Don't blame the police – it's woke politicians who have given up on fighting crime

SIR – Commentators are far too quick to abuse the police for prioritising certain crimes above others ('Faith in the police', Letters, June 15).
We must stop this, as at the sharp end of policing we have constables obeying orders from their seniors.
Who controls senior police officers? The politicians we voted for. Twelve months ago they were Conservatives; now they're Labour. They are all tarred with the same woke brush.
Our constables are treated with derision because they are the face of policing. Shame on our politicians.
Peter Gittins
Stirling
SIR – Many senior police officers, often over-promoted because they hold degrees, have turned policing on its head with their politically correct pursuit of social-media offences.
In 1979, my first shift sergeant told me that, if you allow a man to go unpunished for stealing something as small as a Mars bar, it won't be long before he returns to empty the shop. He held similar views on graffiti and anti-social behaviour.
I challenge senior officers to run a six-month experiment: flood the streets with officers out of their cars, arresting anyone who commits an arrestable offence, no matter how minor, and see how quickly such behaviour subsides. This would be especially effective if the Crown Prosecution Service were to back up the police with court action, as it did after the recent riots.
Tim Davies
Lampeter, Cardiganshire
SIR – As a resident of Bournemouth, I want to see more officers of the calibre of Lorne Castle on our streets, willing to take action against troublemakers and make our town safe.
Yet this officer was dismissed for gross misconduct after tackling a masked 15-year-old suspect to the ground and holding him down while telling him to 'stop screaming like a b----' (report, June 20). With crimes going unsolved and unpunished, it is fair to say that faith in policing in Dorset is nonexistent. Mr Castle was sacked because his actions had supposedly undermined public confidence in the police. However, it is quite apparent to me that the opposite is true: in sacking him, the misconduct panel has damaged public confidence. Can we therefore expect its members to be removed?
Barry Gray
Bournemouth, Dorset
SIR – Daniel Hannan deplores the state of public areas in Britain, along with growing threats to personal safety ('Britain is turning into a Third World country', Comment, June 15).
In smaller communities, where councillors care little for grandstanding, public life goes on as it should. In Norwich, the Covid-era habits of guerrilla gardening, after-hours litter-picking and police liaison have endured, and are being adopted more widely.
'Friends' groups who take care of provincial railway stations across the UK are pioneers in this area. What was a default task for underemployed railway platform staff has been taken up by community activists.
Thomas Carr
Norwich
A shift in British values
SIR – As I approach my 75th birthday, I reflect on how values have changed over my lifetime.
Respect for our elders was drummed into us during my youth. Today, we have a Government that is willing to take winter fuel support away from pensioners, and tax inheritance that would otherwise go to heirs. To cap it all, it now seems likely that we will have to navigate the intricacies of assisted dying ('Assisted dying Bill set to become law', report, June 20). It will be quite a job to ensure that there is no coercion, no fear of 'doing the right thing' to avoid being a burden, and that the professionals are driven by the right motives.
A viewing of the cult film Soylent Green might help us understand the kind of dystopian future towards which we seem to be headed.
Tony Wolfe
Penrith, Cumbria
Lebanon's liberation
SIR – Those Lebanese dancing under missiles fired at Israel (report, June 18) ought rather to cheer the Israeli planes heading for Iran.
After decades of death, destruction and economic collapse, can they still not see the enormous damage that Iran, via Hezbollah, has inflicted on their once peaceful land? What have they gained from being a centerpiece of Iran's 'axis of resistance' against Israel?
Israel and Lebanon once peacefully coexisted. It was even jocularly noted that if any Arab country first made peace with Israel, Lebanon would be the second to do so. Hezbollah was the reason that Lebanon had no president for two years; Israel's loosening of its tight grip on the state is what finally broke the impasse in the legislature.
In violation of UN-brokered agreements, Hezbollah militarised south Lebanon below the Litani River. The day after Hamas's October 7 massacre of innocent Israeli civilians, Hezbollah initiated daily rocket fire into northern Israel, leading to massive destruction and the flight of tens of thousands of residents. Subsequent fighting has yielded yet more destruction and depopulation on the Lebanese side of the border.
