behalf of the Prime Minister. Eight of us – a mix of civil servants and advisers – shadowed the whole domestic policy agenda. The Cabinet Office played its traditional coordinating and brokering role – but did nothing to move departments from their entrenched positions and look for positive solutions that cut across departmental boundaries.
A meeting on policy on lone parents chaired by the Cabinet Office, full of Grade 7s briefed not to concede an inch of departmental turf, was one of the most dispiriting two hours I ever spent in government. The Prime Minister – and the government – lacked a capacity to develop forward looking policies and to do the hardest of all things – renew itself in office.
It is there that the ability of the Strategy Unit to take a fresh look at issues (particularly those not on the immediate political radar and that do not sit neatly in departmental boundaries) and its ability to both challenge but also work with departments will be missed.
Barker and Rutter are both absolutely right in their analysis. Admittedly, many observers thought that the PMSU’s fortunes had waned in recent years since its glory days under Geoff Mulgan. But room for improvement doesn’t constitute a case for abolition.
The strategic deficit on global risks and foreign policy looks especially bad. Combined with a Foreign Office that’s now almost wholly focused on ‘winning business for Britain’, a new National Security Council apparatus that is (as predicted) having to focus almost all of its energy on firefighting, and DFID apparently being pulled away from its global thought leadership role in favour of an approach more along ‘aid administration’ lines, the question would seem to be less where the long-term strategic thinking on global risks is happening in Whitehall, than whether the new government wants any to happen at all.*
*All the more reason why we need a National Intelligence Council along the lines of the US model, as I’ve argued here before.
