The Blunders of Our Governments

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To understand why blunders happen it is helpful to distinguish between structural and behavioural causes. Structural causes are rooted in poorly designed policy-making and delivery structures that are liable to produce or allow mistakes, irrespective of the quality and behaviour of the politicians and officials involved. The remedy lies in the reform of the UK’s policy-making system. A fault more often attributed to civil servants is ‘operational disconnect’ or the ‘implementation problem’ – policymakers with little or no conception of how front-line services and policies in action actually work (or don’t). (This was a principle concern of the recent Civil Service Reform plan). And finally, there are the cases where ‘panic, symbols and spin’ become the actual purpose and driving force of policy – the classic ‘something must be done’ reaction that often leads to bad policy decisions. Behavioural causes lie in the inadequate skills or delinquent behaviour of ministers and officials operating in a sound policy-making system. The remedies include better training, more appropriate experience, increased self- and group- awareness and more compelling incentives and sanctions for performance. Structural causes: (1) the deficit of deliberation the collective inertia produced by the bureaucrat's view of his job. At State, the average "desk officer" inherits from his predecessor our policy toward Country X; he regards it as his function to keep that policy intact —under glass, untampered with, and dusted—so that he may pass it on in two to four years to his successor. And such curatorial service generally merits promotion within the system. (Maintain the status quo, and you will stay out of trouble.) In some circumstances, the inertia bred by such an outlook can act as a brake against rash innovation. But on many issues, this inertia sustains the momentum of bad policy and unwise commitments—momentum that might otherwise have been resisted within the ranks." This note lists the policy and delivery failures that suggest the need to reconsider the current relationship between Parliament, Ministers and civil servants.

The Blunders of our Governments, Anthony King and Ivor Crewe. Oneworld Publications, September 2013. The book ends at 2010 but has a Postscript about the performance of the present Government. This is the weakest part because, as the authors admit, it is far too soon to make such judgments. They produce a list of possible mistakes which the Coalition has made, but none yet is a proven blunder.Within weeks of entering 10 Downing Street as leader of a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, Cameron had reneged. The new government announced an NHS upheaval described by the country’s top health official as so large “it can be seen from space”. History will record the decision not just as another broken promise but as a huge blunder. A common feature of the “blunders” is the extent to which policy development gets separated from the realities of the world. In the worst cases policy is developed by small groups of like- minded people in Whitehall who share the same set of assumptions and fail to test those assumptions outside the group. The group often assumes that there is only one way of doing things: a common example until recently was the assumption that the private sector is always superior in know-how and efficiency. They often have little understanding of how people on the receiving end of the policy will behave or react – what the authors call, “cultural disconnect”. Follow this link to access a longer and deeper discussion of the issues around speaking truth to power. Or Failing to ? In Britain, politicians and senior officials are also disparaged for the simple reason that our governments get things wrong, sometimes very badly wrong. They blunder, probably increasingly, probably on a greater scale than at least some comparable countries, and certainly unnecessarily and too often. Anthony King and I have completed a study of major government blunders committed by the UK government between 1980 and 2010 to see if there is a pattern that explains these missteps. What is a blunder?

The effect of the changes has been to distract and fragment an NHS already facing severe financial pressures. Billions have been spent rebadging bureaucrats, while the reforms have ignored the central problem for health systems in all advanced economies – how to merge social care for fast-ageing populations with the traditional diagnose-and-mend approach. The trouble with a system designed to take such unconstrained decisions is that it is as efficient at facilitating bad decisions as good ones. All the governments that committed the blunders we investigated were strong and decisive, but their very strength and decisiveness made possible – indeed positively encouraged – their blundering.and it is, “much of the time, either peripheral or totally irrelevant. It might as well not exist”. On the other hand, the so-called ‘efficiency savings’ resulting from a significant reduction in the number of ‘arms length bodies’ (aka quangos) were in due course shown to be mainly due to reductions in outputs. Successive administrations have wasted “obscene” amounts of money on government information technology, according to the Commons Public Accounts Committee reporting in July 2011. The MPs said that “Over-reliance on a few large contractors and poor public sector purchasing and management skills has produced a recipe for rip-offs”.