This week Damian McBride, sometime Treasury communications
leader and later special advisor to Gordon Brown, published an article in
Prospect magazine entitled “Not fit for purpose”. McBride claims that the policy failures and fiascos which have been discussed
at length in books published this year such as Anthony King’s and Ivor Crewe’s
“The blunders of our governments”[i]
and Richard Bacon’s and Christopher Hope’s “Conundrum”[ii]
are principally the result of the civil service being out of touch, of there
being too few people among the upper echelons of the service who are female,
young, from working class origins, from regions far from London, not from
expensive schools and universities, or indeed who have not previously worked in
the Treasury. Overcoming the narrowness of recruitment will, he claims, make
the civil service more meritocratic and more “fit for purpose”.
But let’s unpack
that claim. McBride’s diagnosis is that the civil service being “out of touch”
is the problem that explains both civil service timidity in advising ministers
and the very opposite problem, which he thinks is just as important, of civil
servants “being allowed to push things through without sufficient checks from
ministers or their advisors”. Quite how timidity and unaccountable railroading
co-exist in the same tier of civil servants, McBride doesn’t explain. Are the
same civil servants guilty of both things? On the same policies? Nor does he
explain clearly why they are both supposed to be the result of the same
underlying problem.
The call for
“representative bureaucracy” is a good one. Few people, I hope, would disagree
with it. McBride is quite right that the upper tiers of the civil service are
still not open enough, although even he is forced to admit that the demographic
statistics look a great deal more civilised than they did even fifteen years
ago.
But the sensible
argument for a more representative bureaucracy is an argument about simple
justice. We want diversity and equality of opportunity for their own sake.
McBride doesn’t
offer any evidence that a narrow and shallow pool of recruits to the upper tier
of the civil service is what really explains the collapse of the west coast
mainline franchise, or the training credits fiasco or the protracted muddle of
tax credits or the long series of IT projects which have been delayed,
abandoned, overrun their budgets or just failed to provide workable systems.
That’s because there just is no evidence that this was the problem.
What really lies
behind the weakness of the British civil service is much less about the quality
of the personnel and much more to do with the system in which the individuals
have to work. Lack of institutional memory at the top due to the constant churn
of staff, feeble capacity for serious client-side programme management, poor
understanding of how rail or IT industries really work, weak capacities for
understanding the drivers of costs, the toleration for scope creep, lack of
sufficient span of control for programme managers, ministerial tendencies
toward spasmodic but brief efforts in micro-management… all these things are
the product of informal institutions in the way that the service is organised
and collective capabilities are cultivated, and also of the more fundamental
relationship with ministers and ministerial power. Perhaps unsurprisingly in
someone who has been a special advisor, McBride never really mentions ministers
or their expectations, and never considers the ways in which they work might be
contributing to poor policy performance.
The same argument
applies to ministers just as well as it does to civil servants. Claire Annesley and Francesca Gains show that although the coalition government has brought more women into ministerial
posts, on its own that won’t make policies that benefit women any more likely
to be implemented successfully, not least while the government is doing things
that run contrary to many women’s interests.
McBride has
fallen into the ancient error in management thinking that what we most need to
do to improve the running of an organisation is for the managers to change the
people and get a better lot. The civil service is like many other organisations
which are performing poorly. A majority of the staff would work more
effectively if the systems were changed, which cultivate collective
capabilities. We want different staff for reasons of equality of opportunity,
not because that alone would make for fewer fiascos. Changing the people might
do something for justice, diversity and equality. But on its own it will do
nothing very much for performance. To take McBride’s examples, where civil
servants are too fearful to provide ministers with candid advice, people with
different accents won’t necessarily have any less fear of the consequences if
we do nothing to address what is commonly called the “public service bargain”
which orders the relationship between civil servants and ministers. Overly
ambitious, vaguely specified schemes and misdesigned procurement systems for
National Health Service IT systems and the failure to control an organisation
that wasted billions before being wound up were not the result of lack of
diversity in recruitment. Whatever went wrong on universal credit that led Iain
Duncan Smith to blame his civil servants – and it is hard not to have the
suspicion from the information that has been aired in the press that the brief
from ministers may not have been sufficiently clear, whatever fault may also
have lain with the officials for their understanding of what would be needed
for a workable IT system for so ambitious a programme – was not the result of
too many ex-Treasury types in the Department of Work and Pensions.
McBride’s assertion
that until the top civil service looks more like the rest of Britain
“miscalculations like the bedroom tax and Help to Buy will simply keep
happening” is completely lacking in any account of just how the one would be
the principal cause of the other. It just isn’t the case that whatever “common
sense” more common people might bring to government, that alone would enable
those commoner people better to understand IT or rail franchising or complex
procurement or to ask tougher, more probing questions about costs or
complicated consortia for big programmes. And certainly common sense alone
won’t give civil servants the confidence, where they lack it, to speak truth to
powerful ministers or, dare one say it in this context, to their special
advisors.
No, diversity and
equality in the civil service is something we should care about it for its own
sake. Reforming the civil service in ways that would improve its performance
requires something other than a change of personnel. It might also require a
change in the relationship with politicians and their political appointees. But
perhaps Mr McBride isn’t ready yet to address that problem.
[i]
Anthony King and Ivor Crewe, 2013, The blunders of our governments, London:
OneWorld.
[ii] Richard
Bacon and Christopher Hope, 2013, Conundrum: Why every government gets things
wrong and what we can do about it, London: Biteback.
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