With Hezbollah and its patron, Iran, weakened, Lebanon has a real opportunity to free itself from their malignant yoke. Should it succeed in doing so, Israelis would be among the first to dance and cheer, welcoming a renewal of friendship.
Richard D Wilkins
Syracuse, New York, United States
The logic of Sizewell C
SIR – Research suggests that Sizewell C nuclear power station (Letters, June 20) will cost approximately £12.5 million per megawatt to build. The Rolls-Royce small modular reactor (SMR) units are estimated to cost less than £5 million per megawatt.
Sizewell C is unlikely to be commissioned before the mid-2030s, allowing for the usual delays. Overall build time for the SMR units is estimated to be four years, including testing and commissioning.
Given that the small reactors are less than half the price and can be built twice as quickly, why are we bothering with Sizewell C?
Ian Brent-Smith
Bicester, Oxfordshire
SIR – I was interested to read your report (June 18) about Westinghouse wanting to site a large nuclear power station at Wylfa on Anglesey.
The Nuclear Industry Association keeps repeating the mantra that Wylfa is the best site in the UK for a large nuclear station. Unfortunately, it is forgetting about the grid constraints that give Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, headaches elsewhere.
As the National Energy Systems Operator has said, the grid in North Wales will be near capacity by 2030, and a new line of pylons will have two national parks and an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty to negotiate before fighting through the Midlands to southern England.
The south-east of England will be deficient in renewables, so to minimise total system cost, that would be the best place to site a new station.
Dr Jonathan F Dean
Campaign for the Protection of Rural Wales
Llannerch-y-medd, Anglesey
Training nurses
SIR – In the 1980s, I taught at a girls' secondary school in Sittingbourne, Kent. Following a good basic education, at 16 many of our pupils went on to become nurses at local hospitals (Letters, June 15). When the university degree requirement was announced, the careers adviser – a lady of considerable experience – said: 'That's the end of the British nurse. Many of our girls do not want to aspire to degrees. We will lose a huge number of competent, caring health professionals.'
Why have successive governments ignored this crisis? Ministers should work towards providing high-class, on-the-job training for those who have already proved themselves capable of following their chosen career.
Jeannette Meyers
Ashford, Kent
Fallen Angel
SIR – In a prime spot in Lavenham – England's best-preserved medieval village – stands the 600-year-old Angel Hotel. It has been a public house since 1420. For want of a tenant, this once convivial meeting place now stands empty, neglected and forlorn.
When I came to live in Lavenham 35 years ago, the Angel was thriving and profitable. With the right management, it could quickly regain its former popularity and become a magnet for tourists from all over the world. As for the locals, we would flock back to a well-run village pub.
David Brown
Lavenham, Suffolk
Lunches box
SIR – My sister and I started school in 1950. For lunch (Letters, June 15) we took a bread and dripping sandwich in a greaseproof bag with our names on. The teacher took these offerings from us on arrival and put them in a box with all the others. There were no fridges then. They were given out to the appropriate child at lunchtime.
Jan Denbury
Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire
Lads and ladies
SIR – It appears that using the term lads in the workplace when there are females present could count as sexual harassment (report, June 12). Further, a recent complainant may be entitled to compensation.
With this in mind, I will contact all the bars and restaurants that my wife and I have visited in recent years and demand redress for sexual harassment. Phrases such as 'Hello guys', 'Is everything OK with you, guys?', or 'Would you guys like to see the dessert menu?' surely fall into the same category. I wonder if I can find a sympathetic judge.
Vic Storey
Dereham, Norfolk
When offices ran on ink and blotting paper
SIR – With reference to Vivien Womersley's letter (June 15) on inkwells in school desks, I had to refill them and change blotting paper at the bank after I left school aged 16. The manager used red ink, and my hands ended up covered.
Veronica Lown
Staines-upon-Thames, Surrey
SIR – I was gratified to read Vivien Womersley's recollection that the typical ink monitor from her school days was 'a trusted, steady-handed classmate'. My own appointment as ink monitor at a Hornchurch primary school in 1955 gave me useful experience in the responsible allocation of resources.
However, I then went into academic life, where I fear I wasted much ink.
Shanacoole, Co Cork, Ireland

