How does the UK government work? And what do the different departments do?
Unfortunately the answers to these questions are not particularly straightforward but a new report by the thinktank Institute for Government sheds some light on the matter.
After years of devolution to Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish administrations, not all government departments have much say over what happens in those countries. Government activity in each is visualised in the maps below.
DCLG - Department for Communities and Local Government
DH - Department of Health
Defra - Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs
DCMS - Department for Culture, Media and Sport
DfT - Department for Transport
BIS - Business, Innovation and Skills
MoJ - Ministry of Justice
Law - Law officers (Attorney General’s Office)
HO - Home Office
DWP - Department for Work and Pensions
DECC - Department for Energy and Climate Change
CO - Cabinet Office
CXD - Chancellor’s Departments (Chancellor’s Departments (APA, DMO, GAD, HMRC, HMT, NS&I, OBR)
DfID - Department for International Development
FCO - Foreign and Commonwealth Office
MoD - Ministry of Defence
Each department has different demands, especially when it comes to the passage of legislation. The Treasury, for example, passes several times more bills than most other departments as it is turning the budget proposals into law each year.
Some departments can go for a whole parliamentary session without legislating for anything. The Northern Ireland office has only passed one bill since 2010.
It’s not all about passing legislation though. Another governmental function is disseminating information - whether this is through freedom of information requests, ministerial responses or answers to written questions.
The following chart shows what percentage of questions during the last complete parliamentary session were answered on time. Notable exceptions to a generally positive response time were the Home Office (50.4% of questions) and the Ministry of Justice (28.2%).
The Home Office was also among the worst performers when it came to making responses to other MPs in a timely fashion (with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport faring even worse on this metric).
Looking across the three metrics (parliamentary questions, written correspondence and FOI requests), the Home Office was rated 19th out of 19 government departments by the Institute for Government.
Whether it’s passing legislation (e.g the Treasury), allocating huge sums of money (e.g the Department of Work and Pensions) or responding to huge volumes of written correspondence - different departments have different priorities.
Meanwhile, staff numbers of civil servants in Whitehall have been reduced by nearly a fifth since the coalition government took power, according to the report.
The Institute for Government say that while the coalition are close to the target of a 23% reduction in staff - set out at the beginning of the parliament - the cuts have slowed in recent years and vary across departments.
The central government civil service currently is broken into several different departments - although the Institute for Government says that reforms may need to be made to this system to cope with the planned further cuts.
To quote from the report’s authors:
In recent quarters the rate of these reductions has dropped and will need to pick up again sharply if the government’s expectation is to be met. As the outgoing head of the civil service, Sir Bob Kerslake, has argued, further cuts after the election will force Whitehall to change its ways of working and organisation. It will need to join up more services, rather than replicating the same capability in 17 different departments.
