One area where Labour and the Tories have started agreeing

With less than three months to go to the election, politics is pretty partisan at Westminster at the moment as PMQs today demonstrated. But there is one area where there is, despite the proximity of polling day, a bi-partisan consensus emerging: civil service reform. This morning, both Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, and his opposite number Lucy Powell, who is also in day to day charge of the Labour campaign, appeared at the conference of Govern Up, a new think tank on civil service reform headed up by the former Tory Minister Nick Herbert and the ex-Labour frontbencher John Healey. Now, the reason that both parties are so interested in civil service reform is that they both believe that they might be in power after the next election and so have an interest in fixing the machinery of government. One idea worthy of further scrutiny is Govern Up’s proposal to create a UK Office of Budget and Management which would yoke together the Treasury and the Cabinet Office in a bid to make government more efficient.

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