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BBC News

31 minutes ago

• BBC News

What can Northamptonshire expect from Reform UK's Doge teams?

They have caused a stir in Donald Trump's US and now Elon Musk-style Doge teams are descending on Northamptonshire's two unitary councils, which are run by Reform UK. What can people in the county expect from them and what have they achieved elsewhere? What is Doge all about? Hardly anyone had heard the acronym Doge before Donald Trump returned to the White House in idea is reported to have surfaced first at a dinner party where Donald Trump's billionaire advisor, Elon Musk, was speaking in Tesla, Space X and X businessman told fellow diners that, if given the passwords to government computers, he could streamline its Trump became President again this year, he set up the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) and put Musk in charge of aim was to end the "tyranny of bureaucracy", save taxpayers' money and cut the US national debt, said has actually happened so far is two million federal workers being offered a deal to leave. What are Reform UK's Doge team doing in Northamptonshire? A preliminary meeting with the Doge team happened this week at West Northamptonshire Council, and it will be descending on North Northamptonshire in the near future following the huge swing from the Conservatives to Reform UK in the May local Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, who received a hero's welcome when he met his councillors in Corby on Tuesday, explained how it would work."The Doge team comes in and it talks to the officers and says 'we want to look at the books, we want to see what money's been spent on this, what money's been spent on that, we want to see the credit card statements, we want to see the contracts'," he took repairing potholes as an example and said Doge would ask "Who've you assigned to do this job? How long is the contract for? What's the cost? Is it based on results?"He insisted that "not everything about Doge is critical, not everything about Doge is slagging off what's gone before. I'm really hoping that Doge can help everybody".Reform UK said its team in West Northamptonshire would consist of "software engineers, data analysts and forensic auditors". How much is Doge costing taxpayers? The short answer, according to Reform UK, is Arnull, leader at West Northamptonshire, said: "The cutting-edge expertise the Doge team are providing free of charge will make it that much easier to identify waste and free up funds."Martin Griffiths, who leads West Northamptonshire, said: "We're not going to pay a penny [for the Doge review] so that's why our officers are fully in support of this."Some politicians have questioned whether experts would really work for free, and have suggested the pro bono element might not be good for local Lehmann, Green party leader in Kent, the first council to undergo the process, said: "The fact that they have software engineers offering to work 'for free' is of particular concern, given that the data they are forcefully requesting access to would include significant volumes of commercially sensitive information and the personal data of many of Kent's most vulnerable residents." How have opposition parties reacted to Doge in Northamptonshire? The leader of the Labour group on West Northamptonshire Council, Sally Keeble is concerned about the team's accountability and use of has submitted a Freedom of Information request for all communication between the council and the team to be said: "If the Reform administration wants to appoint Doge, they should put the organisation through a transparent procurement process with safeguards in place for people's personal data." Helen Harrison, who leads the Conservative opposition in North Northamptonshire, has said she would welcome any efficiencies but believed the review should be carried out by council officers rather than an external Harris, who leads the Liberal Democrat group in the North, said: "We understand that during the visit on Friday, 13 June the Doge team asked for no information, were provided with no information, didn't share a plan, and yet proclaimed that they were already 'starting to save taxpayers money'." Harris added: "It begs the question why taxpayers are paying cabinet member allowances, including basic councillor allowances of around £424,000 to the [Reform UK] administration."It's their job to lead, set strategy and establish savings, not the responsibility of an unelected group of individuals."West Northamptonshire's Independent councillor Ian McCord said he had written to the council leader to ask whether advice had been sought about the legal standing of the Doge unit, and whether data held by the council would be safe. What effect has Doge had elsewhere? NIgel Farage is adamant that the Doge approach is said: "Already, in other counties, we have found examples of pretty egregious expenditure."In Derby, where there is a cabinet member for council efficiency (Doge), the party claimed to have made efficiency savings equating to £6,000 per later admitted that figure was a mistake and was more like £4,000 per day. An unlikely winner so far from the Doge initiative has been the public sector workers' union to data released to Sky News, weekly new memberships increased by an average of 272% in the week after the May election results were a weekly average of 12 new members at North Northamptonshire the union saw the figure shoot up to 27 in the week following the has admitted that efficiencies may be more difficult to find in Northamptonshire's two unitary councils, which came into being in 2021, than in some older politicians have pointed out that councils already face regular audits so Doge teams would simply duplicate that the available evidence, though, two things look certain: Northamptonshire will go through the Doge process, and it will still be controversial. Follow Northamptonshire news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.

