The Week 14 March 2025
Policy Director
Lenin was right when he said there were “decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen”. And this week definitely makes it into the latter category.
At Re:State we use The Week to update you on the most interesting things going on in Westminster, along with what we’ve been up to. But this week it’s hard to separate those two things out! Because along with the latest developments in geopolitics, the Government’s media grid has been full to the brim with public service reform announcements.
It started off with Pat McFadden, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, using the Sunday morning media round to announce reductions in the size of the civil service, and taking on a culture which is too often indifferent to poor performance. We wrote about this in our landmark report from last year, ‘Making the grade’, which catalogued the issues with routine poor performance, and it’s great to see the Government accepting our recommendations: to initiate performance improvement plans more quickly; to dismiss staff who don’t meet standards; and to be willing to spend money to get rid of poor performers rather than carrying them indefinitely.
Briefing all week paved the way for a set-piece speech by the Prime Minister yesterday in which he told us that he wanted an “active government” and was prepared to take on the system to get his way. He majored on commitments to cut the compliance costs from regulation by a quarter, and to take on a State which had become “overcautious and flabby”. In practice, the focus was on the proliferation of public bodies. Just last month we published ‘Quangocracy’, which outlined how Government needs to get a grip of the hundreds of public bodies which account for 60 per cent of day-to-day public spending, but have little oversight or accountability, exactly the approach the PM took in his argument.
Most significantly, the PM announced the Government would start with the biggest one first, abolishing NHS England and bringing it back under the direct control of the Department of Health. He is absolutely right that decisions made about spending and policy shouldn’t be put beyond the remit of elected ministers, and extra layers of bureaucracy come with many hidden costs. Re:State argued for exactly this in our major paper last year ‘Close enough to care’, though long-running supporters will know that it has been a core recommendation of our health policy work as far back as 2017.
Plenty of elements of the wider government plan are lacking in detail. Peter Kyle took to the airwaves to announce the Government would be finding £45 billion of savings and productivity improvements from AI, but with little detail about how. In our paper ‘Getting the machine learning’ from September we argued the Government needed to look for efficiencies in the big, frontline services where the majority of the cost is, but that inevitably involves making headcount reductions — will the Government be confident enough in their plans to go down that track?
Behind the headlines, we’ve seen movement on even more Re:State recommendations. On Tuesday the Treasury released their internal review of digital spending, which commits to pilot many of the policies we recommended in our January paper ‘Byte-sized budgeting’ : particularly lighter touch business case processes and more flexibility for iterative funding of technology programmes.
The Treasury also announced that Re:State will be one of the evaluation partners for its Office for Value for Money, where we will be looking at how their work measures up to the ideas we set out in our paper ‘The price of everything’ for improving value for money last year.
Onto the read of the week
Peter Kyle has been taking his own call for more AI in government to heart, as information obtained under Freedom of Information request by the New Scientist shows. Logs showing the advice he asked ChatGPT for, and the answers it gave, were released. It’s great to see a secretary of state responsible for an emerging technology experimenting with it personally for one of the things Generative AI is best at — coming up with suggestions of things to look into. But eager Whitehall watchers will be wondering what precedent this sets for the disclosure of more information over time, as the first release of LLM logs under an FOI — which sets a dangerous precedent for policymakers in the future. It will be incredibly damaging for Ministers and officials’ trust in the technology if their queries can be retrieved and published publicly.