Patrick Barbour: Better government

Patrick Barbour was chairman of two public companies, Barbour Index plc and Microgen plc, and has authored a new paper for the TaxPayers’ Alliance campaign on Better Government, available here.

“John Reid’s Brain is Missing” screamed the front-page headline of last Thursday’s Sun, together with a photo of an appropriately confused-looking and lobotomised Home Secretary.  According to the paper, there were “fears for his sanity” after his failure to get to grips with the crisis engulfing the prison service.

Reid deserves serious criticism for his performance, but the personal nature of the media’s attacks risks obscuring the bigger picture.  The successive Home Office debacles over the past year are much more a reflection of the dysfunctional system of government in Britain than of the short-term performance of the latest Home Secretary.  John Reid’s biggest mistake was accepting the job in the first place.  When the prison and probation services are close to full-scale breakdown and we face the prospect of prisoners being released early en masse, the person responsible for sorting out the mess was for many years a Labour Party apparatchik and has just a few short months’ knowledge of the criminal justice system and little real management experience.  Also, he will probably only be in this job for a couple of years at most, having had no less than eight jobs in ten years. 

A similar pattern of inexperience exists elsewhere.  We have a former press officer, Patricia Hewitt, running the National Health Service – the world’s third largest employer.  We have a former postman, Alan Johnson, managing the affairs of every school in the country.  We have a former solicitor, Des Browne, deciding on military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

This is not meant as a personal attack on these Ministers, each of them I am sure have their own skills.  But imagine if a major company like Tesco behaved in a similar fashion: in a time of crisis, replacing chief executive Terry Leahy with someone who had no experience of managing supermarkets (or anything complex, in fact) but who was nevertheless a very competent graphic designer.  It is, of course, a ridiculous scenario that could never happen.  But this is effectively how we choose to run the Government of the fifth largest economy in the world.

With this bizarre and archaic system, it is hardly surprising that British government malfunctions across the board, and has done so for decades.  Our education system is a shambles and there is no doubt it is already leaving us less able to compete with rising powers in Asia.  One in four children leave primary school without sufficient reading ability to tackle the secondary school curriculum and almost 60 per cent of 16-year-olds do not achieve a GCSE grade C or better in the three core subjects of English, Maths and Science.  The British Medical Journal has ranked the NHS second from bottom among 19 developed countries on quality of care.  Our criminal justice system has basically failed. 

As usual, the poorest in society suffer the most.  Only a quarter of pupils eligible for free school meals achieve five GCSEs at Grade A*-C; there is a huge gulf between the rich and poor in healthcare outcomes; the British Crime Survey shows the risk of almost every category of crime is significantly higher the poorer the population.  The risk of burglary is 63 per cent higher than the national average for those earning less than £5,000 a year.

Politicians assure us that they will sort things out in the end but after years of persistent failure – under governments of both main parties – people understandably no longer believe them.  Public disillusionment is widespread and growing fast.  The TaxPayers’ Alliance has just taken a snapshot of this disillusionment with a new ICM poll.  60 per cent agreed with the statement that “Politicians have almost no experience of managing the vital things they’re in charge of, they aren’t in touch or competent, so whichever party wins nothing will improve.”  No wonder 4 out of 10 didn’t bother to vote at the last election. Extraordinarily, nearly 70 per cent of people now think more than a fifth of what government spends is wasted.  People have simply lost hope that things will get better – a very serious situation for the health of our democracy.

We cannot seriously address this disillusionment until we end our 19th Century system of government which fails, and replace it with a new structure that can actually enable meaningful change.  The first step is attitudinal: politicians must acknowledge reality and admit that when government monopolises as much as it does, they simply have impossible jobs.  They try to run organisations like the NHS that are so complex they would be beyond the world’s best business minds.  And it is politicians’ persistent failure which goes to show that civil society knows better how to run hospitals, schools, welfare, and large areas of the criminal justice system.  Politicians should only be responsible for those things that civil society cannot run, like foreign and defence policy.    

The next big step is that politicians should not involve themselves in management.  MPs are typically former press officers, parliamentary researchers, local councillors or lawyers.  Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, has never had a job outside of politics.  MPs are not usually professional managers and so, like in the United States, the Prime Minister should be able to appoint competent outsiders to run scaled-down departments in a smaller, better government.  These managers should be left with the time and space to run things as they see fit – as in the private sector.  In other words, politicians should not be involved in management and management should not be involved in politics.   

