David Willetts is a member of the House of Lords
The Sunday Times had an interesting and important column from Kemi Badenoch on the business of Government. It drew on her own experience of trying to get prompt payment of compensation for the sub-postmasters. But it reflects the experience of many ministers, from different parties, all frustrated at how hard it is just to get things done.
She focusses particularly on the legal constraints. And yes, just about every ministerial decision now could be challenged in the courts. That does not mean the challenge will necessarily be successful. Even if a challenge succeeds that should not be treated as a political failure.
I remember David Cameron making it clear to Cabinet that we would often be advised that there was a risk of legal challenge to a decision but that should not of itself deter us and if a decision were successfully challenged that was not a political black mark. He did not want us inhibited from getting on with stuff by cautious advice assuming that legal challenge was of itself bad. The tone of Kemi’s article left me wondering if Rishi ever said that to his Cabinet.
These legal challenges are exacerbated by broadly drafted meta-laws such as the equality duty.
Neither Magna Carta nor the Bill of Rights, the two great bastions of our freedoms, set out grand statements of general rights but focus instead on specific rights of due process from habeas corpus to parliamentary consent for taxation. It is legitimate for Kemi to ask if we’ve got the balance right, though Government cannot be above the law.
There are deeper forces at work as well.
Mancur Olson argued that mature modern democracies gradually slow down as our diverse civil society enables different interest groups to become increasingly organised and use all the powers available to pursue their own interests. He was writing in the 1970s and then it took Margaret Thatcher to batter down the interest groups. Maybe that is what we need again. Is Sir Keir, with his own legal background, the man to do it as he realises how many barriers he faces to get growth going?
Kemi is right to focus on how Government can be made more effective. ConservativeHome’s Henry Hill warned yesterday that “elections aren’t won on process.” However, that may underestimate the general dissatisfaction with how Government and public services work. If Labour lose the next election it will be because they have found it hard to deliver their promises and in such an environment electors will be asking if any group of politicians can be trusted to do that.
There are some good practical measures which could be taken by either Party to get Whitehall working better.
Too much money is spent on outside consultants. That is because civil servants are no longer expected to shape a career by building up real subject expertise in a home department. Instead, they move on and move up by applying for jobs in completely different areas in different departments. Their expertise is now supposed to be generic i.e. about process such as handling Freedom of Information requests or Parliamentary scrutiny. That means that instead consultants take over when civil servants should have deep domain expertise which ministers can then draw on.
Secondly there is an awful lot of scrutiny of each other within the public sector. I myself worked on the first attempt at creating internal market in the NHS back in the 1980s. Those quasi-markets inside public services can create enormous waste of effort “ playing at shops”. It is a low trust environment with an enormous amount of time going to checking up on each other.
Thirdly if ministers and officials do take a risk but it goes wrong the minister may well have moved on leaving behind the department having to pick up the pieces. If civil servants get the blame they resolve to be even more risk averse in future. Senior ministers signalling that a decision was a risk worth taking not a shameful failure to eliminate risk would change the atmosphere dramatically.
This gets to the heart of what Government does.
Often it is taking on risks which are too great for individuals or perhaps even companies to bear. The welfare state is a big risk pooling mutual insurance scheme. Government supports innovative new technologies in America by taking on more of the risk before are ready for the commercial market through for example advance procurement for defence and security. Taking risk – knowingly and deliberately – is one of the ways Government protects people and promotes enterprise.
We should not penalise it or make it harder.