BBC News

an hour ago

• BBC News

The murder of John 'Goldfinger' Palmer in Essex still unsolved

In June 2015, John "Goldfinger" Palmer was shot six times in the garden of his secluded woodland mansion in Essex. But due to an oversight in the police response, the 65-year-old's death was put down to natural causes - until a murder investigation was eventually launched six days later. Ten years on, detectives are still hunting whoever killed the man once described as Britain's richest criminal. Palmer earned his nickname following the audacious 1983 Brink's-Mat men disguised in security uniforms stumbled upon £26m worth of gold, diamonds and cash in a warehouse just outside London Heathrow dealer Palmer was accused of melting down the gold in a shed in the garden of his mansion near years later, on 24 June 2015, he was gunned down as he was burning documents in the garden of his home in South Weald near prosecutors had charged him a month earlier with fraud, firearms possession and money laundering. At about 17:30 BST, a suspect believed to be a contract killer scaled his garden fence having seemingly watched him through a carved-out was killed in the only part of the garden not covered by was found unconscious by his son's girlfriend. Two police officers attended at about 19:20 and had assessed his death as "non-suspicious" on account of an operation wound from recent gall bladder surgery. A week later, a post-mortem examination revealed he was, in fact, shot in the chest, abdomen, arm, elbow, back and kidneys. "It's definitely not something I'm going to hide behind; we did make mistakes," said Det Supt Stephen Jennings of Essex Police, speaking to the BBC's Gangster podcast series in 2022."We didn't do enough background checks on John."Had we done that, the officers would have realised he had quite a substantial criminal background."They didn't really check the body well enough to discount any third-party involvement." Roy Ramm, former commander of specialist operations at New Scotland Yard, said it was a "very serious error"."You talk about the golden hour in investigations - that was lost, the day was lost, several days were lost - and I do not envy the senior investigating officer who picked up the case and tried to make progress with it," he told the BBC. "It was nigh on impossible."The two young police officers later faced disciplinary action. Humble beginnings Born in Solihull near Birmingham, Palmer was one of seven children raised in a poor single-parent was a serial truant and left school at 15 without learning to read or teenager worked in roofing but moved on to street trading, which included selling paraffin off the back of a moved to Bedminster in Bristol and made his first £100,000 (£2m in today's money) from a jewellery set up Scadlynn, a company trading precious scrap business partner Gareth Chappell was later jailed for 10 years for conspiring to handle stolen goods in connection with the Brink's-Mat raid. The gold When Palmer was identified as a Brink's-Mat suspect, he accused the Met Police of "overreacting"."I'm completely innocent of anything to do with this so-called 'Mats-Brink' bullion raid," he said, sitting beside a hotel pool in Tenerife in 1985, after being tracked down by BBC war reporter Kate continued to deliberately - or mistakenly - confuse the Brink's-Mat name when he stood trial at the Old Bailey in 1987, and it blew kisses to jurors after they found him not guilty of conspiring to handle stolen gold Brink's-Mat heist, and the cat-and-mouse chases that followed, have been dramatised in BBC One TV series The the final episode, which aired earlier this month, the fictional detective, played by Hugh Bonneville, signs off with: "It's Brink's-Mat - it's never over."Palmer seemed unable to shake off the spectre of the 1983 raid. Timeshare empire Instead of going to ground, Palmer became one of the biggest landowners in Ramm, who oversaw investigations into Palmer and the laundering of the Brink's-Mat gold in the 1990s, said his team was "convinced" he invested earnings from the robbery into the amassed an estimated fortune of £300m which he used to buy a West Country mansion, a French chateau with its own golf course, a jet, turboprop-powered helicopters, a £750,000 yacht, and a classic car collection including Porsches and and Elizabeth II were jointly ranked 105th in the Sunday Times Rich prosecutors accused him of masterminding a timeshare fraud which involved 16,000 victims who were scammed out of more than £ found him guilty of conspiracy to defraud at the Old Bailey and he was jailed for eight years in 2001. David Farrer KC, the lead prosecution counsel, described Palmer as the "biggest shark" in the timeshare waters - a quote that was rekindled for the final episode of The Palmer defended himself, Mr Farrer spent hours liaising with his opposite number in private."He could be quite pleasant and charming," said the retired barrister."That was invariably when he thought the case was going well for him. I've no doubt whatever of his potential violence. "If I had been anything other than prosecuting counsel he would have clouted me a few times."Mr Farrer recalled how during the trial, Palmer wore body armour and was shadowed by Special Branch officers because they were concerned a north London gang had put a contract out on him because he owed them served half his sentence, and in 2009, he moved in with partner Christina Ketley and their son at South Weald. Contract killer Speaking to the BBC's Crimewatch in 2016, Det Supt Jennings said the Spanish fraud prosecution - announced at the end of May 2015 - was the most likely motive for his was complicated when considering his links to the men behind the Hatton Garden heist of April 2015, the detective said, and because of recent "law enforcement intervention with organised crime families"."It was an opportunity for any one of those individuals at any subsequent trial to blame John for what took place and obviously he would not be in a position to answer that or refute it," said Det Supt Jennings. On the evening Essex Police revealed Palmer was murdered, Mr Farrer received an unexpected call from a Scotland Yard detective he had worked with more than 13 years earlier."I asked him, was it the Russians who did it?" Mr Farrer recalled."He said they thought it was much more likely this gang in north London, the Adams, and they certainly didn't think that it was directly anything to do with timeshare - in other words, the same people that caused Palmer to wear body armour during his trial."The Mail on Sunday singled out the Adams crime family as the brains behind the killing in a 2016 "Patsy" Adams, of Finsbury, north London, was jailed later that year for shooting an associate, and other members of the syndicate have received prison time in recent McCunn is more veteran lawyer led civil action against Palmer in the mid-1990s on behalf of insurers acting for the Brink's-Mat business."It could be linked to any number of activities he was known to be involved with," he told the BBC. 'Very dangerous people' A £100,000 reward was put up by Palmer's family and charity Crimestoppers in 2018 for information leading to a conviction - but that reward has Ramm said: "It is particularly important that this murder continues to be investigated because of who Palmer was, the role he played in the network of serious and organised criminals in the UK, in Spain - internationally."He offended and upset some very, very, dangerous people, and we need to know who they were." Palmer always maintained he did not know he had melted Brink's-Mat Ketley was due to stand trial in Madrid in 2019 in connection with the timeshare fraud, but the case against her was dropped. Other individuals were found guilty."Without doubt [Palmer] has made mistakes in his life; I believe he has paid for those mistakes," Ms Ketley told BBC Crimewatch."I was incredibly proud of the way he adjusted to a very normal life."She still owns the gated woodland property where Palmer was murdered. She did not respond to the BBC's approach for comment. A 43-year-old man from Rugby, Warwickshire, was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder in 2015, but was released without February 2017, detectives said a 50-year-old man from Tyneside, who lived in southern Spain, was questioned on suspicion of murder in what was a voluntary interview. He faced no further Police says it has taken hundreds of witness statements, pursued hundreds of lines of inquiries and examined thousands of pieces of the failures on the day Palmer was murdered, a force spokesperson said on Friday: "It is always best to secure and preserve crime scenes as soon as possible to achieve the best forensic evidence and regrettably that was not the case in this incident."However, outdoor crime scenes by their very nature have less forensic opportunities."We believe this murder was a professional contract killing and our experiences of similar cases such as this are that these types of murderers are forensically aware, limiting our opportunity to secure evidence." Mr Ramm thinks detectives will need an organised criminal to hand over key information as "leverage"."I think that's probably the only way it's going to be solved - someone on the inside becomes an informer." Follow Essex news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.

