Regulation: “invisible government” reprised
By Richard North - May 25, 2026
Far from diving into my bunker with the aircon turned up to maximum – in anticipation of the Met Office’s life-threatening heatwave – I have been out in the street for most of the last two days, fixing my road.
Because I’m using a petroleum-based bitumastic binder as the finish coat on the recycled asphalt I’ve laid, I needed a period of at least three-days rain-free in order to carry out the work and, for the last fortnight and more, we’ve had rain every day. Now that the good weather cometh, I must make roads while the sun shines.
That said, the work is gruelling, not particularly pleasant and I’m getting back indoors at the end of the work sessions in an advanced state of fatigue. In that condition, as I settle down to write the latest blogpost, the state of British politics seems more than a little unreal.
This particularly applies to debate that is running on the structure of the civil service, with the latest episode in this long-running saga delivered by Reform’s Danny Kruger in a report entitled Fixing the Centre, with the sub-title identifying “proposals for the heart of government”.
I can’t help but think of this initiative that Kruger is looking in the wrong place, at the wrong things, coming up with arcane proposals that are focused on the role of the Cabinet Office – which he wants to abolish – along with an obsessive determination to abolish quangos and cut down civil service numbers.
Under a Reform UK government, Kruger says, the great majority of quangos and agencies will be brought back into the Departments or scrapped. This will, he avers, bring the real experts into government; make them meaningfully accountable to ministers and thus to parliament and the public; and ensure their issue-specific advice is considered alongside other, competing priorities.
The abolition of the Cabinet Office, the establishment of the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) and the restoration of responsibility and accountability to departments, he argues, would create the opportunity to establish stand-alone teams tasked with innovating outside “business as usual” operations.
A team or taskforce could work with OPM colleagues, Kruger suggests, similar to how cross-government units work today but directly reporting to a minister, to develop bespoke solutions to sudden crises; to fix long-running dysfunctions that the “business as usual” team can’t spare the time, or lacks the expertise, to deal with; or even to establish parallel, probably highly digital, operations in certain functions to demonstrate a better way of working than the analogue operation of the status quo.
This sort of high-flown rhetoric undoubtedly impresses the weak-minded and the Westminster wonks – the sort that get nose-bleeds if they venture further north than the Watford Gap services.
But rarely are failures of government directly related to structural defects. In my experience, the reorganisations of departments following failures almost invariably result in reduced capabilities and measurable deteriorations in performance – not least because the causes of the failures are never properly determined.
As you might expect, Pete is on the case and, equally predictably, he is not in the least impressed with Kruger’s desire to “bring the real experts into government”
What you’ll then get. Pete counters, is a new class of crony super-spad, intended to be elite private sector experts, who will have no idea how to get results out of large, amalgamated governmental organisations.
They will end up leaning heavily on their senior civil servants (the ones who haven’t been given their marching orders) who will be deemed obstructive for pointing out certain technical and legal realities said super-spads will have no concept of. It will lead to much the same implementation logjams and will continue to blame civil service “intransigence”.
Central to this mythmaking is the likes of Dominic Cummings who was never likely to accomplish meaningful reforms on account of his abysmal temperament, but, says Pete, “the civil service is not to blame for fourteen years of Tory failure”.
In developing his theme, Pete recalls that a large part of the reason Reform has any momentum at all is because the Tories did nothing with their massive majority and mandate.
Brexit, he says, was not thwarted by the deep state. Ultimately, EU regulatory systems are complex areas of governance, and if you’re going to reform things like agriculture, fishing, planning, asylum and energy, then you need a deep understanding of how the system currently works and what you want to transition to.
But nobody, he recalls, did that work, least of all anybody in Vote Leave or Farage’s Ukip. The policy cupboard was bare. There was no will to diverge from the EU baseline because nobody had any considered ideas of how things should otherwise work. That was too much like effort.
There is a lot of sense in that view but this is by no means the full extent of the problem. Back in 2008, I wrote a piece in the EUReferendum blog headed Invisible Government in which I mooted that, when you face the ongoing deterioration of society, it is not just in the big things that you measure it.
It is, I wrote, also in the hundreds and thousands of small things that used to be done that are not done any more. That is where the real breakdown is at its most damaging, I averred. And as for the reasons why, a significant factor here is that so many people in authority no longer understand how the nuts and bolts of government work any more.
Much of the work done, my thesis went, was “invisible government”, and when this layer of government disappeared, no one realised it had gone, because so few knew it was there in the first place.
This came to mind with my current travails with Yorkshire Water and the difficulty in my private road of getting this utility to obey the law, reinstating the road surface to a proper condition after an excavation.
Although here I am focused on my own particular problem, I am by no means alone in my experience. In March 2023, under the Sunak administration the Department of Transport was complaining about the poor standards, noting that the average failure rate for street works by utility companies was then 9 percent, but some of the worst performers were failing inspections by as much as 63 percent.
Such failures make an important contribution to the rash of potholes which is blighting Britain’s roads, but the problem has been so long recognised that a statutory framework for control was produced in the form of the New Roads and Street Works Act (NRASWA), 1991 – back in the days of John Major.
Come 2023, the problem had got so bad that the Sunak administration produced new regulations and a statutory code of practice for street work inspections, in an attempt to reduce the level of non-compliance – and the ensuing potholes.
This is where we see “invisible government” at its finest. Each highway authority – usually local authorities or county councils – have their own NRASWA “compliance teams”. They monitor roadworks, inspect the reinstatement standards and have powers to force the utilities to finish their repairs properly, even to the extent of doing the work in default and charging the utilities, if the roads are left in a poor state.
However, here’s the rub. The compliance team in my local authority area, which does the work locally, has been cut from 70 to a mere 18. The survivors can barely keep track of the works on their main highways and have no time to monitor minor roads, much less unadopted road, where local authorities have an oversight function. My calls for help have gone unanswered.
As a result supervision of the utilities has fallen to an all-time low, at a time when street works are at a record high, coinciding with the recabling of Britain with fibre optics, and the water companies playing catch-up on water leakage. defeating the object of Sunak’s 2023 initiative.
I am sure that the likes of Danny Kruger and his “efficiency” wonks would be delighted to see the reduction in the headcount, but the shortage of staff had real-world effects. We are all paying many times more than the savings have delivered, as a result of poor enforcement.
The same, incidentally, goes for planning enforcement, where local authority activity has all but collapsed, and for the vital task of trading standards, where there is chronic understaffing throughout the country.
Thus, if Reform and the other pretenders to the throne really wanted to make an impact, they would be better advised to concentrate on the nuts and bolts of “invisible government”, where small changes could have profound effects, rather than dwelling on highfalutin vanity schemes which will have very little practical effect.
