A former Chief Minister has voiced concerns over the current structure of the Cabinet Office suggesting its functions could be streamlined with greater focus given to departmental leadership.
Sir Miles Walker shared his thoughts during an oral evidence session with the Constitutional and Legal Affairs and Justice Committee.
Pointing to the growth of the the Cabinet Office, he said: “I think when I finished the Chief Minister, I think the chief minister’s office was only 14 or 15 people and today it is, I don’t know, 400/450 people.
“So you’ve got a great bureaucratic organisation that I think must be quite difficult for an incoming Chief Minister or Council of Ministers to deal with.”
Slim It Down
Sir Miles said that one area he believes could be improved would be to slim down the Cabinet Office.
He said: “I spent a lot of time pushing stuff back to the departments.
“The ministers will come forward and say, can the council ministers do this? Can we do this? Can and I say, no, go back down, that’s a departmental matter, thrash it out in the department, and then come forward when you’ve got it sorted.
“I guess that’s almost impossible to do now with this massive organisation supporting the Council of Ministers.”
Home Grown
When questioned about the growing civil service, Sir Miles stressed the need for homegrown talent.
He said: “I think government need the best people possible working within it as a civil service, and I think to have a structure where you can move from department to department and move up through the employment opportunities and so on, is very important.
“I think one of the thing that saddens me now, and I know we have a unified civil service, but the way that it’s working out, and the lack of senior civil servants who are home, bred, if you like, and have come up through the service.
“I find that as a somebody outside looking in, quite, quite concerning. I think if we can rear our own top people then they have a better understanding of the Island.
“And I’m not going to say, do a better job, because I don’t know those those that are in post at the moment, but it just saddens me that not many of them appear to have come up through our our civil service.”
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