Telegraph

an hour ago

• Telegraph

Why ‘naive' Labour can't fix broken Britain

Heidi Alexander became the latest Transport Secretary to deliver unwanted news regarding HS2 last week, as she unveiled yet more delays to the crisis-hit high-speed rail project. She said it brought her no joy to tell households that not only will the scheme miss its target date of 2033, but it will also cost at least £37bn more than expected. In her words, the saga was an 'appalling mess' and a 'litany of failure'. Strikingly, her comments were almost identical to those made during a public inquiry into the Edinburgh Trams system in 2023, which was completed £400m over budget and five years late. To add insult to injury, producing this report cost the taxpayer £13m. Such damning examples of troubled infrastructure projects have given rise to a simple question in recent years: why is it so hard to get anything done in this country? Until recently, Sir Keir Starmer's diagnosis was simple: 'the party opposite'. But after nearly a year of governing with the biggest majority in 25 years, the Prime Minister, who insists he is a 'builder, not a blocker', has set his sights on a new enemy. 'When Labour came in, there was an expectation that relationships with the Civil Service would be put on to a much more stable, harmonious footing after what had been a decade of quite fractious relationships,' says Patrick Diamond, a public policy expert and former special adviser to Lord Mandelson. 'Suffice to say, it really has not worked out like that.' Like his predecessors, Sir Keir is waging war on Whitehall after concluding that Britain's state machinery is broken, even despite boasting more employees than ever before. He is hardly the first to say so. Michael Gove called it the 'blob'; Liz Truss described it as the 'deep state'; and Dominic Cummings said it was 'an idea for the history books'. Sir Keir issued his own critique in December when he said that too many civil servants were comfortable in 'the tepid bath of managed decline'. According to polling from YouGov earlier this year, 52pc of all MPs believe the Civil Service works badly, compared to 40pc who think it works well. 'There is a lot of frustration in Labour circles about the way the Civil Service works and the feeling that it's making it much harder for Labour to get things done,' says Diamond. '[People worry] this is going to undermine Labour's political position because in three or four years' time, it's going to be more difficult to turn around and say, 'We've changed the country in the way that we promised in our last manifesto.'' The Prime Minister's latest effort to solve this problem appears to borrow from the playbook of Boris Johnson's former adviser, Cummings, by bringing more radical thinkers into Whitehall. He has launched a new drive to attract 'elite' talent into government to help 'rewire the state', aiming to attract people who typically would not consider a role in the Civil Service. Concern over the performance of the central government is growing despite it employing a record 4m people. That includes 550,000 civil servants, the highest number since 2006. Chaos reigns across many of the state's most crucial functions, whether that be waiting too long to see a GP or spiralling hotel bills for asylum seekers. Productivity across the public sector is still 4.6pc lower than in 2019, while the health service is 10pc less efficient than before Covid. This means that the Government is pouring ever more money into the public sector without results. This is key because voters will simply lose faith in politics if no party can achieve real change in government, according to former head of the Civil Service, Simon Case. 'If we don't fix this, we'll just end up with politicians, but even more importantly, voters getting more and more frustrated that it doesn't matter who you vote for, nothing changes,' he says. 'That is a really big problem if people increasingly turn away from voting, engaging and caring about our democracy because they think it doesn't matter any more.' Yet Sir Keir faces a mammoth challenge to turn things around. Money is tight, discontent is rife and productivity growth is lacklustre. If he cannot find a way to overhaul Whitehall, his hopes of transforming the country will evaporate as quickly as his public approval ratings have already. The HS2 fiasco – which includes £100m spent on a bat tunnel – is just one of many examples of official failure. NHS gets a health check Experts believe Labour can make most headway with voters by making good on pledges to fix the NHS. 'Labour have made improving the NHS a central part of their pitch,' says Max Warner, from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. 'The key target for this Parliament is that 92pc of those waiting for pre-planned hospital care in England should be waiting less than 18 weeks.' To this end, Rachel Reeves recently unveiled plans to give the health service a yearly £29bn boost as part of her spending review. Still, it may not be enough. 'That 18-week target has not been met now in essentially a decade,' says Warner. 'It will be really challenging to hit it by the end of this Parliament. It's more likely than not that they're not going to.' Currently, the health service is on track for a lost decade of productivity despite employing a record number of people and receiving tens of billions of pounds more in funding. 'The Government has continued to set targets for NHS productivity, but even if they hit those, hospital productivity will have only really just returned to pre-pandemic levels by the end of the Parliament or by 2028-29,' he adds. