Comments on: The changing map of Whitehall

By: The maps of changing Whitehall | Public Strategist

The maps of changing Whitehall | Public Strategist — Mon, 17 May 2010 23:28:22 +0000

[...] week I illustrated my post about the mergers and demergers of Whitehall with a very bad picture of a very neat illustration of the timelines of government departments in [...]

By: Martin Stewart-Weeks

Martin Stewart-Weeks — Sat, 15 May 2010 09:34:19 +0000

Does Her Majesty In Council have the power to give the work of a government department to an organisation outside of government? Maybe she should be able to do that. Maybe she should be given the flexibility to think about government’s contribution to ‘public work’ including giving responsibility to non-government players?

And maybe the exhortation to ‘build to last’ is missing at least some of the point in an age where large-scale, ‘permanent’ institutions are often part of the problem, not of the solution?

By: Patrick Dunleavy

Patrick Dunleavy — Thu, 13 May 2010 16:02:59 +0000

Public Strategist can find a complete map of departmental changes for recent years in the report by Anne White and Patrick Dunleavy, “Making and Breaking Whitehall Departments: A Guide to Machinery of Government Changes”, which is published this week by the Institute for Government. The link is at:
http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/pdfs/making_and_breaking_whitehall_departments.pdf
It’s also on the LSE site. Or just Google the title.

(Incidentally this is a different IFG report from the one that Public Strategist criticizes for mistakes).

The chart of all the changes is on page 16. It shows that the only departments not extensively reorganized since 1979 are MOD, the Privy Council Office, and the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland Offices – although of course the SO and WO have greatly thinned down since devolution. Incidentally, the chart photographed in Public Strategist’s article is highly inacccurate.

Patrick Dunleavy, LSE Public Policy Group