Andy Burnham's power grab will let unelected civil servants complete their takeover

Andy Burnham wants to write a new law giving the Cabinet Secretary the power to issue binding orders to Permanent Secretaries across Whitehall. It sounds technical. It isn't. It is one of the most significant transfers of power in modern British Government, and it is happening without a single vote being cast. At present the Cabinet Secretary - currently Dame Antonia Romeo - is both the head of the Civil Service and the Prime Minister's principal adviser. But she cannot give orders to the Permanent Secretaries who manage the Departments of Government. Only Secretaries of State – the ministers appointed by the elected Prime Minister, themselves Members of Parliament answerable to the public – can give orders to so-called 'Perm Secs'. Not any longer. Andy Burnham is planning a new law that will give the Cabinet Secretary the power, in law, to direct what Perm Secs do. The Civil Service is taking over. Dame Antonia Romeo is not elected. She answers to no constituency and no Parliament, and under this new law, increasingly not even to the Cabinet. She is being handed the power to run Whitehall as her own operation, above the heads of the Secretaries of State, who are supposed to lead their departments and answer to the Prime Minister and the voters for what they do. This is not decentralising power to ministers. It is centralising it in the unelected official who already chairs the weekly meeting of Permanent Secretaries — the real Cabinet, some would say, next to which the elected one increasingly looks decorative. Mr Burnham calls it ending "Whitehall turf wars." What he is actually doing is writing into statute the idea that the civil service runs the country and ministers are guests in their own departments. It didn't have to be this way. As Robert Armstrong, Cabinet Secretary in 1985, put it: the civil service "has no constitutional personality or responsibility separate from the duly constituted Government of the day". It exists to carry out ministers' decisions, not to manage them. Burnham's reform inverts that principle entirely. The Cabinet Office was created in 1916 to service Cabinet meetings. It employed 300 people in 1997. Today it employs over 11,000 — a third the size of the Royal Navy — and No10 is formally listed as a mere subsidiary unit within it. Reform UK's plan, Fixing the Centre , sets out our plan for change. We would abolish the Cabinet Office and the office of Cabinet Secretary, replacing them with a proper Office of the Prime Minister, led by a political Chief of Staff hired and fired by the Prime Minister, not a mandarin appointed for life. We would create a separate Department of the Civil Service, run by someone with a record of turning organisations around, tasked with shrinking Whitehall and rewarding good officials properly. And we would give ministers themselves the power to hire and fire the Permanent Secretaries who run their departments. None of this is about attacking civil servants, most of whom want to serve their country well. It is about who is in charge. Mr Burnham's answer is an unelected official, whose power is entrenched in law. Our answer – the people who would run the state under a Reform Government – is the people the British public has put there. Our Standards: The GB News Editorial Charter