Catalogue description Central Policy Review Staff: Files

The Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS) was set up in October 1970. Although, in the years prior to 1970 there had been different strands of thought about the need for a stronger central policy capability, the new Conservative government's white paper, The Reorganisation of Central Government (Cmnd 4506), referred to the need for a framework within which the government's policies as a whole may be more effectively formulated. The white paper text was the only formal guide available to the CPRS and its first director, Lord Rothschild, in deciding how it should be composed and what it should do; it had no legal basis or terms of reference: and Rothschild largely determined the style and content of its activities during his period of office and for some time after. Rothschild identified or selected all the initial CPRS staff himself - roughly half from within the civil service, the other half from the business sector, the universities and from consultancy - at different times the staff has included a sociologist, a political scientist, a demographer, a biologist, and others.

Rothschild was replaced in 1974 by Sir Kenneth Berrill, an academic economist; and on his retirement in 1980 Berrill was replaced by Robin Ibbs, a board member of ICI with particular responsibility for planning.

From the start the CPRS was physically located in the Cabinet Office.

The CPRS's oversight of government overall strategy became increasingly intermittent and, after early 1974, it concerned itself with discrete and often unrelated topics. The new prime minister Harold Wilson established the Policy Unit inside 10 Downing Street to provide an alternative source of advice to that of the civil service, and most other senior ministers were also assisted by their own appointed policy advisers. Special advisers had become an established part of the core executive, and this development may have at least partly undermined the need for a unit of the CPRS kind.

In 1983 Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher disbanded it.