Part of the state series of articles.
Interwork detachments are temporary interministerial offices formed for problems that cross several parts of government. Although they are staffed and equipped by the bodies that form them, they are strictly civil service organisations and hold no power to introduce legislation. A detachment is usually headed by a senior civil servant.
Detachments are formed by agreement between the relevant departments, without reference to a minister or a commissioned State Secretary. Once established, members are seconded from their home departments for the life of the detachment and work for nothing else. A body whose staff keep their old duties becomes an information-sharing group instead of a working office, so the secondment is total.
Detachments are most often assembled in response to, rather than anticipation of, a problem. Common examples include:
- Disputes between offices of the civil service
- Federalisation of a new republic
- Commonwealth responses to disasters overseas
- Infrastructure shared between bureaus of different ministries
There are typically hundreds of detachments active across the Commonwealth at any time, most of them small and procedural. The Guinea Federalisation Interwork Detachment has run for over two decades and manages the federalisation of Annobon and Java in the Gulf of Guinea. The Retaliatory Interwork Detachment was established as part of the Commonwealth response to the Air India Disaster.
Detachments hold no cadre of their own. Their officers are seconded from the services and their junior staff lent by the bureaus that formed them, and both return home when the detachment closes. A secondment counts towards an officer’s seniority in their own service.
A detachment dissolves when its problem is resolved. Because some problems prove chronic rather than finite, a detachment may instead be absorbed into the permanent structures of a ministry – usually as a bureau, and occasionally as a new statutory service where the problem turns out to be a kind of work rather than a place or a thing. The Economic and Statistical Service began as the planning detachments of the Commons Economic Preparation commission. The bodies that formed a detachment may also close it once it has outlived its usefulness.