The Pickles plan

Some Cabinet ministers develop airs in office. Eric Pickles isn’t one of them. Sitting at the head of a conference table that looks like it’s been purchased from a discount office supplies catalogue, he explains his outlook on life. ‘There are two kinds of people,’ he says. ‘There are those who open that door and courteously speak to people, and there are those who bellow. There are those who write long memos on the temperature of your cappuccino and those who are just grateful if you get a warm beverage, and I’m the latter.’

He would place himself in an even rarer group: a minster who gets things done. He boasts that ‘this department has fundamentally shifted from being on the side of local government to being on the side of council tax payers’. As evidence of this he cites the fact that his department is scrapping more regulations than any other.

Pickles is happy to advise Cabinet colleagues on how to follow suit. ‘You’ve got to see it from the side of the public and not from the side of the bureaucracy,’ he says. But not all of his colleagues, particularly the Business Secretary, Vince Cable, agree that deregulation is what the economy needs.

When I put Cable’s objections to Pickles, he tartly replies that ‘every department, including his, needs to get a move on. We do need to deregulate.’ He says, using the kind of tone a teacher might deploy with a too wilful pupil, the ‘really important thing here is we don’t just slash away at regulation willy-nilly. We started from the basis, and I’m sure Vince might find this helpful: what should government do? what should be our priorities? what gets in the way of those priorities, what are we asking business to do?’