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, has shown he is not afraid of big decisions like scrapping NHS England, allegedly after no one there could tell him or Sir Keir's key adviser, Morgan McSweeney, how much it would cost to slash waiting lists. However, Alex Thomas, at the Institute for Government, warns that unwinding such a vastly complex organisation could prove to be a distraction. 'I do think [scrapping NHS England] will take up quite a lot of time and capital,' he says. 'They need to be careful that the activity they're pursuing isn't going to distract from the core objectives.' In recognition of problems within the public sector, the Government has already vowed to overhaul the Civil Service so it can push through change faster. Pat McFadden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, a Cabinet minister who has for most of his life worked in the public sector, wants to run the state more like a start-up. 'If we keep governing as usual, we are not going to achieve what we want to achieve,' he said after launching secondments for private sector tech workers in government. This has been followed by pledges of holding civil servants personally responsible for achieving savings in their departments and getting rid of underperformers. Darren Jones, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, has also said he wants to see government spending monitored in real time on a digital dashboard, an idea first floated by Cummings. This formed part of the Vote Leave architect's plans to create a new unit at No10 that would track departments' underperformance and waste in real time. 'Nobody's in charge' But Labour ministers cannot blame Whitehall for everything, observers warn. Many believe that despite having years to lay the groundwork in opposition, the new administration was not ready to rule. 'For a whole set of reasons, it just wasn't as well prepared as it could have been for power,' says Diamond. 'They came in with not that many policy commitments. There's a feeling in quite a lot of Whitehall departments that they're dealing with ministers who still have a lot to do in working out what their policy approach should be.' Some of this is down to naivety, says a former top civil servant speaking on the condition of anonymity. 'On the political side, there's a lot of frustration,' the source said. 'They thought – in the way that quite often politicians on the Left think – that they turn up, and just by the virtue of being different people, they would somehow be able to make it better, which is kind of quite naive. They're discovering that actually governing is hard. People don't often appreciate that making change happen is boring and hard.' Ministers are frustrated with the Civil Service and how Whitehall operates, complaining of an aversion to risk-taking, slow processes and uninspiring advice. It begs the question whether the British state's problem is the people who lead it, those who execute their vision or the system itself. Case, who was the most senior civil servant from 2020 to 2024, believes it is the system itself that has become far too complex and slow. 'The way we have organised our state means that it is extremely difficult to alter the status quo,' he says. 'The thing that isn't fair is that people say this is all down to the Civil Service. The Civil Service is actually only one very small part of the machinery of the state. 'At the heart of this lies the problem of power in the UK being far more diffuse than it used to be. The problem with the diffusion is that it feels like so many bodies are now responsible. What it can feel like to prime ministers is almost everybody's in charge, so nobody's in charge.' Case is not alone in this assessment. It is an opinion shared by Diamond, who is now a public policy lecturer at Queen Mary University of London after working in Tony Blair's government earlier in his career. 'What people underappreciate is that there isn't this thing called government that is a single bureaucracy where everybody works together and is coordinated,' he says. 'Most of these public services are vastly complex sets of organisations, some of which are not directly linked to each other, not accountable to each other or not directly controlled by ministers. 'The idea that there is just this lever you can pull ... Those levers are actually very hard to find, and even when you pull them, it doesn't necessarily mean that something's going to happen.' This is a common criticism from those who have experienced the Civil Service from the inside. Layers and layers of bureaucracy have, over time, created a system where no single employee has much agency or responsibility. As a result, when you are in the belly of the beast, getting anything done is difficult. 'People commonly talk about the great problems we have with getting things built in this country, whether that's houses or infrastructure,' says Case. 'They start to list off all of the different bodies that are statutory consultees, who get a say over how you're building your road or how you're building a nuclear power station. 'Each one of these may have been a sensible decision, but the problem is nobody over the decades has stopped to think about the accumulation of each of these. It should not take 10 years to build a nuclear power station.' Bloated bureaucracy This view is echoed by another former, anonymous civil servant. 'A change of government doesn't change lots of the ways that our state is just totally bent out of shape, and lots of things don't work,' they said. 'You can't fix those things overnight. 