Keir Starmer must provide clarity for his No 10 reset to pay off
4 min read
If the PM can avoid repeating past mistakes, then his new-look operation might just give him what he wants.
Keir Starmer has replaced his principal private secretary (Dan York-Smith takes over from Nin Pandit), and his political head of communications (Tim Allen takes over from James Lyons), brought in an economic adviser (Minouche Shafik) and – the big one – created a new role for Darren Jones as Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister. And that’s not the end of the personnel changes. The Prime Minister is now looking for a new political policy chief after Stuart Ingham moves across to work with Morgan McSweeney.
By any measure, this is a big shake-up. In the PM's words, it is about moving the government into “phase two” and “ramping up the next phase of the government’s domestic agenda”. In more common parlance: it’s about getting stuff done. There are two traps Starmer must navigate through to give this set-up a chance of success: clarity and ambition.
First, by not being clear enough on who is responsible for what, especially in terms of delivering on Starmer’s priorities, the new look No 10 is at real risk of compounding some of the issues it seeks to resolve. I currently count at least four people doing this from the centre: Jones in his new role; Clara Swinson (appointed as second permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office last year and head of the Mission Delivery Unit); Pandit, who is reportedly staying on in a “new role leading on policy delivery in No10”; and Pat McFadden, whose responsibilities as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster include “missions” and “supporting the delivery of the government’s priorities”. Add to that the Prime Minister’s private office (and a new PPS in Dan York-Smith who will want to show he ‘gets’ what Starmer is after), and the myriad of others in and around the centre who purport to speak for the Prime Minister, and the picture is looking very busy.
Big figures can work together and jointly set direction, but this reorganisation will fall at the first hurdle if those inside government do not know who is doing what and why. There is already far too much duplication at the centre, as updates get ceaselessly commissioned and spreadsheets and delivery trackers proliferate, gumming up the Cabinet Office and departments, and damaging relationships between departments and the centre.
Second is the uncertainty about what this means for the government’s missions. In some senses, this shake-up throws the centre’s weight behind missions by bringing in Jones as a senior political figure to deliver the Plan for Change – the document which sets out the milestones against each mission. The risk is that while Jones focuses, rightly, on the task at hand of meeting those milestones, this becomes a No 10 that grips the system ever more tightly from the centre. That model may well deliver the milestones, but it would be the death toll for the expansive, collaborative and innovative model of mission-led working championed by McFadden and Cabinet Office minister Georgia Gould.
This needn’t be the case – it’s possible for Jones to lead a positive and collaborative model, supporting departments to meet their milestones and acting as a central troubleshooter. That model could even free up more space for Gould and McFadden to work with Cabinet Secretary Chris Wormald to pursue mission-led reforms to how the civil service works. That requires – once again – clear direction from Starmer, and for those in departments to know who they pick up the phone to when they need the centre’s help.
The new operation is being sold as speeding up the pace of change (an eternal source of frustration for prime ministers). If Starmer can deliver on the shake-up – by steering this nascent No 10 to organisational clarity and by avoiding a blinkered obsession with targets – he might find No 10 starts delivering for him.
Hannah Keenan is an associate director at the Institute for Government.
