Ministerial Directions - improving a misleading graphic.

In the UK, the Civil Service has the job of implementing Government policy. They do this in a non-political way. They do have a duty to advise and if they conclude that a policy is unworkable from a number of perspectives, they can request a ministerial direction that transfers the liability from the civil service to the government minister. This recently happened with the the UK's new proposal to ship to Rwanda asylum seekers who arrive illegally by boat across the English Channel. There was seemingly some doubt that the policy would save money.

This has led to some media coverage about how frequently these ministerial directions happen. One graphic in particular shows these since the time of John Major.

The original for this is here.

This graphic is confusing because the eye is drawn to a trend which could give the impression that the number of these directions is decreasing.

I spent time counting the number of interventions (yes, I did it manually because I couldn't find the source data). These are the raw numbers for each prime minister.

Major    13

Blair    20

Brown    17

Cameron    10

May    10

Johnson    18

The actual numbers are not interesting by themselves, it's vital to normalise the number of directions by the length of the time the prime minister spent in office. If we do this, we get the following interesting graphic.

This is interesting because it shows a recent increasing trend and shows that the Johnson premiership has the largest proportion of directions per year. Prime Minister Brown would no doubt argue that the global financial crash during his time contributed to the large number for him. Prime Minister May would no doubt point to Brexit and Johnson would point both to Brexit and Covid. It is somewhat concerning however that the UK is implementing policies that may not be represent value for money. 

It's ironic that the ministers who make the directions will be out of office and will not face any sanction if the policy does indeed fail at some distant point in the future. There is no check and balance that could deter such risky decisions to stop ministers ignoring advice.

Reproducible research is important and you can find all the data and code on Github here.