'You've got far too many people. Big organisations with lots of bureaucrats are just a nightmare. It means every individual job is less interesting. You've got much less space to operate in, and many more people to have to check with about whether what you're doing is going to interfere with what they're doing. It just begets a kind of endless meetings culture.' The Civil Service has swelled by 134,000 staff from a low point of 416,000 in late 2016, meaning that the bulk of austerity headcount cuts have now been reversed. While some of this rise reflects that the UK needs more administrators post-Brexit, ministers are keen to stem the rise. The Government is poised to cull as many as 50,000 civil servant jobs in the coming years in a push to find savings. It comes after Covid created a politically contentious culture of working from home that has become hard to undo. Departments such as the Treasury still only have an office attendance of 63pc, the latest available figures for March show. Figures released by the Cabinet Office also showed long-term sickness among civil servants hit a post-Covid high in the year to March 2023, the latest data available. 'Not being in the office has made people feel a lot less part of a collective,' says the former civil servant. 'There's just a kind of passivity and a sense of helplessness on both sides. I don't think either the ministers or the civil servants in government feel very powerful.' There are also questions over Whitehall's ability to attract and retain the best talent. Despite fast-growing wages in recent years and gold-plated pensions, many jobs attract far worse pay than in the private sector. As a result, the Civil Service cannot expect the best candidates, insiders say. 'If you're really good, you will literally be able to double your salary by going and working in the private sector, doing what counts as pretty much the same job,' the former civil servant says. 'The Civil Service should be about half the size at least, and the people should be paid more. It doesn't make financial sense for a very clever person in their early 30s to choose to be a civil servant.' Pay will only become a more salient factor as the Government seeks to adopt artificial intelligence to make efficiencies, experts warn. Diamond is adamant that the Government must pay to hire the best, particularly as the likes of Meta offer £74m signing-on bonuses to poach leading AI researchers. 'The tension has always been the question of whether civil servants should be paid more than the Prime Minister,' says Diamond. 'If you think about trying to recruit people out of the technology sector who can do all sorts of AI processes the Government's going to need, the idea that it is unacceptable to pay them more than the Prime Minister is a bit naive given what it would take to attract such people. Thomas, at the Institute for Government, adds: 'There is legitimate concern about the extent of specialist skills in the Civil Service, the speed of staff churn and people moving around. There needs to be a really clear focus on skills and capability, and building that in order so that ministers can get things done.' Cutting the fat The Civil Service needs to be scaled back to improve performance, he believes. 'There should be more rounds of compulsory redundancy and compulsory exit in the Civil Service based on performance,' says Thomas. 'You talk to most civil servants, and they are frustrated with how performance isn't well managed. 'Some of these mutually agreed exits and cuts that are going to have to come following the spending review's reduction in administrative budgets are an opportunity for the Civil Service to get more match fit.' Like other experts, he believes the central Whitehall machinery, such as the Cabinet Office, needs to be overhauled. The Government is in the process of slimming it down, but Thomas says: 'There's definitely further to go to get a No 10 Cabinet Office machine that's really humming.' A quagmire of quangos, a big and unwieldy Civil Service and ministers still finding their feet give a flavour of Labour's teething issues. Even a tentative proposal to scrap the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and hand its responsibilities to bigger, better-resourced departments appears to have been judged too ambitious and quietly shelved. These challenges explain why Sir Keir, after less than a year in power, is voicing opinions similar to those of Cummings. 'It's not that the civil servants are anti-Labour or anti any other particular party. I think the challenge is that change is always more challenging,' says Clive Betts, the Labour MP for Sheffield South East. 'The other problem is, in this social media age... you go on your computer and immediately say, 'This needs to be done', and you assume that it can be done. I had emails within two weeks of the last election saying, 'Why haven't you done taxi licencing, why haven't you changed it?' 'We know what needs to be done. But the process of getting it changed, and the actual details of the change and how you write the new legislation will take some time. The public, I think, is less understanding of those challenges,' Betts says. With Britain facing an acute housing crisis, more than 6m people waiting for hospital treatment and Europe's highest industrial energy prices, there is much to do and little time. After only 11 months in charge, Labour is trailing Reform in the polls and Sir Keir's personal rating is in the doldrums. Mandelson's former adviser, Diamond, points out that Blair confessed to only finding his stride with the Whitehall machinery in his second term. Sir Keir may not have that luxury.