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By Julia Willemyns (@jujulemons)
Politicians can seem out of their depth. How many MPs could confidently explain how LLMs work, what a gilt premium is, or the difference between a demand-side and supply-side intervention? For many at the fringes of Westminster, the obvious diagnosis is talent. And it is true that public life, as currently structured, is not a job that reliably attracts or retains deep expertise.
But Britain’s deeper problem is a lack of political capacity. We have built a large, complex, interventionist state without building a correspondingly thick political layer to direct it.
We ask a relatively small number of ministers, advisers and MPs to oversee a sprawling administrative machine, make trade-offs across highly technical areas, and remain democratically accountable for outcomes they often lack the time and staff to understand.
When political capacity is too thin, the state governs itself. Departments pursue their own objectives. Regulators and arm’s-length bodies accumulate discretion. Civil servants make decisions that ministers cannot contest in detail. This is often described as ‘the blob’, as though willfully incompetent or ideologically captured bureaucrats have staged a coup. The reality is more banal. If it feels as though the bureaucracy is running the show, that may simply be because, in the absence of a thicker political layer, there is nobody else to do it.
That helps explain the strange character of British politics. Ministers insist they are pulling the levers yet don’t see change. Politicians blame the civil service for decisions that voters would reasonably expect ministers to oversee. MPs absorb public anger for things they do not control.
Voters conclude that their representatives are useless, while representatives feel like glorified caseworkers and media performers. The problem is not just that Parliament contains the wrong people. It is that Britain has hollowed out the political layer in both the legislature and the executive.
The Pierre Bourdieus or Dominic Cummings view would be that part of the problem is the wrong sort of people are becoming MPs. Parties choose career politicians, not (depending on your school of thought) superior technologists, scientists, tradespeople, or workers. I think that’s the wrong way to think about it.
The problem is not mainly who gets selected to run. It is what Parliament lets them do once they get there. Even if you filled the Commons with unusually capable, experienced, high-agency people, most of them would still find themselves trapped in an institution that gives them little room to exercise judgment or deploy expertise.
When a job offers little autonomy, ability to exercise judgment, and chance of having meaningful impact, many capable people with other options simply will not do it.
Let’s say you’re a high-performing CEO who has now become a backbencher. And for the sake of argument, rising through government ranks is impossible – you’re too contrarian, too ‘right’ or too ‘left’, or not of the right constituency or demographic. How would you deploy those superior CEO skills for the betterment of Britain?
You can’t vote your conscience without losing the whip. If you do, you become a lone voice screaming in an otherwise unbothered parliament. You’ll probably lose your seat at the next election.
So maybe you join a select committee. Except, according to Rory Stewart, if you have expertise in an area, whips will bar you from the relevant bill committee.
Even if you make it onto a committee, they’re largely powerless. British committees can formally send for persons, papers and records, but this power is used sparingly, and enforcement ultimately depends on the Commons (meaning the government majority). No wonder the Travelodge CEO feels comfortable ignoring committee summons. Compare this to the US, where congressional committees issue subpoenas enforceable through courts and contempt proceedings, entirely independent of the executive.
Committees are also under-resourced. British committees are staffed like university societies, with only five to eight permanent staff members. In the US, a single major standing committee can have fifty to a hundred staff members.
Staffing will also be an issue in your office. As a CEO, you had five directors, each with specialist teams beneath them, reporting to you. In Parliament, you get five (underpaid) generalist graduates. How will you and your team master the details of a 400-page infrastructure bill, a pensions reform package, and AI regulation?
You don’t have time. Your office is drowning in casework and comms. Every week, constituents send housing benefit delays, NHS referral problems, visa applications stuck in limbo, council planning disputes. The rest of your staffers’ time is spent drafting tweets, handling media requests, and responding to angry emails. None of them have time to master technical areas of policy.
Insiders may privately believe a weak Parliament is not a problem. Backbenchers do not need to be experts, what matters is a strong executive that can act decisively. But, even if you are skeptical of a strong Parliament, this misses how the system reproduces itself. Backbenchers do not remain backbenchers forever. Many eventually become Ministers. Making the job of MP a good one matters if you want able people to enter politics, stay there, and eventually govern well.
