tim..... wrote:

One likely consequence is that some Departments may be abolished
or merged. For example, on Newsnight, it was suggested that DEFRA and
DCMS
didn't really need to exist as separate departments at all, and a lot
could be saved by abolishing hem,

Really?

Does abolishing a ministry, but still performing all of its functionally,
save a lot?

If you still need all of the "customer facing" people you still need all
of the buildings that they work in, and you still need most of the
management chain to manage them.

All you save is the single guy at the top (and the office that (s)he sits
in)

More than that in that there are fewer Permanent Secretaries and the like
and systems are merged with economies of scale. However because two
departments are rarely merged directly but rather responsibilities are
constantly respread around it's hard to get clear figures.

Oh and you save a little bit in your stationary budget by not having to
keep backup stocks of headed-notepaper (measured against the extra cost of
throwing away the old stock that you now can't use).

One of the more ridiculous things we do in this country is to constantly
reorganise government departments under new names such that the stationery
gets out of date and everyone gets confused by the titles - once when
lobbying a minister in another department we found even he didn't know for
sure the snappy short title of the Department of Communities and Local
Government. It had spent four years as the "Office of the Deputy Prime
Minister" largely because the name had already existed and it was a face
saving measure to cover up the fact that the Department of Transport, Local
Government and the Regions had been simply split. But it was then split from
the DPM and so needed an actual name. When Eric Pickles was exploring the
DCLG in 2010 he found it still had boxes upon boxes of unused biros from the
days of the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions, 1997-2001.

In general the Cameron government has so far avoided renaming and
reorganising government departments, bar changing the Department of
Children, Schools and Families to the Department of Education *, but long
term it might be better to go the route of other countries where many
ministers have multiple titles for small portfolios, enabling them to be
easily shifted around without having to restructure the back offices.

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