Oiling the machine - inside the Number 10 policy unit
5 min read
The Policy Unit provides prime ministers with crucial advice on the direction of departmental policy. Will Tanner, former deputy chief of staff at No 10, argues it would be perilous for Keir Starmer to ignore its value
Harold Wilson may have held many regrets about his first period in Downing Street between 1964 and 1970, but his biggest, confided on the eve of his 1974 victory, was that “I didn’t have my own independent policy advisers in No 10.”
The Policy Unit was, and remains, a response to a paradox at the heart of Britain’s state machinery. While the prime minister constitutionally exercises authority over all of Whitehall, Downing Street has historically lacked the resources needed to exercise that power directly. The “PU”, as it is known, addresses this imbalance. By giving the prime minister a phalanx of advisers committed to his or her strategic priorities, mostly drawn from outside the mandarinate, it fills what John Hunt, Wilson’s cabinet secretary, called “the hole in the centre”.
Though it has grown over the past fifty years, the Policy Unit today still comprises fewer than thirty special advisers and junior Whitehall officials. This little platoon tends to be most effective when it acts as both the prime minister’s “eyes and ears”, to borrow Wilson’s phrase, and what Sarah Hogg, John Major’s policy chief, termed “the grit and oil in the government machine.” In other words, the Policy Unit works best by offering the prime minister unvarnished intelligence and advice about the direction of departmental policy, while giving Whitehall strategic clarity about what the prime minister wants or doesn’t want.
It is doubtful, for example, whether Margaret Thatcher’s war on the unions or Geoffrey Howe’s 1981 Budget would have been as decisive had the acerbic memos of her Policy Unit chief, John Hoskyns, not repeatedly upbraided the hesitancy of the Civil Service. Likewise, Tony Blair’s revolution in public services might not have been as radical had Andrew Adonis not been driving it from the centre. In my own stints there, it was my Policy Unit colleagues who overcame departmental resistance, shifting policy towards technical skills and intraregional transport, for example, and away from low-value degrees and the exorbitant waste of HS2.
In the anatomy of No10, the Prime Minister’s private office acts like a central nervous system, transmitting information synaptically across Whitehall and, during dysfunction, creating capacity for paralysis. The political team, meanwhile, tends to act as No 10’s brain: rationalising policy, anticipating criticism and analysing Parliament. It is in the Policy Unit that you will find the ideological heartbeat of a No 10 operation, and the truest representation of the prime minister’s instincts. This was true under Hoskyns, Hogg and Adonis, but also holds for James O’Shaughnessy, Munira Mirza and Eleanor Shawcross’ respective stints running the unit under Cameron, Johnson and Sunak.
Inevitably, ideological proximity brings vulnerability as well as strength. When the prime minister disagrees with a secretary of state or urges a new direction, the Policy Unit becomes a lightning rod for any reaction. It is easier to brief against defenceless officials or meddling advisers in Downing Street than the prime minister directly. The corporatist Jim Prior, for example, resented John Hoskyns’ influence over Thatcher’s union policy. Yet with few, if any, formal levers over departments, it is rarely wise for the Policy Unit to rise to antagonism. Like the rest of No10, the Policy Unit does not trade in hard power but through goodwill and persuasion.
For such a vital part of the Downing Street operation, the Policy Unit is somewhat aloof from the rest of the building. Inauspiciously housed on the second floor, in a cramped warren of former bedrooms, it is oblivious to much of the chaotic day-to-day of No 10. This has advantages, in that it encourages longer term, less reactive policymaking. But distance comes at a cost in a building where proximity and information flows matter. This is why I always favoured bringing the PU downstairs to the open plan office overlooking No 9.
Excluding the Policy Unit from decision making can spell disaster. When Liz Truss became prime minister, she not only moved the Policy Unit wholesale into the Cabinet Office but also excluding its advisers from key measures in the mini-Budget. Whether Policy Unit advice would have tempered the hubris of that devastating fiscal event, one cannot say, but by cutting it out, she sidelined one of the few parts of Whitehall capable of assessing the combined fiscal, market and political risks that cost her the job.
This is a lesson that Keir Starmer would do well to heed. While much of the blame for the first 100 days has been directed at Sue Gray, at least some of the errors reflect an underpowered Policy Unit, with fewer external appointees and less access to the Prime Minister. In an echo of Truss’ mini-Budget, it is rumoured in Whitehall that the Policy Unit was sidelined from both Reeves’ decision to cut Winter Fuel Payments and Peter Kyle’s ill-considered decision to cancel AI supercomputer funding. If either is true, the subsequent fallout should prove instructive.
There is, however, cause for optimism. The internal reshuffle that followed Sue Gray’s departure led to the promotion of the superb Nin Pandit, my Civil Service opposite number when I ran the unit as the prime minister’s principal private secretary. Making the same journey from the second floor to the outer office as her predecessor, Elizabeth Perelman, Pandit knows firsthand the critical role of the Policy Unit and how to use it effectively. If Starmer trusts in that judgement, he can be sure of one thing: he will not leave No 10 with the same regret as Harold Wilson half a century ago.
Will Tanner served as deputy chief of staff to the former prime minister, Rishi Sunak. He is the founder of Onward
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