No doubt many will highlight the electoral difficulty of selling such a reform programme. But the same TaxPayers’ Alliance poll shows that while there is disillusionment with the political process and a feeling that “nothing changes”, there is also enthusiasm for the prospect of radical reform.  There is widespread support for wholesale change to the way the NHS and schools are funded and managed, and for real police reform with direct accountability at local level.  It also shows that people understand that it is perfectly possible to have lower taxes and better public services. This is increasingly a mental stumbling block for politicians, not the public.

If we want to avoid Britain declining to the status of a third-rate power, we need to bring our Victorian system of government into the 21st Century.

Comments

[HF]

I agree providing:-

1. These ministers have the right and obligation to be held to account in the HoC

2. The appointments are approved in the same way they are in USA.

Losing the patronage of govt positions for MPs will weaken a PMs control of their party.

[Bill Melotti]

A very sensible proposal. I've always wondered why it is new Governments don't appoint new people in the top jobs. I understood Labour changed the law to allow political appointments in the civil service, so maybe the mechanism is already there. They waste it on PR and spin people however.

Pity the article doesn't go into a deeper analysis of why the civil service fails to deliver results and change. David Blunkeet started to go into in his book, but only very superficially.

Also how many captains of industry would would to downgrade into a job that doesn't pay that much, doesn't carry a great deal of prestige these day and would doubtlessly create intrusions into their private life?

[Angelo Basu]

From an operational perspective, aren't departments and agencies like the NHS run by officials rather than Ministers already? Some of these are or could already be from the private sector.

The proposal could work if this was made more transparent and that there was a statutory framework which established the heads of the relevant service delivery branches of the State and subjected them to a suitable degree of public scrutiny. I don't think that being grilled by a Parliamentary Committee would do- public engagement in the activities of the Committees is not anything like as strong as the US Congressional and Senatorial hearings which make the news even over here.

The worry is that rather than being seen as a positive, the appointment of these experienced people would be seen as creating a new tier of beneficiaries of Ministerial patronage. Another load of public sector fat cats?

There may be some high profile health and education professionals out there who would be accepted by the public as being the best placed to do the job, but ultimately I don't think that the public would be terribly well-placed to decide who could do such specific jobs best. Perhaps there should be elections for each specific post?

Ultimately the distinction between policy and operations is a difficult one (as Michael Howard found to his cost during the prison crisis while Home Secretary). The more autonomy and responsibility you give to the officer running a service the less control over policy remains with Ministers. Perhaps Ministers don't know enough about their departments, but that's something they have in common with the electorate! People are, despite the poll results, likely to be too sceptical to accept the technocracy that is being proposed here.

Political parties need to make compromises and trade-offs between differing policy aims and to prioritise different sectors against one another. Technocratic leaders of individual departments won't have that collective sense so the reality will be that government and administration would be set to a war which no-one would win and which would lead to reduced confidence in both.

In the early days of New Labour, they actually tried to put some of their technical specialists in charge of their areas of specialism. However, in the end, they realised that giving Frank Field the chance to think the unthinkable about social security reform meant that he would in fact do just that and come into conflict with the wider aims of the Government. Lord Sainsbury did not noticeably improve economic competitiveness with his role at Trade and Industry. Robin Cook was ultimately not able to put in place the ethical foreign policy he wanted. Clare Short ended up being an embarrassment to the government (and indeed to herself because she tried to square the circle between her beliefs and what the government was really trying to do). Estelle Morris realised that being a specialist in education was not actually a great deal of help in dealing with the politics of education.

Perhaps we might say, ah, but that just shows the failings of those people and the control-freakery of the Millbank machine for New Labour. But I'm not so sure.

The idea appeals as it is a step towards smaller government, but I doubt that we can be so brave as to let go of the political control levers.

[David Sergeant]

This issue seems to have come forward during NewLabs term of office. The problem of democracy is that elected representatives are ultimatly responsible to electors and the "professional" experts, both national and local, are not held electorarily responsible, worse, their main agenda is the expansion of their profession or department. Things like efficiency are low down the menu, apart from anything else it is almost imposible to define efficiency in governmental organisations and, since efficiency usually makes waves, it is usually not encouraged.

Electors see politics and government through the prism of the media and the media want "eye catching initiatives" and "punch and judy" politics to attract the attention of readers/viewers. Good government doesn't sell newspapers.

The advantage of the U.S. system is that it allows non-politicians to become Ministers but maintains a level of accountability to elected representatives. I think we are going to have to change the system where only elected representaytives can be put in charge of the enourmous government organisations.