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Andrew Lownie recounts how he became the victim of state surveillance as a result of his successful efforts to secure the release of the personal diaries and letters of Dickie and Edwina Mountbatten – bought by the University of Southampton with public funds to be open to researchers – in what became the largest-ever release of material under Freedom of Information (FOI), 33,000 pages, but which personally cost him over £400,000 in legal fees. Drawing on his own research experiences, he also describes the failure of government departments to deposit records at the National Archives as required by statute, the techniques public authorities use to frustrate FOI requests and suggests how FOI could be improved. All of this curation, he argues, leads to a distortion of the historical record and the censoring of our history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 10 March 2024 the Commission on the Centre of Government published its final report: Power with Purpose. The aim of the commission had been to explore why Number Ten, the Cabinet Office and HM Treasury do not always work as well as they should and to explore what could be done to improve the centre of government radically. Perennial concerns about the existence of a 'hollow crown' at the centre of British government were, the final report recommended, to be resolved through the implementation of a 'radical' reform agenda. This article interrogates the commission's proposals from a critical perspective and builds upon existing concerns as to the viability of further centralising power in Whitehall. It achieves this by reflecting on an understanding of why history, criticality, governance, evidence and relationships matter when seeking to cope with complexity or when designing genuinely 'radical' new governance capabilities. It is argued that a full appreciation of these factors is essential to any project to strengthen the core executive and offers a more balanced, relational and systemic approach to nurturing strategic capacity in government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An Institute for Government (IfG) report on 'government at the centre' recommends creating new, rationalist policy machinery (including an inner cabinet) to manage the UK government's four‐year policy programmes—faithfully following how the Cameron‐Clegg coalition operated in 2010–15. That government's disastrous example shows how politically naïve this plan would be. This article draws out its complete infeasibility in late 2024 conditions. The IfG also proposes setting up a new Department for the Civil Service headed by a powerful minister as a counterweight to the Treasury (criticised only for being 'too good' and hence over‐dominant). Instead, this article sets out the case for a new and strong Department for Finance, Procurement and Productivity to take responsibility for spending control and other key public management roles, where the Treasury resource management has conspicuously failed in the last decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at Prime Ministers' attempts to reform their operation in Number Ten and their relationship with the Cabinet Office in response to frustrations they encounter trying to drive their policy agenda from the centre. Prime Ministers have developed new institutions to bolster their meagre resources in Number Ten. There is particular focus on the experience of John Major in trying to push his Citizen's Charter. It notes how resistant departments were to many of the changes. Finally the article discusses recent changes in Boris Johnson's Number Ten that marked the brief tenure of Dominic Cummings and his clear centralising mission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the aim for improved resiliency of small businesses by the Civil Contingencies Secretariat (CCS) of the Cabinet Office in Great Britain. It notes that transactions between government departments and wider stakeholders are coordinated by the CCS. It mentions that the efficiency of business continuity planning has declined for small businesses.

This article demonstrates how the Cabinet Office was able to isolate rogue ministers as a means of reinforcing collective Cabinet responsibility and enforcing the will of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. Harold Wilson returned to Number 10 Downing Street in 1974 promising to renegotiate the terms of Britain's entry into the European Community. The renegotiation effort was coordinated by the Cabinet Office's European division, which aligned itself to Wilson's strategy of engineering the renegotiation to ensure Britain would remain a member of the Community. Benn was opposed to Community membership and in his capacity as Secretary of State for Industry sought to use the renegotiation items of regional development and the steel industry to cause its disruption. The Cabinet Office, in close collaboration with Wilson and Foreign Secretary Jim Callaghan, frustrated his attempts by utilising the machinery of government it operated against him to help push their preferred policy through. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]