I have no great love for the Department of Trade and Industry.

When the flak is flying over major issues of the moment, like the various Rover crises, the Department and successive Secretaries of State have tended to be less than frank.

Yet at many more mundane levels I have always thought it does a pretty decent job. And industry in this country desperately needs a confident Department prepared to fight for the sector and its future.

But does it actually do that?

It never seems to have the clout factor that the likes of education or health can wield, and almost seems to be treated with disdain by the Treasury.

Ministers appear to view it as merely a staging post to greater things, they rarely have any intrinsic interest in industry and commerce, and so there is a certain lack of leadership. And because its inadequacies are for all to see there has been this campaign among the national newspapers to break up the DTi.

Yet for all its faults I think that is the last thing we should be doing. The trouble is the rumours suggest that Gordon Brown, if he becomes Prime Minister, is bent on doing just that.

Curiously, the Department came out of a recent Whitehall review with a sort of seven out of ten rating, which I would suggest means it must be doing something right.

I didn’t see the report, but it apparently gave the Department relatively good scores for delivering in core policy areas.

Despite big job losses – staff numbers down from 4,200 in 2004 to 3,200 in April and another 300 posts on the way out.

The question now is whether the aim of helping business could be "better served through changes to the machinery of government or through structural changes" – in other words a complete break up or reform of the DTi itself.

Change – I have never bought this mantra that the only certainty in life is change. I have always believed continuity is at least important and where you do make changes you make them in a gradual and creeping way rather than big slashes with the knife.

Sadly today you invariably get some egotist at the top who has to display his management testosterone and the respective company or organisation is trashed from top to bottom with baby thrown out with the bath water.

Look at the state of the Business Link empire.

It has been reorganised from top to bottom every five years and as a result has never succeeded. Now it is in the hands of the regional development agencies, is in the Midlands getting another revamp, and we will see if it makes a blind bit of difference.

I suspect it won’t.

By all means make the DTi more effective, I say, and I think industry is desperate for such an outcome too. But let’s not tear it down and start again.

Better the devil we know.