The civil service does not need more powers. It needs more capability.
Each reform of Whitehall in the past decade has added authority to a workforce shedding the people who could use it.
Reform of the civil service has, for a decade now, been understood almost entirely as a question of structures: which department owns which function, which arm's-length body absorbs which power, which Cabinet committee has the final say.
The structural conversation is largely irrelevant. The binding constraint is no longer authority; it is capability. Whitehall has spent ten years shedding precisely the people — economists, engineers, procurement specialists, data scientists — who can convert authority into outcomes.
The replacement, where there is one, has tended to be a consultancy contract. That model has not failed for ideological reasons. It has failed because the institutional memory it was supposed to substitute for cannot, in fact, be substituted at price.
A serious capability strategy would do less restructuring and more recruiting. It would pay specialists what specialists are paid elsewhere; it would tolerate that some of those specialists will leave; and it would treat the building of long expertise as a function the state cannot outsource indefinitely.
None of this is glamorous. It is, however, the part of public sector reform that, if anyone were prepared to attempt it, would actually work.
