Some government programmes survive in order to benefit the people employed to administer them – rather than those vulnerable people they were once intended to rescue.
"Locate a social problem; define it as a government responsibility; set up a government programme designed to solve it. Intellectual habits die as slowly as other habits. People who have thought according to this formula for many years are not easily induced to look at reality in new ways. But there is more at stake here than sluggish mind-sets. Very large and powerful vested interests have grown up around every policy of the welfare state.”
- Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus, 1977.
A famous ‘Yes, Minister’ comedy sketch featured civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby showing his hapless minister, Jim Hacker, around a hospital. It was a model hospital Sir Humphrey insisted, and was meeting all of the targets that had been set by the civil service. The only problem was that the hospital was missing just one thing – patients.
Other real-life examples are less amusing and more worrying. A public sector employment officer told a successful voluntary project – working with hard-to-employ young people – that they were too effective and threatened his job.
Both of these stories (one fictional and one all too true) confirm Franz Kafka’s observation that “every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy”.
There is nothing slimy about Whitehall’s individual civil servants, of course. They are not faceless caricatures in bowler hats but are usually decent men and women with their own families to feed. But, sadly, they are not the most productive of workers.
The unproductive civil service bureaucracy
They are relatively unproductive because of their resistance to change. Milton Friedman’s tyranny of the status quo has taught us that a market economy will bankrupt businesses that are resistant to change but bureaucracies do not face the same competitive pressures. They survive because politicians often protect ineffective projects that embody ‘good intentions liberalism’.
They also survive because of powerful vested interests. In the 1970s some of the most powerful unions within the UK were found within the industrial sector – stopping corporations like British Leyland and Ford from making the changes necessary for the modern world. Today’s most powerful unions are found in the public sector. Teachers’ unions are most aggressive in opposing progressive conservative reforms like school choice and police officer unions fiercely protect their members’ outdated practices.
The taxpayer is left footing the bill for bloated government. A top slice of every £1 taken by the tax system is consumed by the churning bureaucrats who administer Britain’s complicated and centralised form of government. Some benefit payments are so complex that the cost of administering them is greater than that received by the intended beneficiary. Another feature of the civil service bureaucracy is its politically-driven fear of risk. Its attempts to ensure that voluntary groups in receipt of public funds don’t waste money may be more costly than any waste was ever likely to be.
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