Alexander Bowen: If Starmer wants to clean up politics, he is going to need more SpAds

Alexander Bowen is an MPP-MIA student at SciencesPo Paris and St Gallen specialising in public health, and a policy fellow at a British think tank.

*Whisper it* Maybe the European Commission is right, maybe Greece is too.

You won’t hear that on this site much, but every now and again you must. This is not some commentary on the Elgin Marbles or the tacit adoption of a European pushback policy. No, where they are right is on the question of ministerial teams and their structure.

Just last week, in the people’s Q&A following the people’s speech in the people’s garden (and presumably making use of the people’s microphone) Keir Starmer dealt with that exact question. How could he “talk about getting the rot out” whilst his government runs a Jacksonite spoils system putting a dozen party donours and employees of the Labour-aligned organisations that they fund, into impartial civil service positions?

His half-formed response of ‘something, something, only Tories are complaining’ – something a browse of The Guardian or recent Institute for Government statements would demonstrate was quite obviously false – beguiles what could have been a useful response – a pledge to restructure how the part of the civil service that deals with ministers and their special advisors directly.

What made Starmer’s appointments inappropriate, outside of appointing donours, wasn’t, for example in the Jess Sargeant case, bringing in someone from a Labour think tank to work on constitutional reform. It was appointing them into an impartial civil service role to do so and breaking norms that they had sanctified in opposition.

That’s the bit that reeks, and that’s also the bit that should have been answered with reform.

Britain in its politically blind appointment, promotion, and removal process for all of the civil service is sui generis – the OECD’s report on this exact question makes that clear. Even the Danes and Swedes, the closest thing we have to a global benchmark for good governance, operate ‘hybrid’ systems with appointments at least at the senior level involving some political input. 

Now Britain need not politicise its civil service, but there is one thing that could be done that would both eliminate these politicisation scandals and genuinely promote good governance – create ministerial cabinets. 

The European Commission operates on that model. It works well and promotes delivery. In Brussels, governance is much like in the UK split between the Collège of Commissioners (equivalent to Britain’s cabinet) and the cabinets of each Commissioner (approximate to the special advisors each Minister employs). Why these cabinets work, and why the special advisor system despite its best efforts, doesn’t work is quite simple. Their size, their pedigree, and their non-focus.

In European terms, British ministers have just about the fewest SpAds. Whilst France averages 13.5 per Minister, Belgium 18.5, the average UK SpAd team is a little over 3. If a credible commitment device is needed here to eliminate political attacks based on SpAd team size, then they should take a page out of Greece’s book that sets a legal parameter of 9-34 SpAd equivalents.

Now bigger need not be better. Compare the delivery under John Major’s government home to 35 SpAds to recent governments which in the Tony Blair era have averaged twice that. That’s in part where pedigree matters. 

Rachel ‘Osborne’ Reeves in her petit cabinet, her team of special advisors, has created an economist-free zone. Indeed there are rather more media studies grads than economics grads – or even people with some experience in economics. Indeed, the one person in her old shadow cabinet team who did have background in economics was the one who was removed from her SpAd team and given an off-payroll job.

Maybe that’s okay. Policy and politics are two different things and two different skills. We need not expect the Culture Secretary to be an Author or a professional Cellist. But at a certain point, and in something like economics, it is so inherently both technical and political that a minister depending entirely on drama grads for the political and entirely on civil servants for the technical is not a recipe for success. 

Process, impact assessments, background, and basis are tools bodies can use to wield power – and that power can be wielded most against those who cannot return fire in a credential and competence gunfight. Complexity can be used both to create compliance and justify bad policy.

SpAds needn’t be experts but they do need to be able to scrutinise the output of the civil service and understand some of the ascientific methodology that has been engaged in creating impact assessments on topics as removed as smoking, terrorism, and national service.

The system engaged by the European Commission, Greece, and other states enables that. Take the cabinet of the European Commissioner for Climate Action. Francs Timmerman, the last one, for instance made the head of his cabinet the former leader of the Dutch Labour Party Diederik Samsom, and Timmermans’ replacement did similar picking Dutch CDA MEP Esther de Lange as his head of cabinet.

Looking at the rest of the cabinet, it is split between specific technical experts, some of which are handpicked from the European Commission’s civil service as ‘politicised’ technocrats, and people with explicitly political backgrounds. Both the technical, the steering, and the ordinary are handled. In Greece, legislation specifies a split between the ‘scientific’ and special.

Creating British equivalents to Germany’s party Stiftung system, which provides the kind of resourcing needed to fund the next generation of special advisors and independent evidence bases, would help in that too.

As for focus, an expanded SpAd team would allow for legislation or area-specific SpAds that could focus on driving policy and improvement in a specific area. Where two SpAds cannot focus on detail, despite their objective ultimately to do so on behalf of their minister, a dozen can.

Again in the Climate Action Commissioner’s cabinet, you have members specifically dedicated to areas – Mes will do Denmark, Sweden, and Finland; Gippner will do Germany, Austria, Malta, and Czechia. Large cross-cutting portfolios can then be broken down into manageable chunks (something that the Home Office, Health, or Treasury in particular could well benefit from).

In DCMS for instance, why not have a SpAd solely dedicated to driving the Online Safety Bill and have a different one posting about the Secretary’s visit to XYZ primary school? That kind of focus despite their best efforts is simply not possible when SpAd teams are two or three people.

Ultimately, then instead of trying to kick off the kind of historic PASOK-ND Greek public jobs spiral that politicises the civil service, Starmer needs to acknowledge that sometimes the Government needs to be more overtly bigger to be better and accept larger SpAd teams. If that means legislating for it then he should go for it. 

The spoils system scandal is very real, but it need not be.

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