Under the Review of Public Administration, the NIO is already planning to cut the number of district councils from 26 to seven and to introduce single authorities for education and health, in place of the present boards. The objective is to provide more uniform, economic public services, with savings in staff and administration, but there is a natural desire for all such decisions - including reductions in government departments - to be taken at local rather than national level, by politicians with a local mandate.

The proposals -- leaked exclusively to the Belfast Telegraph -- come at a sensitive time, when the DUP and Sinn Fein are locked in a dispute over policing and power-sharing, which must be resolved by the end of this month. They now know that the only hope of stopping the Government in its tracks, and getting some democratic input into the future administration of Northern Ireland, is to reach a deal that both parties can support. Otherwise - and the Government may have wanted to raise public concern - matters will be taken out of their hands.

While people should be worried about government edicts that affect their everyday life, they will hardly object to the reduction of costly bureaucracy in departments that are surplus to requirements. Everyone knows that the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 meant that new departments had to be invented, so that all four parties in the executive had a share of power, and the sooner they are trimmed - devolution or not - the better.

The new proposals are a return to a simpler past, although there must be doubts about a giant Sustainable Development and Energy Department, incorporating Agriculture, Environment and Regional Development, plus elements from two other departments. Civil service heads and the unions will have a lot to say, for and against, but they will know that the days of ever-expanding empires, run in ways that are constantly being criticised by the audit office, are over. Even the quangos are to be culled, down from 81 to 54.

Having run an eye across our over-governed province, Peter Hain is preparing the ground for more streamlined, up-to-date administrative arrangements, whether or not devolution returns. The detail could - and should - be worked on by local politicians, in a new executive, but change is unavoidable, and overdue.