There is a deep irony in a government that has kept making the same sort of mistakes now lecturing its civil servants (who have to deal with the consequences) that they should adopt the “test-and-learn culture” of the best digital companies and “first-class” government projects.
Since Labour ministers arrived at their desks in July, less prepared than might be optimal, they have tested many policies with disastrous political consequences. But, like the Bourbon dynasty in France, they seem to have learned remarkably little about public persuasion. If they carry on at this rate, they’ll lose the next election as comprehensively as they won the last one.
In such circumstances, all governments have to take stock, assess performance and presentation, study public opinion – and find someone to blame.
The Tories alighted on the unions, the EU, migrants, “lefty lawyers”, and the amorphous (and mostly mythical) administrative “blob”, to explain away their failures. Now, it’s Labour turn to turn the civil service into a scapegoat for its own shortcomings.
Not only is this facile and deeply distasteful, it’s disrespectful and counterproductive. For its entire existence, but particularly ever since Boris Johnson arrived in Number 10, civil servants have had to cope with confused, chaotic ministers who either don’t know what they want or simultaneously demand mutually incompatible outcomes – culminating in the Johnsonite doctrine of “cakeism”. The worst ones just expect their staffs to tell them what to do.
Far from castigating the dedicated, brilliant, expert people who work for them as workshy saboteurs, our political classes should instead be deeply grateful to them for getting the country through the global financial crisis, domestic terrorism, Brexit, the Covid pandemic and the energy crisis in one piece. They deserve a pay rise.
If ministers of all parties get frustrated about the inability of the state to “deliver” desired outcomes, they should ask the skies a few searching questions about what they expect from a medium-sized economy with sclerotic growth. Whatever else, it’s implausible to attribute this long-term trend to the working habits of, say, the permanent secretary at Defra, or the people toiling at the DVSA, MI5 or National Savings and Investments.
To avoid offence, Pat McFadden – endearingly dour cabinet office minister, de facto deputy prime minister and unlikely revolutionary – says he wants to liberate “good people” caught in “bad systems”, adding that firms such as Spotify have “changed our lives”, and that government has “got to take the learning from what’s happening” in other sectors. This will be done by seconding tech firm workers to the civil service, for six to 12-month “tours of duty”, to work on Labour’s national “missions”.
Sounds fair enough – and he’s right to pilot his ideas with smaller projects, such as family support and temporary accommodation in certain places. The idea is to cut costs and improve the take up of services, presumably in a non-cakeist way through innovation: “Test it. Fix the problems. Change the design. Test it again. Tweak it again. And so on, and so on, for as long as you provide the service. Suddenly, the most important question isn’t: ‘How do we get this right the first time?’. It’s ‘How do we make this better by next Friday?’”
I wish McFadden and his team good luck with that, but you have to be sceptical about their chances.
Without being too pejorative, it’s not immediately obvious how having some bloke from Google turning up at the department for housing for a few weeks will add all that much to the effort, even if he can see how to apply AI to the issues – such technical capability needs to be available to the state immediately and in a permanent, integrated basis – combining technical skills and knowledge with expertise in the relevant policy area.
Then there’s the lazy, automatic assumption that the private sector and trendy tech bros always do things better, whereas the “lived experience” of those companies often suggests the opposite. Remember the complacently bloated staffing of Twitter that Elon Musk discovered when he took control of it – and then his self-destructive attempts to slim it down?
If, as suggested, government is to be more like a tech start-up,it will have to be able to raise risk capital and then burn through it at an alarming rate, as Dominic Cummings wanted to do with the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria), now up and running. We shall see how that performs.
In terms of the policy-making of the civil service, perhaps McFadden, who has useful experience of the Blair administration and a talent for ratiocination, should simply advise his fellow ministers to set clear objectives for their departments, ask for their advice and the options to achieve them, and then let them get on with the job without having some spod from Spotify turn up and interfere in some aspect of the benefits system they neither understand nor care about.
Getting the techies to “re-wire Whitehall” sounds great, and by all means give it a go. But it’s never going to be transformative in the way that hard cash is – and it’s not the fault of the civil service that there isn’t much of that around.
