Localism – the way to save Whitehall

February 24, 2010 by · 8 Comments
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.

Share

Tags: ,

A truly radical approach to civil service reform

January 29, 2009 by · 8 Comments
Filed under: Politics 

I spent an hour or so yesterday at the think tank Reform discussing a draft paper on civil service reform. The paper is a perfectly decent canter over the usual terrain. The argument is that the civil service is not fit for purpose, something that has been exposed by various policy and commissioning disasters but also by the dissatisfaction of ministers I and the many flaws exposed by the Cabinet Office capability reviews.

The argument is that incremental change has not worked. From this, reports tend to move to a set of options which focus on the interface between ministers and senior civil servants.

This is fine as far as it goes, and I certainly agree that the biggest challenges for the service lie in the relationship between the politicians and the officials.  My problem with the approach is that it takes as given the demands made on departments by ministers.

If we were looking at the performance of any other large organisation it would be appropriate to ask whether it is sensible to expect the organisation to be able to do well all the things asked of it. This is why the outcome of many reviews of private and third sector organisations is that they should hive off functions or try to do less better. But this isn’t simply a matter of the civil service devolving more to localities or setting up more arm’s length agencies.

For departments to function effectively there needs to be a better way of managing and regulating the demands made on them. The question should not simply be ‘has the department delivered what it was supposed to’ but also ‘was it ever reasonable to expect the department to deliver what was asked of it?’

As well as questioning the process by which departmental workloads are determined, and redefined, by politicians – often without notice or any assessment of capacity or effect on existing work programmes -  we also need to recognise that the ‘civil’ duties of the civil service are not merely about responding to the demands poured into them from their ministerial masters. The question needs to be how departments manage inputs, not just top down, but also from the wider policy community and society itself. 

The idea that Whitehall can often be out of touch with ‘the front line’ of policy delivery is hardly new. It is most often addressed through the collection of detailed data. But departmental decision makers need to have the scope to gain deeper insights into the experiences of the people delivering its policies and on their receiving end. And senior officials also have a vital ‘civil’ role in managing the policy community, not simply responding to lobbying from vested interests or receiving the ideas of academics and think tanks but working with the community so that it engages constructively and creatively with the Government’s objectives.

A truly radical approach to civil service reform would recognise that the civil and democratic responsibilities of senior public officials lie not simply in the service of their political masters but in being accountable and connected to policy communities and wider society. From this starting point, any fundamental inquiry into how the civil service can possibly work better for us all must include questioning the fitness for purpose of the cultures, methods and demands of the political system of Government.

Share

Tags: , ,