To London, where the Institute for Government’s 2025 conference is in full flow. This afternoon the think tank hosted a wide-ranging conversation with Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Alex Burghart. The Tory MP discussed everything from the role of the civil service to the glamorous life of an opposition politician. ‘In the Cabinet Office, I had 11,000 people helping me. Now I have four,’ he remarked drily. And when he turned to the issue of the Treasury machine, Burghart pulled no punches.
Discussing the centre of government the Tory politician was quick to warn attendees of the ‘overwhelming power of the Treasury in government’. Burghart described his own rather frustrating experience with the Exchequer, noting that it gave him ‘an insight into how a series of spending controls that had been brought in for perfectly good reasons had, over time, been cranked up to ridiculous proportions’. He went on:
When done badly this has a sort of stultifying effect on the formation of policy and its delivery across the departments. You see teams being demoralised. You see ministers being demoralised. People feel there’s not real point to starting out on something unless everything is signed off on. There’s even a form of despair which creeps in – that even if it is signed off, the Treasury’s position may change.
Crikey. It’s a bleak image…
Burghart’s warning comes ahead of this afternoon’s speech to the conference by none other than the Chief Secretary to the Treasury himself. Darren Jones has the unenviable task of laying the groundwork for spending cuts as rising borrowing costs present yet another challenge to the increasingly beleaguered Labour government.
There is one thing that both Burghart and Jones agree on, however: that the current system of government needs improved. The Shadow Chancellor to the Duchy of Lancaster warned today that ‘there does need to be a fundamental reappraisal of the way in which these systems work, or don’t’. Jones will say something similar later, with the MP set to tell his audience that the government won’t ‘settle for doing things the same and hoping for a different result’. How interesting.
But as the polls continue to show their popularity plummeting, the Labour lot have their work cut out trying to win back support. No matter how much system change is promised, hints at further spending cuts are unlikely to boost the national mood…
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