Number 10 Policy Unit

The Number 10 Policy Unit is a body of policymakers in 10 Downing Street in the British government. Originally set up to support Harold Wilson in 1974, it has gone through a series of guises to suit the needs of successive Prime Ministers, staffed variously by political advisers, civil servants or a combination of both.

The Coalition Government of May 2010 quickly disbanded two major parts of central infrastructure, the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit (PMDU) and Prime Minister's Strategy Unit (PMSU), as part of the Prime Minister's agenda to reduce the number of special advisers and end micromanagement of Whitehall. In their place, a strengthened Policy and Implementation Unit was launched in early 2011, staffed wholly by civil servants and reporting jointly to the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister under joint heads Paul Kirby (Policy) and Kris Murrin (Implementation).

The current members of the Policy Unit are Susan Acland-Hood (Home Affairs), Paul Bate (Health and Adult Social Care), Chris Brown (Education), Richard Freer (Defence), Tim Luke (Business and Enterprise), Michael Lynas (Big Society) and Ben Moxham (Energy and Environment). The Unit is supported by the Research and Analytics Unit.

Directed by Oliver Letwin and Danny Alexander's Policy Board, the Unit works closely with Conservative and Liberal Democrat political advisers Steve Hilton, Polly Mackenzie and Tim Colbourne, and the private offices of the PM and DPM.

Previous heads include Bernard Donoughue, Ferdinand Mount, John Redwood, Brian Griffiths, Sarah Hogg, Norman Blackwell, David Bennett, David Miliband, Andrew Adonis, Matthew Taylor, Geoff Mulgan, Dan Corry and Nick Pearce. Other notable members have included Oliver Letwin, David Willetts and Sir Michael Barber.

Famous quotes containing the words number, policy and/or unit:

    If matrimony be really beneficial to society, the custom that ... married women alone are allowed any claim to place, is as useful a piece of policy as ever was invented.... The ridicule fixed on the appellation of old maid hath, I doubt not, frightened a very large number into the bonds of wedlock.
    Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)

    Maybe it’s understandable what a history of failures America’s foreign policy has been. We are, after all, a country full of people who came to America to get away from foreigners. Any prolonged examination of the U.S. government reveals foreign policy to be America’s miniature schnauzer—a noisy but small and useless part of the national household.
    —P.J. (Patrick Jake)

    During the Suffragette revolt of 1913 I ... [urged] that what was needed was not the vote, but a constitutional amendment enacting that all representative bodies shall consist of women and men in equal numbers, whether elected or nominated or coopted or registered or picked up in the street like a coroner’s jury. In the case of elected bodies the only way of effecting this is by the Coupled Vote. The representative unit must not be a man or a woman but a man and a woman.
    George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)