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Whitehall Monitor 2021, published by the Institute for Government, reveals the way the pandemic has changed how the government takes decisions, spends money and makes policy.

The last year saw a drop in the government’s transparency on its spending, only a small proportion of Covid contracts awarded on a competitive basis, and many policy U-turns. And 2020 also saw the highest number of ‘ministerial directions’ – formal instructions for civil servants to continue with a policy despite their concerns about value for money or feasibility – for decades. The business secretary alone issued seven directions for pandemic-support policies, many of which, including the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme (SEISS) and Bounce Back loans, have proved to be poorly targeted and costly.  

Government has awarded contracts at high speed. Only 1% of the £17.3bn spent on Covid contracts has been awarded through competitive tendering, and 61% awarded with no competition at all. The government has an even worse record on transparency than its recent predecessors: only 16% of departmental information releases on spending over £25,000 were published on time in 2020, down from to 38% in 2014.

The civil service continued to grow last year, with almost 10,000 civil servants joining government between December 2019 and September 2020 – meaning nearly half of the coalition government’s staff cuts in the wake of the financial crisis have now been reversed. Thousands of officials rapidly moved from other areas of work, including Brexit preparations, to work on the Covid crisis.

Johnson has suffered fewer cabinet-level resignations than Theresa May – no cabinet ministers resigned in 2020 since Sajid Javid quit as chancellor in February. But more junior ministers (10) have resigned than at the same point in May’s premiership (7), and the PM has drawn criticism for keeping several ministers – notably Priti Patel and Gavin Williamson – in post despite policy failures and, in Patel’s case, having been judged by the prime minister’s independent adviser to have broken the Ministerial Code.

The report also shows that:

• In 2020/21 government spending will top £1 trillion for the first time, pushing the deficit to its highest level as a proportion of national income since the Second World War.
• In May 2020, more than 90% of civil servants in every department except DWP were working at home, compared to fewer than 3% before the pandemic.
• The government’s new televised press conferences attracted millions of viewers – peaking at 27.5m in May.

IfG associate director and report author Tim Durrant said:

“The pandemic has forced ministers and civil servants to change what government does and how it does it. If the success of the vaccine rollout continues, the government has a chance to get back to its priorities, including levelling up the UK and defining a new role for the country on the global stage. But there are other challenges ahead, not least questions about the future of the union. Boris Johnson and his ministers need to learn from the repeated U-turns, the poor value for money schemes and the other mistakes of 2020, as well as from what has gone well, to make a success of 2021.” 

Notes to editors

1. The full report can be found on our website.  
2. The Institute for Government is an independent think tank that works to make government more effective.
3. For more information, including data to reproduce any charts, please contact press@instituteforgovernment.org.uk / 0785 031 3791.

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