A weak Parliament would matter less if power had simply shifted to a stronger, more politically directed executive that had the capacity to lead. But that is not what has happened. Instead, as Parliament has lost grip on its core constitutional function, power has diffused to arm’s-length bodies, regulators, courts, and departments (which, as I will argue, often means the civil service in practice).
Arm’s-length bodies (ALBs) – quangos, regulators, agencies, non-departmental public bodies – now control roughly £369.8 billion in annual spending; ~30% of total government expenditure is spent with little political scrutiny.
Regulators such as Ofcom, Ofgem, and the FCA can write the operational law of entire sectors. MPs can’t amend them, can’t vote them down, and often can’t even access the technical details. Parliament can question ministers, but the ministers themselves often don’t know the answers. The ALBs hold the operational levers, the data, the expertise, and the day-to-day discretion.
This isn’t new, but it’s become significantly worse. Post-war state expansion led to a boom in agencies and non-departmental public bodies, especially in the 90s and 00s. There have been periodic attempts at a ‘bonfire of the quangos’ but not much has changed.
When constituents complain about sewage or train delays, MPs perform outrage in the Commons, but they know that they cannot legally command the Environment Agency or Network Rail. The power to decide has been delegated, but the responsibility to answer remains, and MPs absorb the anger for decisions they no longer control.
Meanwhile, the role of courts has expanded to adjudicating policy. Judicial review applications rose from hundreds per year in the 1980s to over 15,000 at their peak in the 2010s. And the only reason they have come back down recently is largely because immigration cases have shifted to tribunals.
Major policies set by the democratically elected Government are now routinely tested and sometimes nullified in court. The Human Rights Act 1998 accelerated this trend. Section 3 requires courts to interpret legislation ‘so far as possible’ to be compatible with Convention rights. In practice, this gives judges significant power to reshape what statutes mean, sometimes in ways Parliament didn’t anticipate.
For example, the House of Commons voted overwhelmingly (385 to 26) in 2025 to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organization following attacks on national infrastructure. However, in 2026, the High Court overturned this mandate, ruling the ban ‘unlawful’ on human rights grounds. Whatever one’s view of the group, it is a clear restriction of parliamentary sovereignty when a policy with such massive cross-party support can be dismantled by a panel of judges.
And most laws aren’t debated to the extent people think. Parliament passes roughly 30-40 Acts per year. Ministers sign off on over a thousand Statutory Instruments a year; in some recent years, over 3,000. These are secondary legislation where no amendments are allowed and minimal debate takes place. Most become law automatically unless Parliament actively objects, which almost never happens. The Commons last rejected one in 1979.
When Parliament does legislate, it increasingly does so through skeleton bills – framework laws with minimal detail that hand Ministers sweeping powers to define actual policy later.
My compatriots may baulk. It is good that ministers are powerful! More parliamentary oversight means slower timelines, political grandstanding, and legislation held hostage by backbench revolts. Better to give ministers the powers and let them get on with it.
But, under the current system, shifting power to ministers doesn’t always mean more political control. Danny Kruger is arguably right to call for restoring parliamentary sovereignty – but the part of government most in need of reform, if we want to increase political capacity, is the executive.
The government has roughly 130 special advisors, of which most are in no.10; each department has two to five special advisers. Most advisors are focused on communications and political management, not policy detail. And the ones that work on policy are completely outnumbered by permanent civil servants.
When we shift power from Parliament to departments, we’re really shifting it to the permanent bureaucracy. The people writing those statutory instruments aren’t politically accountable ministers and their advisors. They’re civil servants executing departmental priorities.
Our government is uniquely light on political capacity. France has roughly 500 political appointees across government ministries. The US has around 4,000 political appointments. Even Denmark has more political appointees per capita than the UK.
There is a lack of expertise in the political layer of government; partly because when you have so few spots, you have to employ generalists. So special advisors end up with Frankenstein briefs. Meet the health-AI-climate-education guy!
