Localism – the way to save Whitehall

February 24, 2010 by
Filed under: Politics, Public policy 

With OFSTED reporting that progress in primary schools has been hampered by too many central initiatives, and the the inquiry into events at Stafford Hospital in part blaming the ‘target culture’ of the NHS, today is going to be another bad day for centralism.

As I said last week, there is a debate going on at the heart of government over how far Gordon Brown should go before the election in showing real determination to decentralise. For a long time now I have been encouraging politicians to adapt one of Bill Clinton’s most famous phrases and assert that ‘the era of big central government is over’.

But I sense that the localists in Government are still having a hard time, especially in the face of the unwillingness of large service departments such as DCSF or DWP to give up any of their levers of control. If Labour doesn’t move on this, an  incoming Conservative Government probably would, offering local councils a non-negotiable deal: ‘you won’t get any more money for several years but you can have much more control over how you spend it, and by the way, the buck stops with you’.

But even after news like today’s, the way this argument is structured in Government makes the localist case difficult to sustain. It is up to the localists to ‘prove’ that devolving power would improve outcomes. But given its complexity and the confounding variables this is an impossible case to make.

Instead every presentation on this issue to ministers and officials should start with a slide headed ‘myths of centralism’, containing the following bullet points:

1. Centralism does not lead to uniform performance levels or outcomes

2. Every new central initiative/target reduces the salience of existing initiatives and targets

3. The messages sent by the centre (especially if there are lots of them) are very different to the messages eventually heard at the front line

4 There are systematic reasons why opt-in pilots are more likely to succeed than the same policy when it is made a mandatory national programme

There is a big opportunity here for new ways of thinking, but my recent discussions with insiders leave me with little confidence it will be grasped.

For many years now the Cabinet Office has been conducting capability reviews of Government departments. All well and good. But the question not asked is whether the capabilities these reviews are looking for – the ones currently expected of Whitehall departments – are those that will be needed in the future.

A radical devolution of power (and, of course, there need to be safeguards about how this is done and how the centre deals with demonstrable local failure) could be accompanied by an equally radical recasting of the way that Whitehall plies its trade.

Instead of a machine driven by the desire to maximise control, to compete with other departments for money, power and legislative time, and by silo accountability, a modern on-line Whitehall needs to be a place where people get what they want through thought leadership, trust, persuasion, innovation and collaboration.

Most local authorities and other public agencies have no desire for the centre simply to abandon them. But they want supportive and clever leadership rather than mechanical and oppressive interference. If Whitehall doesn’t learn these skills, then, when the inevitable shift of power away from the centre comes, it will not only lose an empire but find itself without the skills to perform a new role.

So, far from devolution being a threat to Whitehall, it can be the opportunity for it to become the kind of centre it needs to be in the 21st century. Most people who think hard about the medium and long term future of Government get this. Sadly, the combined nervousness of Number Ten, intransigence of service departments and limited vision at the top of the senior civil service suggest it may have to be a different administration that makes the shift.

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8 Comments on Localism – the way to save Whitehall

  1. Tina Louise on Wed, 24th Feb 2010 1:17 pm

    2. Excellent read on a subject I envisage but sometimes struggle to visualise – you helped, thank you.

    You described it best for me with…
    “Instead of a machine driven by the desire to accrete control, to compete with other departments and by silo accountability, a modern on-line Whitehall needs to be a place where people get what they want through thought leadership, trust, persuasion, innovation and collaboration.”

    I wonder too at the whole business of electing parties. Am I naive in thinking that [hiring] experienced [managers] for departments of health, education, social care etc would be a more effective system?

    Is there some way we could be rid of parties and elections and instead have a government that is actually a management team hired by us, for us and accountable to us?

  2. Fake Fan Base on Wed, 24th Feb 2010 1:29 pm

    3. We also need to point to the fact that: The region is not local.

    A real step from the present regime of control freakery. I wonder about the inculcation of ‘top down’ styles and views across key organisations but also outside government like the Audit Commission.

    We could be in for exciting and creative times. Everything points to a setting to create empowered communities but there are so many variables. The debate expands and contracts in relation to who tells it. Do we still need the concept ot UK PLC or would this only serve to be the province for our cabinet/head office?

