Listening to Keir Starmer announce this morning that he is going to abolish NHS England can only make the Conservatives wonder at what might have been. It should have been a Conservative prime minister making this sort of speech, declaring the civil service to be ‘flabby’ and cutting out masses of duplication in public administration.
Indeed, the Conservatives made a good start in increasing the efficiency of public services when they returned to office in coalition with the Lib Dems in 2010. Civil service numbers were cut by more than a fifth, from 492,000 in 2010 to 384,000 in 2016. But then something went desperately wrong, and Whitehall was allowed to run to fat again. In the last months of Rishi Sunak’s government, the civil service – at 513,000 – exceeded even the bloated blob that Gordon Brown left behind.
Brexit shares a lot of blame for the party losing all focus on what should be one of its biggest strengths
It is hard not to look at the U-shaped graph of civil service numbers over the past 15 years and compare it with the graph of the number of people on out-of-work benefits.
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