Danny Kruger's policy flop

When Danny Kruger defected to Reform, we were told by the Spectator et al that he would bring intellectual heft to Reform’s policy making. I was not at all taken in my this - and I was right to be sceptical. Today Kruger has published his policy outline for civil service reform.

I’m not enough of an insider to pass comment on whether his general thrust is accurate, but I can see he’s working on the basis of age old tropes about the civil service that formed the basis of Yes Minister episodes when I was an infant. Sometimes you only need a snippet to get an insight into how someone thinks. What gives the game away is the assertion “Meanwhile Defra has policy teams for each individual species of fish”.

If you know anything about fishing at all, you know that it’s an inherently complex policy area. There are good reasons why you might want bespoke policy teams according to species. I asked Grok to speculate why that might be.

DEFRA (the UK Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs) does not have separate departments dedicated to individual species of fish. Fisheries policy and management are handled centrally under the Marine and Fisheries directorate, which oversees areas like domestic fisheries reform, EU fisheries policy and negotiations, external fisheries negotiations and trade, marine system management, and protecting the marine environment. This directorate coordinates evidence-based approaches to sustainability, regulations, and international obligations for fisheries as a whole.

However, fisheries management often treats species differently in practice (e.g., through species-specific quotas, regulations, or conservation measures), even within a unified structure. Potential reasons for this differentiation include:

Biological and ecological differences: Fish species vary in life cycles, growth rates, migration patterns, and vulnerability to overfishing. For example, some species like cod may require stricter recovery plans due to historical depletion, while others like mackerel have different seasonal behaviours.

Conservation and sustainability needs: Endangered or threatened species (e.g., certain sharks or eels) need targeted protections under frameworks like the UK Fisheries Act or EU Common Fisheries Policy remnants, to prevent biodiversity loss and maintain ecosystem balance.

Habitat variations: Marine vs. freshwater species, or those in specific areas like coastal waters, face unique environmental pressures, such as pollution, climate change impacts, or habitat degradation, requiring tailored monitoring and interventions.

Economic and commercial factors: High-value species (e.g., salmon or tuna) may have dedicated quotas or trade negotiations to support industries, while others are managed to avoid bycatch or support recreational fishing.

Legal and international obligations: Agreements like those with the EU, Norway, or under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea mandate species-specific management to ensure fair resource allocation and prevent disputes.

As a veteran of boring Brexit debates, I already knew this, but you have to ask why Danny Kruger doesn’t. As with most Tories there is no curiosity as to how the system works or what it’s actually for. They just have an ideological belief that the civil service should be of a certain arbitrary size - and that efficiency is an automatic consequence of amalgamating and cutting headcounts.

This tells us all we need to know about how they’re approaching policy. The size and shape of the civil service should really be dictated by what you what it to do - and for that you need to build policy from the ground up. In the instance of fishing, you would expect a party descended from the Brexit Party would have ambitions about revitalising and expanding the industry, which would necessities more back office policy administration.

Meanwhile, having looked at the illegal immigration problem, I can see that we’re going to have to massively expand the administrative side of enforcement - not least the agencies required to deal with organised crime and immigration fraud. But Kruger will come in swinging the axe, and while Reform will passes a lot of new laws, they’ll find they don’t have the means to enforce them. They’ll then have to rebuild all the institutional expertise from scratch - which takes years.

In fact, the very reason we have so much illegal immigration is because there is little chance of being identified and deported. This is very much a consequence of cutting back on local authority enforcement and reducing inspections. Notionally these cuts made local government more “efficient” but the externalities of policy neglect have major externalities and direct costs.

This kind of sloppy thinking is common on the right. They’re all imbued with the idea that we can delete quangos wholesale (regardless of what they actually do). As such, this is a top-down reorganisation. Rather than function defining form, the civil service is to be reshaped according to an ideological blueprint that bares no relation to the complexity of modern government. Moreover, this all tells us that the right is more interested in sweeping ideological gestures than the nuts and bolts of policy.

As I outline in the above video, there is massive scope for reforming agriculture, moving away from the EU veterinary system, which would cut down on the need for official vets, and you could move to a more local model administered by councils, and cut Defra that way, but there are still necessary official functions that would need to be carried out. The development of serious policy would highlight where cuts could be made, but also identify where government administration is under-resourced. Setting targets for an overall reduction is little more than accountancy and managerialism, not in any way informed by policy.

This is not to say there isn’t bloat and entrenched bureaucracy in the civil service, and there are certainly problems with the culture therein, but this is usually down to poor leadership and the lack of political oversight and engagement. That is the reason they go feral. they have no inherent sense of purpose. It is for policy to give them that direction and purpose - but if Reform isn’t doing policy, there’s no real reason to expect the culture to change.