Ministers vow to “rip up consultation culture”

Minister for the Cabinet Office Nick Thomas-Symonds said the Government would use artificial intelligence “to identify existing disproportionate reporting and consultation duties that are slowing down delivery”.

There would be changes to ensure equalities impact assessments improve policy and results, while environmental impact assessments would be replaced by ‘environmental outcomes reports, which the minister described as “part of a significant step in reducing bureaucracy around new infrastructure projects”. Both would be used only “proportionately”.

Other changes will include reform of the process for collective cabinet agreement of government policy and a new accountability framework for Civil Service permanent secretaries, “designed to focus on delivering the prime minister’s priorities, and holding people to account for doing so”.

Thomas-Symonds said: “For too long, the levers of power in Whitehall have been trapped under layers of outdated regulations and overlapping consultations that prioritise process over progress.

“We are stripping away these layers to empower brilliant public servants to deliver change for working people, replacing an outsourcing of responsibility with accountability and decisive action."

The Attorney General, Lord Hermer KC, said well-intentioned processes had slowed government decision-making, and “ministers and civil servants have regularly identified excessive processes and checks as clogging up the system, creating distance between decision-makers and implementation of policy, and delaying change for working people across the UK”.

The Cabinet Office said consultations were “necessary and helpful” where policy impacts a wide range of complex groups, but had been increasingly used for routine changes.

It said, for example, that an unnamed government department consulted on a change to how it produces its annual report, and a survey had found 131 consultation requirements in just 10 pieces of legislation.

Ministers will consider plans “to further streamline the onerous inter-departmental letter-exchanges in the policy-making processes, that delay and reinforce the government in silos”.

Simon Angelides, chief executive of the Consultation Institute, said on LinkedIn: “What ministers are actually targeting is consultation requirements that have accumulated in legislation without sufficient justification, and internal Whitehall processes that have grown disproportionate to the decisions they serve.”

Angelides said the exception for continued consultation where policy affects complex groups was “a significant carve-out [which] covers most of what NHS bodies, local authorities, and infrastructure bodies do every week”.

He said the word ‘disproportionate’ and how it was defined and by whom “will determine whether this is a sensible rationalisation or something with wider consequences for statutory accountability”.

Mark Smulian