A think tank has blueprinted No 10 North as a sprawling 300-person operation that will somehow require eighteen months to fully staff. This is what happens when someone asks ‘what if we built an entire second government building but nobody had to actually decide anything there’.
The concept is bureaucratic theatre masquerading as infrastructure. Senior ministers will decamp to this new facility to attend workshops on ‘collaborative governance frameworks’ and ‘synergistic policy alignment’—phrases that exist solely to justify the existence of middle management. Meanwhile, actual decisions will continue to be made in the original No 10 by three people in a corridor at 11 PM.
Why build a second office when the first one works through sheer chaos and spite? Because someone calculated that 300 people in a new building looks more organized than 300 people crammed into Georgian townhouses arguing about parking. The free coffee machine alone will justify the budget in internal comms.
The real genius is the timeline. Eighteen months to hire and onboard 300 staff means the entire operation will achieve full capacity just in time for a reshuffle to scatter them all to different departments. The building will then spend three years at 60 percent occupancy while everyone debates whether hot-desking was actually a cost-saving measure or just a way to make sure nobody’s comfortable enough to ask difficult questions.
No 10 North isn’t a new government building. It’s a monument to the principle that if you can’t solve a problem, you can always build a bigger room to ignore it in.