Great as always James. I completely agree that "governing by announcement" is a major problem. I have known countless good people who have joined the public sector with a view to work tirelessly for many years to improve the systems that we all rely on. Alas, above the parapet, what we have is an entire class of people who know that they personally probably have a very limited time in power to achieve any real change. It doesn't help that they will be judged by a media, and let's face it a public too, that have been trained to focus on sound-bite sized statements about the relative success or failure of the Minister's project. This isn't even mentioning personal ego. The reality is that no-one is remembered for saying that after lots of research and advice they were able to make small incremental change.

How we fix this I don't know but the smallest potential start would be to be much much clearer about which people are organisations are involved in contributing to ministerial decision making. Having a page on GOV.UK listing policies in development, perhaps grouped by mission, with a page for each one including that information would at least start to temper the idea that everything is purely the Minister's idea.

We could even discuss how such pages could help us move past the consultation model to something better in time...