Is everything the politicians’ fault?
I am very concerned about the state of our public life. At a senior level we see incompetence, failure and complacency. I don’t just mean politicians. They are (perhaps unfairly) traditionally corrupt and incompetent. I mean the civil servants, those working in local government and other public bodies, managers in health and education, various apparatchiks and hangers on and assorted quangistas. They live in a different world from the rest of us enjoying secure, well paid, lavishly pensioned jobs, a world where there is minimal public scrutiny and no penalty for failure.
Again and again, we have seen failure leading to damaging outcomes. It is possible to forgive hard pressed social workers who have failed to spot child abuse or overworked medical staff in hospitals which have been blamed for appalling maternity care. But no one in authority suffers the consequences. How often have we heard “we are sorry for the failures, and we have revised our systems and procedures so these things cannot happen again going forward”. And compensation may be paid to those that have suffered, after enquiries lasting years, whose terms of reference do not usually include the apportionment of blame to individuals. Just consider the case of the head of the Foreign Office who resolutely stayed on holiday as a diplomatic and humanitarian crisis swept through Kabul. He should be made to watch Carry On Up The Khyber, when Sir Percy and Lady Alicia Ruff-Diamond carried on with their dinner party as shells crashed through the roof.
It’s not their fault; it’s always the system or lack of resources. And, if anyone is named, they move seamlessly to another well-paid job in public service, after being paid a handsome sum in compensation for being fired for incompetence. Ranks close. The apparat looks after its own.
Not the policy – the implementation
How can we easily forgive civil servants in national and local government for expensive policy failures that have not delivered the intended outcomes and cost us all billions in wasted taxes. Time and time again ambitious projects become black holes that suck in ever growing amounts of money. Let us not talk about HS2.
A simple example was an IT system for department of Transport ended up costing £81 million, twice budget, due to management ineptitude described by the Commons Public Accounts Committee as an exhibition of “stupendous incompetence“. That was small change compared with the NHS patient record system that would have been the world’s largest non-military IT system which was abandoned in what might have been the most catastrophic IT failure ever organised by the government. The failed centralised e-record system cost the taxpayer over £10 billion, £3.6 billion more than ministers had anticipated.
This record was easily beaten by ‘test and trace’. Not a bad idea in principle, but shambolically executed at a cost of £37 billion on which the Commons Public Accounts Committee concluded that despite the “unimaginable resources” lavished on the project, it appeared to have made little “measurable difference” to the pandemic’s progress. Germany spent less than €1 billion.
From bad design to disaster
The life cycle of such a project goes something like this ambitious project, outsourcing, bloat, disaster, crash, spend, spend, spend. There appear to be two problems.
One is lack of continuity at a political level at the Government Digital Service. This job is kind of boring and not very high profile (luckily given the trail of disasters that the ministers in charge have overseen). Matt Hancock held the post for 14 months, but none of the six ministers that followed made it to their first anniversary in the job. The latest victim in this graveyard of political ambition is Jeremy Quin whose degree in history from Oxford should fit him ideally for the job of overseeing billions spent on complex IT projects.
The second is outsourcing, since the civil service apparently lacks the technical skill and competence to manage complex, technologically driven projects, given that its most senior ranks are filled with graduates of Oxbridge with degrees in Classics, History, Greats and PPE. This opens the doors to the firms that surround Whitehall, waiting with jaws wide open to be fed the rich feast of outsourced work. Anyone who has worked for such firms will tell you that extracting large and escalating sums from government departments is a no brainer.
Was Partygate a surprise?
Back to Partygate. Is it therefore surprising that the group that consisted of the kind of people who have exhibited such incompetence in designing and managing complex projects, failure in bringing them to a successful conclusion and complacency when confronted with their failure at an enormous cost to taxpayers were apparently quite prepared to carouse, ignoring the fact that those who paid their wages were suffering one of the most restrictive set of rules of behaviour in recent history?
Partygate exemplifies their sense of immunity, insulated from life’s exigencies that govern the rest of us. We saw senior civil servants behaving like irresponsible teenagers, giggling when they thought they might be breaking the rules by having a midnight feast in the dorm.
Time for reform?
The civil service has been the subject of at least two significant reports that recognised the need for change. The 1854 report suggested:
- entry by competitive examination (rather than patronage)
- securing the greatest and most varied amount of talent from the labour force
- standardised regulation of entry standards
- promotion by merit (rather than by seniority)
- the trustworthiness of the entire body
The Fulton report, in 1968, assumed that most of the 1854 recommendations would have resulted in a civil service that was at least educated, honest and trustworthy but pointed out just some of the defects then apparent.
- too much based on generalist all-round
- specialists undervalued
- too few skilled managers (policy advice rated more highly than management)
- not enough contact with the community it served
- too little attention to personnel management and career management
Many of the Fulton recommendations seem not to have been taken seriously and this lies behind recent project failures. Isn’t it time for a new Fulton?
PS. I have nothing against civil servants personally. I have a number of friends who are or were. They are perfectly nice, intelligent and honest people but whose qualifications do not fit them well for the increasingly complex technical and managerial tasks that confront them.
All about investment funds 