Keir Starmer has told cabinet ministers they should stop “outsourcing” decisions to regulators and quangos and take more responsibility for their own departments.
He said they “must go further and faster to reform the state, to deliver a strong, agile and active state that delivers for working people”.
The prime minister’s comments at the weekly cabinet meeting come before an important speech this week on reforming the state, which is expected to result in significant Whitehall job cuts.
The comments will raise the possibility that Starmer and the Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden intend to cut a number of quangos – though Labour has been criticised for creating at least a dozen during its first months in office.
Starmer said departments should be “assessing processes and regulations that play no part in delivering the Plan for Change”, and that meant government taking responsibility for major decisions “rather than outsourcing them to regulators and bodies as had become the trend under the previous government”.
McFadden said in cabinet that the government believed in the power of the state to provide security and stability, but said the previous government had taken an outdated approach to “forever hiring more people and spending more money”.
Under the plans, expected to be announced this week, underperforming officials could be given incentives to resign and senior officials would have their pay linked to performance. The scheme forms part of a wider efficiency drive, with ministers planning to cut about 10,000 civil service roles.
Starmer’s spokesperson declined to say which bodies he was referring to but said the prime minister thought the state had become “passive”.
The spokesperson was asked if the government was planning a “bonfire of the quangos”, but said he would not get ahead of the announcement on Thursday. He said: “The state in Westminster has grown larger but it has not become more effective, and as [the PM] said in cabinet we have seen examples over time of government becoming more passive when it comes to decisions.”
The number of non-departmental public bodies has been in decline for decades, and stands at about 300, down from about 700 in 2010 when David Cameron took office. In the 1970s, there were as many as 2,000.
Among the 14 public bodies set up by the government since Labour won the election in July are GB Energy, Skills England, National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority, the Passenger Standards Authority, the Regulatory Innovation Office, the National Jobs and Careers Service and the Independent Football regulator – though some of these are mergers of existing bodies.
The Institute for Government suggested last weekend that McFadden could consider compulsory redundancy rounds in the civil service, whereas previously job losses have been voluntary redundancies or by attrition. Alex Thomas, from the thinktank, said it would lead to a “mindset shift” among civil servants, saying voluntary schemes and hiring freezes often choked off talent.
Starmer’s comments come amid a row between the Ministry of Justice and the Sentencing Council over what has been called a “two-tier” approach to sentencing trans people and people from ethnic minority and other minority backgrounds. The justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has said she was prepared to legislate to reduce the Sentencing Council’s power if it would not amend the guidelines.
Mahmood is said to be preparing to use the sentencing bill, expected this summer, to do this if she consider that the council, by its guidance, is in effect making policy decisions that should be made by government.
However, Lord Justice Davis, chair of the council, suggested Mahmood did not have the power to change the guidelines. He said if the government tried changing the law to give itself powers to rewrite the guidelines, it would be undermining the independence of the judiciary.
