David Cameron has made speedy and sweeping reforms to the public sector, but the spirit of Sir Humphrey Appleby lives on and is determined to thwart change
The new play of Yes, Prime Minister now on in London’s West End relies a lot more on farce than its television predecessor, but is just as incisive. Those earlier scripts from the 1980s were unerringly accurate and spookily prescient. The subjects they tackled are the same as now: public service cuts, defence spending, open government, small state; and Whitehall waste.
Watching them again is to be struck by the eternal verities of politics. They depict a battle between the politicians who want to change things and the public servants who, by and large, want continuity and seek to frustrate their ministerial masters. Institutional resistance becomes a badge of honour.
In a famous observation after just two years in office, Tony Blair said he had the ‘scars on my back’ to show how hard it was to get public sector reforms past the civil service. After ten years in office and parliamentary majorities of around 170, he still failed to get much done where it really mattered. Will Prime Minister David Cameron fare any better or will he be parading his own battle scars a couple of years from now?
Unlike Blair, however, he has just got on with it. The best time to make unpopular decisions and begin large-scale reform is just after taking office. Leave it too long and governments start to run up against the next election. Short-termism is a political affliction that can easily be exploited by those averse to change.
On the other hand, the coalition has arguably started with too much of a flourish, opening up so many fronts that will be hard to contain. One reason why the NHS budget was ring-fenced was to neutralise health as a political issue, given its toxicity for any governing party. Yet Health Secretary Andrew Lansley has embarked on the biggest overhaul of the NHS since its foundation – a programme for reform which took even his own colleagues by surprise. The opportunities here for something to go horribly wrong are considerable.
Education Secretary Michael Gove – first out of the traps with his reforms – is already involved in a toe-to-toe scrap with his own officials, many of whom regard the free school plans with barely concealed disdain. And it is not just Whitehall: there is resistance throughout the educational establishment, notably among the teaching unions and councils.
In an article over the summer, the Spectator magazine revealed what it called a ‘campaign of intimidation’ against head teachers who wished to embrace Gove’s ideas. One head received a letter from the National Union of Teachers indicating that it might organise a strike at her school. In some areas, it is claimed that local education authorities have threatened to withdraw support services to schools that opt into the Gove reforms. And it is not just Labour councils that don’t like being cut out of the loop – Conservative-run Bromley recently came out against proposals for a new academy.
Institutional resistance takes other forms, too. Shroud-waving designed to scare governments away from their intended course of action and the cuts in departmental budgets offer plenty of scope for this, from claims of Kosovan-style ethnic cleansing to the removal of police from the streets.
Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles has told local authorities that they will have to make efficiency savings that do not affect the front line. But the councils have other ideas. The Local Government Association has warned MPs that home care programmes for elderly and disabled people might have to shut down completely in some parts of the country. If that happens, how long before more cash is found to forestall a political backlash?
The core civil service has also proved resilient to attempts to cut it back. Giving evidence to a Commons select committee recently, Cabinet secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell said compulsory redundancies were inevitable but the aim was to secure most through ‘natural wastage’. It turns out, for instance, that the 25% cut in the Ministry of Defence bureaucracy will include reductions in locally employed support staff in Germany when the army shuts up shop there.
The chances are that when the dust has settled a few years from now there will be just as many Whitehall officials as there are now. Sir Humphrey Appleby would have been thrilled.
Philip Johnston is assistant editor of the Daily Telegraph
This must be one of the laziest pieces of journalism I have read for a while. All the evidence Philip Johnston brings consists of an article in the Spectator – hardly renowned for its objectivity over politics and public spending, which is what you could also say about Johnston’s own newspaper.
He starts out with an assumption – that public servants want continuity and politicians want change. If there were an ‘eternal verity’ (as Johnston says) you have to ask yourself why the Conservative party is so called.
My experience is that public servants are often avid for change. The point, however, is to produce evidence that public servants have been blocking change since May. And Johnston does not even start.
Take health. Johnston say ‘the opportunities here for something to go horribly wrong are considerable’. Does saying that may him, too, an opponent of change or naysayer?
As for education, Johnston appears to be saying that anyone with a scintilla of doubt about the extraordinarily sketchy plans put forward by Michael Gove is a proven left winger. How about a good public servant, who is anxious that plans are deliverable, that public money is being effectively spent – don’t public servants have a residual duty to consider the public interest, which may not always be the same as the interest of government ministers?
Johnston seems to live in a paranoid world where even Bromley Council and Margaret Eaton – solid Tories when I last looked – are part of the conspiracy to thwart the benificent plans of the Coalition. Might it be, instead, that their definition of the public interest just happens to differ from that of ministers, and they have every right to express the difference.
Let’s have comment and opinion, by all mean, but based on facts not supposition and evidence-less assertion.
Philip Johnston (‘Probably Not, Prime MInister’, Opinion 5 -18 November) is rightly circumspect about the chances of successfully reforming Whitehall, given previous abortive attempts.
Yet the current round of budget cuts and endemic poor performance by the Whitehall civil service present the coalition government with opportunity and incentive to undertake fundamental reform and put the service onto a proper footing fit for the needs of the 21st century and to dispense with the legacy of the Northcote-Trevelyan settlement of 1854 and a pervasive culture of amateurism and failure.
The sheer haplessness seen in recent years – in the famously ‘not fit for purpose’ Home Office and currently in Defence procurement to take but two examples – is to no small degree a product of amateurism in service delivery and management, as well as a lack of care. As a generalisation, this is a service struggling to perform efficiently and effectively in an increasingly professional and technically expert world and against the back-drop of an ever more competitive global economy.
Ultimately it is a measure of political failure that an army of (by and large) amateurs and generalists still predominates across the machinery of government at such vast cost with a propensity for making such expensive mistakes. It is also a measure of the success of the Whitehall establishment in looking after its own. Other countries which operated under the Northcote-Trevelyan model have been able to dispose of their Sir Humphreys, as arguably would the UK, if the recommendations in the Fulton Report as long ago as 1968 had been properly implemented.
Substantial reform of the Whitehall civil service is not something the government can afford not to do or to get badly wrong.