Last week, Darren Jones set out his vision for Whitehall. At a speech at the headquarters of the wayfinding tech company, WhatThreeWords (which was ironically hard to find), the chief secretary to the Prime Minister laid out plans for “sludge busting” in the public sector. His measures included toughening-up civil service hiring practices and holding top officials to higher professional standards.
But there was a key word which was noticeably absent from Jones’s speech: reform. Much of what the chief sec spoke about in his Tuesday morning speech involved reforming the public sector. But instead Jones described it as “innovation”, “transforming” or the catchy new addition, busting “the sludge”.
There’s an obvious reason for Jones’s aversion to the ‘r’ word. It runs the risk of bringing to mind Nigel Farage’s insurgent party, and its band of eight MPs. The government is making a “deliberate effort” not to use the word “reform”, one well placed source told the Pygge. The chief sec of the PM mentioned the word once in his speech. It’s clearly tougher than it looks.
[Further reading: Is this Andy Burnham’s moment?]
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