Theresa May’s government is facing inter-departmental squabbles, concerns over staffing levels and “big challenges” drawing up legislation as it attempts to implement a Brexit strategy, analysis by Whitehall’s leading thinktank has found.
“Turf wars” between key departments led by Boris Johnson, David Davis and Liam Fox have been a distraction, wasting time and energy, the Institute for Government (IfG) report said.
The analysis, drawing on official data, also found that some of the departments likely to have the heaviest workloads because of Brexit have been badly hit by budget and staff cuts.
The IfG’s Whitehall Monitor criticised May’s decision to create a new Brexit ministry under Davis and the Department for International Trade under Fox, alongside Johnson’s Foreign Office, but acknowledged the situation was now appearing to “settle down”.
With the three departments settling in, “time and energy was inevitably wasted in turf wars, fragmentation, incoherence and a lack of clarity around roles and responsibilities”, the report said.
It suggested a better option might have been to support a cabinet minister for Brexit with a unit in the Cabinet Office – an echo of previous comments by former cabinet secretary Gus O’Donnell.
Some of the departments facing the biggest challenges around Brexit have experienced “deep staff and budget cuts”, the report noted.
Staff levels at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which is affected by 1,200 EU laws, have fallen by more than a third since 2010, with a reduction in its day-to-day spending of more than a fifth since 2011-12.
The Home Office, which will have responsibility for the new immigration system being drawn up after Brexit, has had its budget reduced by nearly a fifth and lost about a tenth of its staff.
Philip Hammond, the chancellor, announced up to £412m extra funding for the Foreign Office and the two new departments, but the IfG report said it was unclear whether this would be enough and that there were no details of extra money to help other departments.
The report added: “Drafting the great repeal bill – which aims to transpose EU law into UK law where practical – is also proving a more complex challenge than expected, which could further add to departments’ workloads.
“Departments thus face big challenges in planning for and beyond Brexit, many doing so with fewer staff and less money, while needing to carry out relatively unfamiliar tasks.”
The report also criticised the “patchy” approach to transparency in Whitehall, singling out the Home Office under May as one of the worst-performing departments in responding to information requests from MPs and the public.
Only the Ministry of Justice and Department for Education had worse records.
“This isn’t exactly encouraging for those who had hoped that the new prime minister would build on the coalition’s open government initiatives,” the report noted.
Whitehall as a whole has become less transparent in its responses to freedom of information requests over the past six years, the report claimed.
At the start of the coalition, government departments withheld information in full in response to 25% of requests; by the second quarter of 2016, this had risen to 40%, the report said.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion