Treating the Symptoms, Not the Causes: What's Wrong with Demos's Report The Human Handbrake: How Whitehall Culture Holds Back Public Service Reform

A litany of think tank reports has critiqued Whitehall's ability to deliver policy. The latest—by Demos—locates the roots of Britain's governance woes in Whitehall's political culture. Drawing on public policy literature, we critique this report by demonstrating that Whitehall's political culture reflects the enduring structural design of Britain's political system, which remains wedded to forms of top‐down accountability and control and ‘siloised’ working. A focus on cultural reform results in incremental and modest reform ideas typical of think tank assessments of Whitehall, which are undermined by their failure to address the structural causes of Britain's governance problems.