A strong Cabinet Office is good for government

In the run-up to a general election, it is not just politicians who set out their stall. Yesterday's report from the Institute for Government was a major salvo in the battle about how government itself should be run. Senior civil servants, though of course unable to comment directly on such matters while in the job, have made little secret of their dislike for the sofa cabinet style of running the country introduced by Tony Blair. Senior civil servants, such as former cabinet secretary Lord Andrew Turnbull , have been forthright in their criticisms and the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war is once again shining a light on the relationships between public managers and their political masters. The report identifies a "strategic gap" at the heart of the government - the relationship between No 10, the Cabinet Office and the Treasury. Its answer, by and large, is to strengthen the powers of the Cabinet Office and, by extension, those of the cabinet secretary. The Cabinet Office has progressively become the central department for civil service management since the 1980s and the present holder of that post, Sir Gus O'Donnell, has exercised increasing power over departments, through mechanisms such as the capability reviews, which monitor the performance of Whitehall departments. But the report says the cabinet secretary's powers remain "somewhat informal". The cabinet secretary does not, for instance, legally employ permanent secretaries - that is the secretary of state's role. Professor Colin Talbot, professor of public policy and management at Manchester Business School, points out that any change to the constitutional relationship between departments and ministers might well be resisted within departments. "There has always been this problem," he says. Whitehall is changing - yesterday's survey published by the Cabinet Office, on the socio-economic background of the top 200 civil servants, is one sign of that. The modernising tendency want both more change and a consolidation of power, if possible out of the hands of politicians and into the realm of the professional manager. Hence the emphasis in the institute's report on the need for a "strategic" plan for government. How that would work in practice remains open to discussion. Take technology, for instance: the report says there should be a central body, able to intervene when there is a strong case for greater standardisation of computer systems. But, as Public's sister site, Kable , points out, the report also acknowledges the problems of such a course - efforts to do exactly this have been undermined by competing priorities and resistance within departments.