The bureaucracy we need, and the bureaucracy we can cut

What Whitehall’s latest deckchair shuffle tells us about navigating bureaucracy and finding a better way forward

Andy Burnham walked into Downing Street at the start of last week with officials already drafting plans to scrap the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. By that evening it was done. Three and a half years after it was created, the department was dismantled and its responsibilities scattered across the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and the Cabinet Office. Science moved. GDS moved, again. AI moved in several directions at once. The criticism came quickly and was largely reasonable, centring on the fact that a government with barely 2 years to show people anything has improved is about to spend a good part of that time shuffling deckchairs.

I largely agree, because we’ve done this before. Energy got its own department in 2008, was folded into BEIS in 2016 and pulled back out in 2023. DSIT itself was carved out of DCMS in 2023, and digital is now heading back. The Institute for Government estimates direct costs of around £15m to stand up a new department, with substantial productivity losses on top. It has recommended for years that a cost-benefit case be assessed once a change has bedded in, and describes the current arrangement as one where experience resets to zero every time. I mean, they’ve only just painted the walls again in our office, which is a small and slightly ridiculous detail, but one that captures something about the nature of these changes. Reorganisations interrupt work already under way, loosen relationships that took years to build, and leave good people trying to work out who now owns the decisions they were making the week before.

The more important question, though, is what this tells us about the government’s promise to “rewire the state”. Because, beneath the technocratic language of “machinery of government” and a “stronger, more strategic centre” sits a familiar theory of change – one in which government becomes more effective when responsibilities are gathered beneath the right ministers, reporting lines become clearer, and an unwieldy institution is made legible enough for the centre to direct.

These structures matter, of course. They shape authority, budgets and political attention, and in some cases give reformers the power to make departments behave differently. Yet the container itself tells us very little about whether that authority is real, which levers sit behind it, whether the centre controls any of the infrastructure the rest of government depends on, or whether its capability can survive the minister who sponsored it.

My favourite illustration of this theory of change is in James C. Scott’s “Seeing Like a State”, where he describes the state’s drive for legibility, simplifying a complicated world into categories that can be counted, planned and controlled. His example of scientific forestry in Prussia captures both the attraction and the danger. Mixed woodlands were cleared and replanted in straight rows of a single fast-growing species, producing forests that were easier to measure and initially more productive. By the second and third generations, the yields collapsed. In making the forest easier to see from above, the drive for order had erased the interdependent ecology that sustained it in the first place.

Machinery of government changes offer the same seductive promise. They make a complex state easier to see from above, giving ministers clearer lines of control and the appearance of a system that can be directed with greater precision. They also pull reform towards the things the centre can readily count: headcount, budgets, duplicated functions, reporting lines and the number of departmental boundaries a decision has to cross. And, these are legitimate concerns. Waste is not neutral in government. Every unnecessary handoff, repeated form or badly designed process consumes money, time and attention that could have been used elsewhere, and the cost rarely remains inside the organisation. It appears as longer waits, avoidable contact and less space for people whose circumstances require judgement.

The harder work – and albeit much more interesting for me – is identifying the conditions under which good work can happen, then allowing evidence from the work to shape the structures around it. That means understanding where teams have enough authority to act, which relationships help them move across formal boundaries, and where leaders create room for professional judgement. These conditions are harder to display than an org chart, and they tell us far more about whether reform will survive contact with reality.

Navigating bureaucracy: red tape and blue tape

This is what we’re exploring at CustomerFirst. By starting with the lightest governance our work can safely sustain, we the let decisions, dependencies and risks that hit us as we learn show us where something more formal is needed. Accountability stays close to the work, and additional governance gets added where the evidence shows it has a useful role. What we learn then has to travel back towards the centre. A single team can expose where a shared rule, assurance process or missing piece of infrastructure repeatedly blocks the work, but only central institutions can change those conditions across government. Direction and public purpose travel down. Evidence about what helps or obstructs delivery travels back up.

Importantly, that evidence needs to be precise, because bureaucracy is rarely one thing. From above, every delay, approval or handoff can look like friction waiting to be removed. Closer to the work, those same processes may be carrying very different kinds of value, and the time they consume tells you little about which kind you’re looking at.

David Eaves’ distinction between red tape and blue tape has long offered me a useful way of seeing the difference.

Red tape describes the formal bureaucracy of law, democratic checks, audit, safeguarding and due process. These constraints can become excessive, poorly designed or disproportionate, but they carry an identifiable public purpose. They protect fairness, safety, accountability and the principle that public power should be exercised within rules. The task is to navigate them with integrity, understanding which rules matter and why rather than treating every constraint as an obstacle to delivery.

Blue tape grows differently. It accumulates through interpretation, caution, habit and organisational memory, until a preference, workaround or local convention starts behaving like a rule. It is the approval introduced after one difficult case, the meeting inherited from a project nobody remembers, or the phrase “we can’t do that” when the underlying meaning is closer to “we haven’t done that before”. This bureaucracy may once have responded to a real concern, but its relationship to that concern has often been lost.

The distinction sharpens the relationship between efficiency and effectiveness. Efficiency measures the burden: how long a process takes, how many people touch it, what it costs. Effectiveness asks what that burden protects, whose risk it carries, and whether the same public purpose could be secured another way. From the centre, both kinds of tape look like delay waiting to be cut. Inside the work, one may be holding public power to account while the other shields the organisation from the discomfort of exercising judgement.

Learning the difference means following a rule back to its source. Is it required by law, regulation or an agreed standard? Which risk was it created to hold? Has an interpretation become stricter through repetition? What happens when the process is narrowed, changed or removed?

Answering those questions needs legal, policy, operational and service knowledge in the same room, with the people who experience the consequences close enough to challenge the account being given. It’s slower and less theatrical than setting a target for how many approvals should disappear. It also gives the centre a much firmer basis for action. Government can protect genuine guardrails, give teams permission to question inherited interpretations, and change shared rules when the same obstruction keeps appearing. That’s how evidence from one service becomes institutional change rather than another local workaround.

Some thoughts…

Perhaps scrapping DSIT was the right decision. There is something to be said for a politician moving quickly within a system most people find impossible to hold, and a 3-year-old department is hardly a constitutional principle.

What I keep returning to, though, is whether anyone will find out. The informal networks across government will likely absorb this reorganisation as they have absorbed many others. Relationships will be rebuilt, operational memory will remain in many of the same heads and the work will continue under a new letterhead. Government’s resilience makes the disruption survivable, but it can also make the costs difficult to see and the value of the change easy to leave untested.

Whitehall may be able to reorganise itself in a day. Learning which structures help good work happen, which bureaucracy protects public value and which survives through habit takes considerably longer. I think that is the work sitting underneath all of this. Without it, action risks becoming action without judgement.