An impossible day in the life of a minister

A Secretary of State walks into her office on a Monday morning.

All weekend she’s been wading through red boxes, reading, annotating and signing off hundreds of pages of verbiage.

Overnight she has become an unwilling expert on zero-emission bus funding in Rainham, a potential train station reopening in Cullompton and something about ‘state-of-the-art community tennis courts’ in… she forgets where.

Later today, she is meeting Cabinet colleagues to discuss rising interest rates and spiralling inflation, the cost-of-living crisis, the crashing pound, the Northern Ireland protocol and a raging war in Europe that threatens to go nuclear.

But she’s not briefed. She’s not had time. Her brain is super-saturated by mini-roundabouts and planning applications.

On the upside, though, the community tennis courts consultation is going ahead.

Centralisation forces Secretaries of State to make hundreds of tactical decisions every week - decisions which should be taken on the ground, where they will have effect.

How does a minister in central London know anything about the need for 6G AstroTurf tennis court in Newton Aycliffe?

Yet, it seems, her job is to sweat the small stuff.

Given the concentration of power in Whitehall, it cannot be surprising that ministers do not have the time or mental energy to scrutinise and adjudicate upon the thousands of decisions that come their way.

Is the project worthwhile? Is it funding right?  Is it being managed effectively? How would they know and why should they know?

Surely there are more qualified people on the ground who know better what is – and what isn’t – needed? People who are directly responsible to their local communities, the councillors?

We believe that power must shift back to people and their representatives in their local communities.

Leave national decisions to national ministers and decentralise authority back to the people who know best.

Take back control - READ our report on Decentralisation