Douglas Carswell's Blog

Should we break up the Treasury?

Downing Street has been beefed up with a Policy and Implementation team. It is intended to ensure that what the PM wants to happen actually happens. Maybe.

Perhaps what is really needed is to split the Treasury into two?  Leave a rump Finance Ministry behind, and transfer the public spending function to either the Cabinet Office - or a new Cabinet Office / Department of Public Spending.

How might that help?

Reading Jonathan Powell's The New Machiavelli, the Cabinet Office is supposed to be the "transmission system" between central government and what Whitehall departments actually do. Yet clearly the transmission levers don't always function - either then or now. One key reason seems to be the gravitational pull of the Treasury.

With the Treasury calling the shots over public spending, departments end up dancing to their tune - not the Cabinet Offices'. Against the power of the purse, the Cabinet Office can only plead, an Implementation Unit only cajole.

Incidentally, giving the Cabinet Office control over spending could open the way to proper accountability to Parliament too. Once public spending decisions were taken out of the hands of the famously inward-facing Treasury, departmental heads could be made to answer not just up to the Cabinet Office and Number 10, but outward to each Commons select committee.

It's not even as if historically the Treasury has been good at managing public money.

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