This makes it very difficult to keep ALBs in check or legislate in complicated areas. For example, the next selection for the Governor of the Bank of England will take place ahead of March 2028. In practice, the decision is made by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Prime Minister. The Governor has responsibility over inflation, banking risk, and shocks to the economy. Choosing a good Governor who wants the country to grow is incredibly important.
Does Reeves or her team have the knowledge of monetary transmission mechanisms, financial stability operations, quantitative tightening or the internal politics of the Monetary Policy Committee and the Bank’s senior leadership to know which candidate will genuinely prioritise growth over orthodoxy? Probably not (and we shouldn’t expect them to, they don’t have the capacity). This means we will likely defer to whatever the permanent Treasury officials and senior Bank insiders present as the ‘safe’ choice.
Britain’s thin political layer was originally meant to be thickened by Parliament, but we’ve hollowed it out. Meanwhile, the state’s role has expanded significantly. The result is an executive that lacks both parliamentary accountability and sufficient political capacity of its own, leaving the permanent bureaucracy to govern by default.
My view is the political layer should be thickened across the board and that the deal for MPs needs to improve, even if doing so is politically difficult in the short-run. That’s the only way we will encourage more political direction and scrutiny, and in the long-term attract more talent and experience into politics. Here are a couple things you can do in the short-term:
Radically increase the number of political appointments in government. There is no legal or statutory cap on the total number of Special Advisers a UK government can hire. A government could, if it wanted to, double the number tomorrow. But simply adding more bodies will not solve the problem. If this is going to thicken the political layer in any meaningful sense, a large share of those new appointments have to be specialists focused on policy, not just more communications staff, parliamentary fixers, and political aides with Frankenstein briefs. That probably means creating a distinct class within the SpAd system for policy advisers, separate from media and parliamentary roles, and giving each secretary of state a minimum policy complement as standard.
Increase the number of external experts doing a time-limited ‘tour of service’. The UK has schemes to bring talent into government – but this is not used enough. In Britain, most often, experts are brought in via a secondment or direct appointment, during which the government pays for the salary of said expert. In the US, however, the Intergovernmental Personnel Act allows for charities to pay the salary of said experts. This arrangement enables more competitive compensation while reducing the direct cost to the government, making public service a more attractive proposition, especially for those with highly desired skillsets.
Sunset quangos. A sunset clause is a provision that automatically terminates a law, regulation, or body on a specific date unless parliament actively votes to renew it. Right now, quangos persist unless someone fights to abolish them. Sunset clauses reverse that burden. Quangos must justify their existence. Applying this would force regular scrutiny of whether each body is still needed, still effective, and still worth the cost. Many would not survive that test. There’s some evidence that sunset clauses are great tools to keep good policies around while weeding out bad policies. In the US, states that apply sunset clauses to their agencies reduce spending while improving the quality of public services.
Give committees legal powers. In other systems, including the United States and Australia, committees have coercive powers that bite because they can be enforced through courts and contempt procedures. Ours should have something closer to that model. But legal powers alone are not enough. A committee with the formal authority to demand documents is still weak if it lacks the staff and expertise to process them. So stronger powers have to come with larger budgets and more specialist staff.
Increase MP pay. There will always be an incentive for MPs to not want to increase pay – nobody has ever won votes by demanding more money for themselves. One way to solve this may be to make one large increase in MP salaries and then peg it to the median wage so it rises with inflation, reducing the political salience of the issue while ensuring MP pay doesn’t degrade in real terms.
Reduce casework and increase the budget for MP offices. AI could help improve MP productivity. The government should be investing in tools that will address this. Devolution to local councils could also impose a clearer ‘firewall’ between local and national issues.
These changes would strengthen executive capacity now while building Parliament’s powers for the long term, which is essential if public life is to keep attracting talent and experience. Reforming the plumbing of the system rarely feels urgent from the inside, but it is likely one of the highest-leverage ways to fix the recurring problems facing modern British governments.
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