The Cabinet Office has announced the formation of a Department for Departmental Oversight, a new body tasked with monitoring the performance of various oversight departments that were themselves established to monitor other departments over the past seventeen years.

The DfDO, which will operate from offices in Millbank previously occupied by the now-defunct Taskforce for Inter-Agency Coordination, will employ an initial staff of forty-three civil servants. Their primary function will be to establish which existing departments still technically exist and which have been quietly absorbed into other departments without anyone signing the necessary paperwork.

Helen Marsh, appointed as interim Director of Oversight Coordination, confirmed that her team is currently working through a backlog of 127 departmental acronyms to determine how many refer to active bodies. She admitted to some uncertainty about her own position.

I believe I report to the Minister for Government Efficiency, though it’s possible that role was merged with the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Administrative Reform last April. I’ve been sending my weekly reports to both email addresses. One of them bounces.

The announcement follows three decades of successive governments creating new departments, agencies, commissions, and executive non-departmental public bodies, many with overlapping remits. The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities alone now contains remnants of six previous departments, along with what officials describe as ‘a number of stranded quangos that no longer appear on any organisational chart but continue to hold quarterly meetings’.

Among the DfDO’s first tasks will be to clarify the reporting structure of the Office for Departmental Accountability, which was created in 2019 to oversee the Committee for Public Body Reform. The committee had itself been established to review the effectiveness of the Advisory Board on Government Efficiency, which stopped meeting in 2016 after its members could not agree on which ministry they answered to.

James Pendleton, a senior policy officer who has worked in Whitehall since 2003, said the new department was a logical step.

We reached a point last month where we had three separate oversight bodies scrutinising the same spending decision, none of them aware of the others. I spent a week trying to arrange a meeting between them before discovering that two had been merged eighteen months ago, though the merger was never formally announced and both were still publishing separate reports.

The DfDO will report directly to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, assuming that position has not been redistributed to another Cabinet member since Tuesday. A departmental spokesperson said they would confirm the reporting line once they had located an up-to-date copy of the current government structure.

The department’s annual budget of £8.3 million will be drawn from savings made by closing the Efficiency and Reform Group, which was disbanded last year after a review found it had increased administrative costs by 23 per cent.