James Kirkup James Kirkup

In defence of SpAds

Government by headline is always tempting, and always a mistake. Some of the worst such mistakes concern the machinery and cost of politics, where it’s all too easy to announce stuff that sounds good for a day or two yet inflicts long-term harm on the quality of politics and government.

Scrapping and merging Whitehall departments generally falls into the category of ‘things that sound sensible but aren’t’, so reports that such a reorganisation has been canned are encouraging. In any case, there are bigger problems to fix in Whitehall, problems caused by politicians putting appearances before effectiveness.

Public sector pay is a good example. Early in the Coalition days, David Cameron suffered another attack of headline-itis and announced that no one in the public sector could be paid more than the Prime Minister. That was a daft benchmark, not least because no-one bases the decision on whether to be PM on the salary. Whereas when the Government needs to hire someone to run, say, defence procurement or NHS IT, it goes shopping in a labour market where people can and do base their employment choices on salary.

Anyway, that salary cap wasn’t, in the end, much of a cap, but it probably did make it a bit harder for the state to hire the very best people. But hey, it generated a few headlines and allowed DC to say he’d cracked down on public sector fatcats etc etc.

Will the Dominic Cummings vision for Whitehall bring senior pay back into focus? It should. Boris Johnson’s adviser worries that the state isn’t hiring and retaining galactic-grade minds to tackle the big problems of public policy. Which may well be true, but it’s hard to see how a solution won’t involve offering to pay an awful lot more than is currently available to experts joining the civil service.

Money, by the way, is also part of the answer to the relentless churn of civil service jobs that causes such (justified) irritation.

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