At Globe House, the London Passport Office, I want to see where rightwing anarchy leads. The queues outside are a publicly visible sign of the dilapidated state, people indignantly eager to tell stories that seem to signal the collapse of public services, things once solid crumbling away.
The first person I meet is a father from Chichester with his small son, on a last try for the boy’s passport for a family holiday to Greece that was booked three years ago. “It’s lost if we don’t go tomorrow.” A renewal applied for in February was “lost in the post” despite proof of postage. Then they were told a Passport Office IT “systems upgrade” in March had lost it. “Then they wanted another copy of our marriage certificate. My wife spent hours on the phone daily to get an appointment.”
Next they were told the passport was in Newport, Wales, so he headed there at 4am. But in Newport, the Passport Office said it was in Glasgow. When he reached the Glasgow office by phone, they said it wasn’t there: “A nice girl said she’d only worked there three days.” He kept calling. Finally they told him to collect it in London today. “Maybe it’ll be there, maybe it won’t,” he says, in an incredulous daze.
Even worse cases include a couple desperate to see their son, who has been taken seriously ill in Sierra Leone. They show me a photo of him unconscious in hospital covered with tubes. They have flights booked for that night, but a passport is lost in the system: they hope for compassion if they ever reach the inquiry desk.
The Home Office’s bad management is longstanding, but austerity and now ideological anti-statism have made things worse. The chaos over visas for war-stricken Ukrainians lifted the lid on a shockingly punitive culture and and a shrunken state’s incapacity.
Look elsewhere and you see government services in meltdown. Pity the drivers unable to work while waiting for licences in the DVLA logjam, or businesses in cashflow crises waiting for delayed refunds owed by HMRC: that service had its staffing levels and resources cut by 17% between 2010 and 2018, worsening the gap in uncollected taxes. Meanwhile, a 56% cut in trading standards officers from 2009 to 2016 helped cost the Treasury £2.3bn in lost tax from rogue cigarette sales in 2019-20 alone.
Most things falling apart are invisible, with no queues to be seen, just an erosion of the basics that began with the first swing of the post-2010 austerity axe, long before Covid. Barely a week goes by without revelations of decrepitude: last week the National Audit Office found regulators struggling since Brexit to take on inspections that had previously been done by the EU. The Competition and Markets Authority, the Health and Safety Executive and the Food Standards Agency can’t recruit enough staff, lacking lawyers, vets and toxicologists.
“Taking back control” requires more controllers. Instead, the government has just announced a random cull of 91,000 civil servants, a fifth of the entire service. There’s no need for “deregulation” or “bonfires of red tape” when incapacity quietly stops inspections anyway.
Remember all that Tory “elf and safety” mockery over myths such as banning conker fights? Since 2009, council health and safety inspectors have been cut by 54% and prosecutions by health and safety authorities have fallen 38%. Interventions from the Equality and Human Rights Commission have fallen by 27% and construction site inspections have dropped 18%. These are samples of enforcement from Unchecked UK, an organisation funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, the Ecology Trust and others. Their findings on cuts to environmental inspections of water, air and agriculture are hair-raising.
This week I spoke to environmental health officers around the country: one said just the day before she’d found unregistered food outlets whose owners were utterly ignorant of hygiene rules. Despite ever-increasing numbers of food purveyors, there are far too few inspectors. Huge numbers are living in private rented housing, and councils have no idea who or where their landlords are. The public accounts committee has reported 589,000 rented homes with dangerous hazards, with too few inspectors expert in complex law to process cases against rogue landlords.
Yet again a promised employment bill was missing-presumed-dead from the Queen’s speech. The average employer can expect a check by HMRC’s puny minimum wage inspection team once every 500 years. These are just a few of essential functions to be eroded once again by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s “bloodbath for the civil service”, as the Daily Mail put it gloatingly. Jill Rutter of the Institute for Government tells me there was no assessment of need before adopting this measure, just a crude cut back to the service’s size before Brexit and Covid. But by 2016 the civil service had already been cut to its smallest since the second world war.
The cuts will come through hiring freezes and voluntary redundancy, a recipe for losing the brightest and most expert civil servants. With areas such as the north-east of England most heavily reliant on public jobs, forget “levelling up”. Will new offices for the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy in Salford be allowed to hire locally?
The government will pay a political price for this. The kitsch “nanny state” and “red tape” obsession is a freakish Westminster Tory cult, not what most people want. Polling in Tory blue heartlands for Unchecked UK matches its polling in Tory “red wall” seats: most Tory voters reject any weakened environmental and health and safety protections. Most who voted to leave the EU wanted higher UK standards. Tory voters may dislike the EU, but they don’t want to get food poisoning – and they do want their new navy passports to arrive so they can visit it.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
