Gazette reports on today.

The draft report addresses longstanding concerns about the inability of the Government to coordinate policy and the tendency for Ministers to micro-manage.

The Civil Service, which comes in for some well-deserved praise for its honesty and integrity, should welcome many of the reforms proposed in the document.

Better career planning and the ability to move civil servants from one Ministry to the other -- and on secondment into the private sector -- should do much to ensure innovation and flexibility, areas where the civil service has fallen down over the years.

The idea that better assessment of civil servants -- just 30 percent are now assessed -- and that there should be greater flexibility in rewarding civil servants should be welcomed too. Too often, poor Government employees have been allowed to stay in their jobs while good ones have not received the rewards they deserve.

More broadly, the proposals to cut the number of Ministries and to make the surviving Cabinet Ministers full-time deserve close attention.

These are not new ideas, but they would mark a sea change in Bermuda's approach to governance. It could be argued that the UK Civil Service College consultants has exceeded its ambit in making the recommendation; Premier Jennifer Smith said as much last November when Mr. Allen said the Cabinet's size was going to be reviewed.

Nonetheless, no review of the Civil Service would be complete without considering Government's structure, and the proposal to cut Cabinet's size and create "super Ministries'' is worth considering.

In theory, it should lead to greater coordination and fewer turf fights between Ministries and some of the smaller Ministries like Youth and Sport could be folded into another Ministry without being missed.

However, there are dangers in consolidating too much power in too few hands as well. Taken in conjunction with the review's recommendation for a central policy unit, there are risks that all power would be concentrated in the Cabinet Office, without the checks and balances which Cabinet government and Westminster-style Parliaments provide.

Indeed, Westminster-style governments already concentrate a great deal of power compared to US-style legislatures and there are risks that greater efficiency and ease of decision-making could start to look like dictatorship.

Because Government also plans to cut the number of constituencies, this would mean that representative government in Bermuda would be far smaller than it is now. For those who feel Bermuda is over-represented now, that makes sense.

But care needs to be taken that representation is not narrowed so far that politicians lose touch with the people they are elected to represent -- or that the people feel they have no say in a more streamlined, but less responsive government.