The Prime Minister has appointed Harriet Harman as Adviser on Women and Girls, giving the Government an unpaid part time role devoted to violence, economic opportunity, representation and the general task of making a vast state machine notice half the population. A notebook has been assigned to take minutes, although it has already asked whether galvanise counts as a deliverable.
The announcement says Baroness Harman will advise the Prime Minister, work with ministers across Government and help drive action on violence against women and girls. She will also work with the Cabinet Secretary to shift the culture of the Civil Service and ministerial offices. This is an ambitious brief for someone whose hours are officially part time and whose salary is officially nothing.
The arrangement has the familiar administrative elegance of asking one person to improve an entire building while giving her a pen and the right to report directly to the person who occupies the top floor. The role is intended to make Government delivery more effective. Government delivery, in turn, has been placed on notice that it may soon have to deliver.
There is a serious purpose beneath the stationery. The announcement points to tackling violence against women and girls, widening opportunity and improving representation in public life. It also says the Government has declared the scale of violence and abuse a national emergency and wants to halve these crimes in a decade.
That leaves the notebook with several practical questions. Will departments share information? Will ministers agree on action? Will the Civil Service discover that culture is something more demanding than a workshop, a lanyard and a follow up email marked urgent? The fictional notebook has underlined each question twice and placed it beside the biscuits reserved for cross government working.
Harman’s appointment does not itself solve any of the problems named in the announcement. It creates a route for pressure, scrutiny and advice, which is useful if the route leads somewhere other than another meeting about routes. The Government has supplied the adviser, the brief and the national emergency. It must now supply the part where the machinery moves.
The notebook has therefore issued its first recommendation: if Whitehall cannot find the time to act, it should at least stop calling the delay delivery before the stationery starts demanding ministerial accountability. At that point, the pen may become the only thing in Government with a measurable output.
Source: GOV.UK.
