Will Boris Johnson reshape the Whitehall landscape?

Now that Boris Johnson has a clear majority in parliament, his attention may turn to the shape of government. His manifesto, unlike that of most other parties running in the election, made no commitments to creating new, or getting rid of existing, ministries. His immediate predecessor made big changes to the landscape of Whitehall: Theresa May created departments for Brexit and trade, while merging the energy and climate change department established by Gordon Brown into the business department. David Cameron, on the other hand, was deliberately cautious about making big changes, seeing it as a distraction from getting on with governing. Which model will Johnson follow?

There are some obvious options if Johnson does want to make changes. May established the Department for Exiting the EU to show she was serious about getting Brexit done. That was Johnson’s campaign slogan for the election and, assuming he is successful at completing the first phase of the process and the UK leaves the EU at the end of January, will there still be a need for a Brexit-focused department?

One option could be to move the officials working on the next phase of the talks with Brussels into the Cabinet Office, where they will have a more direct reporting line to the prime minister. This would avoid the issues that May faced when she initially gave a fair amount of leeway to David Davis, her first Brexit secretary. Her premiership was characterised by a gradual reining-in of DExEU as she realised how important it was to oversee the negotiations closely. Johnson should avoid the same mistake.

Alternatively, he may want to merge DExEU with May’s other internationally-focused department, the Department for International Trade. Bringing together the two departments responsible for negotiating the UK’s future trade deals would force ministers to confront trade-offs. These are inherent in choosing between a closer economic relationship with the EU or with other countries including the US and Australia. But the future relationship with the EU is supposed to cover more than trade—the political declaration setting out both sides’ broad ambitions includes plans for future cooperation on security, data-sharing, academic research and more. As DIT is yet to sign any genuinely new trade deals, there is no guarantee that it could manage the EU negotiations alongside everything else it is supposed to be doing.

Another question mark hovers over the Department for International Development (DfID), the UK’s aid agency. Johnson and his foreign secretary Dominic Raab have both mooted folding Dfid back into the Foreign Office (where it was before Labour span it out in 1997). Many Conservatives have argued that Dfid is not close enough to the UK’s wider foreign policy objectives and that the large aid budget (underpinned by a legislative spending target implemented by Cameron) distorts the UK’s international presence.

Merging the departments is one thing; cutting the aid budget would be a much more dramatic step. But even the merger is not straightforward. Dfid and the Foreign Office are very different departments. The former is staffed by development experts with experience in managing the vast projects funded by the aid budget (and even then they often struggle to hit the spending target). The latter, on the other hand, is adept at understanding local politics around the world and building relationships that benefit the UK. They are very different skill sets and there is no guarantee that the two departments would work well together.

The UK is a relative outlier in still having an independent aid ministry. In recent years, Canada and Australia have merged their equivalents back into their foreign affairs departments, and many European countries take the same unified approach. There may be unintended consequences though—one Canadian news report found that the merger of the two departments in Ottawa led to a foreign affairs department dominated by development experts, rather than the other way round.

Regardless of the choices Johnson makes, rearranging government departments is not easy. Institute for Government research has found that it takes about two years for the new organisation to get fully up to speed—a long time when you want the government to be getting on with the job of governing. And any changes to Whitehall inevitably mean changes to ministerial portfolios—they can be a chance to reward loyalty but also can provoke or exacerbate rivalries between ministers.

While he may want to remake government in his own image, Johnson would be well-advised to think any decisions through carefully, rather than repeating May’s mistake of creating new departments simply to send a message.