How Dave and George can avoid a terrible rift

24 September 2008

Andrew Tyrie says that root-and-branch reform of the Treasury will be needed when Brown is gone, including weekly minuted meetings. Past friendship is not enough

It’s back to year zero on the fiscal anchors. We should to be pretty blunt about the legacy. After so many Brown-inspired fiddles to them, the so-called fiscal rules will have to be jettisoned. They are currently providing a credibility deficit. And their replacement? Over a decade ago I argued for an independent fiscal committee to give some market credibility to the definitions in the public accounts. Worth a try.

And then there will be Labour’s policy legacy on financial stability. It was clear from the start that Labour’s Tripartite Committee arrangements were flawed. They left power and responsibility divided, without a single figure unequivocally in charge and carrying the can during a crisis. The government’s proposals to rescue the situation, basically asking a reformed Court of the Bank of England to play a bigger role, could well turn out to be a mouse. This is partly because the proposals do not remove that central flaw of existing arrangements.

Some of the above proposals will restore morale. Treasury civil servants (and the rest of Whitehall) need much clearer lines of responsibility. They need to feel that they are part of the policy-making process, that they have reasonable access to ministers who will listen, and that they will not have their views ‘reinterpreted’ or even jettisoned on the way up the reporting chain by special advisers. Conservatives also need to talk more about the public service ethos which they wish to restore. Once the mandarins realise that these new ministers mean it, they will fall over themselves to help. The door will be open not just to mend the Treasury, but to clear up the debris on the economy as well.

Andrew Tyrie is a former adviser to successive Chancellors of the Exchequer, a former shadow paymaster-general and MP for Chichester since 1997.

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Christopher Chantrill

September 25th, 2008 8:41pm Report this comment

One good thing about the Brown/Blair experience. It should make the mandarins love the idea of getting back to adult government.

The whole premise of Yes, Minister was that the Oxbridge educated Sir Humphreys did indeed look down on the second-rater Tory politicians that served as their political masters in the 1908s.

Today they must think it a golden age.