The aim is to streamline the way government departments work, reversing measures taken by the Conservatives during David Cameron’s premiership a decade ago, in an effort to deliver budget savings.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves set out in a statement to Parliament last week how she is seeking efficiencies in Whitehall in an effort to balance the books, arguing that the Tories had left an unpaid bill for public servants’ wages of £9 billion.
She said: “The first difficult choice I am making is to ask all departments to find savings … totalling at least £3 billion.” Among spending lines facing the ax are fees for external consultants, which costs the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds a year, and all non-essential spending on communications. “I am taking action to ask departments to find 2 percent savings in their back office costs,” Reeves added.
During the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition of 2010-2015, Cameron’s minister Francis Maude attempted to centralise “back office” operations across government in the Cabinet Office. These included digital services, property administration, and procurement. The aim was to make Whitehall — as the independent civil service and government departments are collectively known — more efficient and to save taxpayers’ money.
But the reforms apparently backfired, as individual government departments did not want to give up control over the functions they were supposed to hand over to the Cabinet Office.
The result was “vast amounts of extra bureaucracy and duplication,” according to one person familiar with the proposed overhaul. “There is a very significant streamlining planned.” The functions that were centralized under Cameron and Maude may be returned to their original departments.