  3. Laura Bunt on Wed, 24th Feb 2010 1:33 pm

    4. Really interesting post Matthew –

    Very important point that getting to more localism demands a very different role for central government; it’s not just about scaling back and expecting local agencies/communities to step up. I think there’s an important distinction to be made between seeing localism as a means to delivering better national programmes and as a way for more national objectives to be met on the ground.

    We published a report yesterday – Mass Localism – that tries do bust some of the very myths of centralism you’ve set out [http://www.nesta.org.uk/publications/reports/assets/features/mass_localism]. Would love to hear what you think.

  4. Michael on Thu, 25th Feb 2010 9:07 am

    5. The big talk about localism from the two main parties does not seem to be about local authorities and large agencies (notably health – where there has long been a “democratic deficit” – I think that is a term I have heard applied).

    Instead, this brand of localism is pitched at a more micro level. offering schools, sure start centres (that one from the Tories) greater independence from local authority and national control. The suspicion is that this freedom will be within narrow constraints, that it won’t offer very much freedom at all, and once again, the role of locally elected politicians will appear more marginal than ever.

    Does any of this matter?

  5. karl on Thu, 25th Feb 2010 9:26 am

    6. This should be read by everyone who is currently thinking that meaningful devolution is just aorund the corner. The bits about layering of inititatives and targets is very useful to consider. If innoovation is a new way of doing things that is better, than why not stop doing the old thing? This probably does not happen enough and relates to the location of accountability that you refer to in a possible new deal with the centre.
    Perhaps the clue is in your title, as there are probably plenty of people in Whitehall who are veryt concerned about saving it, but not in he way you outline.
    It is not difficult to imagine the Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey conversation on this topic, which ends with Jim agreeing to setting up a new Whitehall department to look at devolution.
    In the Stafford Hosptial case shouldn’t the local authority be able to hold a public enquiry???

  6. Maurizio on Thu, 25th Feb 2010 9:31 am

    7. This is very healthy and much needed debate but the implementation of localities is obviously going to be challenging as there are too many vested interests. Two considerations from my point of view. The first is that regions have to be identifiable by the people who live in them, for example, I doubt anyone can identify himself as part of a spurious “South East” or “South Central” region; much better to use counties (just as a possible alternative for the purpose of this discussion). In short, localities need be large enough to be managed to achieve adequate economies of scales, as well as being small enough for people to be able to identify (and hopefully contribute too) with them. The second is that for far too long most national governments have mistaken strategies with tactics. It is when government meddle with the delivery at microlevel that wastages and inefficiencies creep up and even take over, alienating people from the processes and therefore creating a vicious circle of self-perpetuating failure. The new locality approach however requires a shift in political paradigm. Are are any of the parties fighting the next election ready for this?

    PS) and less jargon like “customers” and Plc please… people just want an efficient delivery of services within a good framework of national and international strategies and are fed up of pseudo-marketing spin

  7. David Wilcox on Thu, 25th Feb 2010 3:45 pm

    8. NESTA ran a good event on this the other day, blogged here.
    Or the tweet version “Localism will mean failures – but don’t underestimate risk of status quo. Nick Hurd shadow minister at NESTA Mass Localism”

  8. Julian Dobson on Sun, 28th Feb 2010 11:28 pm

    9. The sticking point always seems to be accountability. Whitehall won’t trust local authorities not to behave like Lambeth and Liverpool in the 1980s. And local authorities won’t trust ‘the community’, whatever they perceive it to be.

    The result is that accountability is enforced through endless paper chains and audit trails that only value what can be measured, ideally in triplicate.

    Trust isn’t only an alien concept in Whitehall – it’s rare in local government too. So building it will take time and will require different safeguards to encourage the officials to take more risks. At the moment there’s a bit of an all-or-nothing tone to the localist debate, which isn’t helped by the political debate being polarised into localist or statist caricatures.

    Perhaps we should resurrect David Miliband’s idea of ‘double devolution’ – implemented through a series of agreed steps by which power is transferred from central to local to neighbourhood, with each successive step being built into the timetable unless a review finds an overwhelming reason not to proceed.

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