War in Ukraine upends our world again. The iron curtain slams down after the body blows of Brexit and Covid, amid Cop26 climate warnings. With Vladimir Putin’s invasion shaking Nato into life, refilling the war chest will reverse the peace dividend. Rocketing prices for gas, wheat and metals presage prolonged economic pain, as ever, unjustly shared.
These thunderbolts strike when Britain lacks resilience on almost every front. Last week Martin Rees, the astronomer royal and an ex-president of the Royal Society, gave a Cassandra warning in the Financial Times on our vulnerabilities. “The current system dooms Britain to remain perpetually unprepared” against “existential risks” from “the atomic bomb, biological weapons, artificial intelligence and climate change”. A chaotic and short-termist national risk register gives no “proper assessment of the dynamic nature of risks such as floods, cyber-attacks and bio threats”.
His words are restrained, but the Lords risk assessment and risk planning committee, of which he is a member, tolls a funereal bell on the country’s capacity to protect itself. Why this critical lack of resilience? Up jumped Jacob Rees-Mogg last week, the improbably titled minister for Brexit opportunities and government efficiency, with a reminder of the reasons why, as he announced another 65,000 public servants were to be cut. These are the doers of mundane things protecting us from threats great and small, dangers distant or immediate. Westminster politicians can command, but if there’s no one on the end of the bell pull when it rings in the Downton public servants’ hall, nothing happens.
The curtain was pulled back when one appalled beginner revealed he was left alone in the Foreign Office with a failing computer system to cope with the tragic exodus from Kabul. Between government policies in parliament and actual delivery falls the shadow of monumental maladministration.
When the axe swung after 2010, the number of public servants dwindled to its lowest since the second world war. Then, irony of ironies, in escaping Brussels’ “red tape” and “bureaucrats”, says Jill Rutter of the Institute for Government, “Brexit became a job creation scheme for civil servants”, as every department swelled to recreate lost EU functions. Numbers leapt up again to respond to Covid, but even then they were still well below 2010 levels. Some roles, such as test-and-tracers, will be shed, but, says Rutter, ministers picking a headline-grabbing number at random, regardless of skills and necessary tasks, is as absurd as the “one-in-two-out” rule for regulations plucked out of the air 10 years ago, which Iain Duncan Smith’s task force is trying to accelerate.
Here’s the perversity: ministers slice away the skills, experience and capacity that would be needed to carry out their own wishes. Let’s ignore how misguided their policies may be, and just look at their incapacity. Hardly a week passes without some breathtaking example tumbling out of the National Audit Office, the public accounts committee or select committees scrutinising Whitehall departments.
Last week, for example, the public accounts committee revealed official estimates that the state is unlikely to recoup up to £21bn of Covid business loans in “an unacceptable level of mistakes, waste, loss and openings for fraudsters”. That sum is so enormous it’s beyond counting in the usual currency of nurses, teachers or police officers, but think what damage it could repair. Cuts to due diligence on monitoring contracts is the worst possible value for money, as Rutter warns that reports of unchecked fraud undermine trust in HMRC, when the whole tax edifice relies on people’s willing compliance.
Take a deep breath here and let’s dash haphazardly through just the latest revelations. The law’n’order party has brought justice to a near halt through a lack of prosecutors, defending barristers and judges, with the backlog so long, cases are now listed for 2024. Last week’s official report showed rape cases in England and Wales take two years to get to court. Undertrained, understaffed and ill-equipped police fail to cope with a fraud epidemic, up by 43% in two years, causing the resignation of government minister Lord Agnew.
Some blunders are small but telling: last week the £1.3bn Kickstart scheme was revealed as “chaotically” failing to get a promised 100,000 young unemployed people into work or checking what employers had done with their £1,500 grants.
The Home Office asylum-seeker backlog has seen decision delays of more than a year rise ninefold in the past decade.
The 6 million-long NHS waiting list was already rising pre-Covid, due to cuts in doctor and nurse training and in beds, but now the length of time people are waiting for is also increasing: in 2010, there were virtually no people waiting for more than a year, now the figure in England stands at roughly 300,000.
Delays at the DVLA for driving licences and HGV driving tests long predate Covid. Add here the parlous state of the Environment Agency to cope with sewage outflows and floods, Natural England stripped bare, and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs nowhere near defining its replacements for EU farm subsidies. A backlog of checks on restaurant hygiene and factory safety grows, the Institute for Government tells me, while children at risk are not referred to social services and education harm mounts due to catch-up failures in English and maths.
These are just snapshots of public services no longer there for the dull basics.
Look at this blustering government’s big talk and ponder how a broken-down machine can produce net-zero targets, “levelling up” and Brexit “opportunities”, let alone a whole new defence tilt. Here’s an exhibition performance in bad government decisions matched by failed administration – and it’s about to get worse. As Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Rishi Sunak’s ill-timed Mais lecture promised tax cuts. Maybe ideological small-staters of the Rees-Mogg and Sunak stamp don’t much mind if the despised state fails to function, but voters do.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
