The Whitehall bureaucracy cannot be reformed: most of it should be abolished

The Art of Delivery: The Inside Story of how the Blair Government Transformed Britain’s Public Services by Michelle Clement

You become Prime Minister and your supporters cheer you into Downing Street, waving the Union flags supplied to them by a member of your staff. The Cabinet Secretary greets you and assures you that the official machine stands ready to implement your plans. Now at last you can do the things you castigated the last Government for failing to do.

But how to set the machine in motion? And what should you do first? Is it more important to reform the machine, or to use it in its present form to deliver the improvements you have promised?

Michelle Clement describes how Tony Blair and his colleagues attempted to get the machine to work. When they came into office in 1997, they had devoted more thought to campaigning than to what they would do if and when they won.

Blair felt he wasted his first term, and was determined to avoid making the same mistake after the general election of 2001, when New Labour won a second landslide victory.

He declared that he took this victory as “an instruction to deliver”, and set up the Delivery Unit, led by Michael Barber, to improve the delivery of public services. This book is the story of the Delivery Unit in the years 2001-2005.

Clement has a new source, the almost 600,000 words Barber wrote in his diaries during those years, and has interviewed most of the ministers and officials whom he persuaded to support his endeavours.

She believes the Delivery Unit succeeded:

“By the time of the 2005 general election, the quality of public services in health had been improved across all targets, in education the target areas had almost all improved upon 2001 standards, in the Home Office and criminal justice system all targets had improved on 2001 standards, and though road congestion had not improved rail punctuality had.”

This generous perspective is not one which would find favour with news editors, but has considerable merit. If (as I often feel inclined to do) one simply scoffs, one will never understand what the Blairites got right.

Clement’s book started life as a doctoral thesis written under the supervision of Professor Jon Davis, Director of the Strand Group at King’s College, London, and comes garlanded with praise from Ed Balls, Peter Hennessy, Alan Milburn, John Rentoul, Sally Morgan and Simon Case.

It is a lucid account of an important subject, and on finding it to be better written than I expected, I decided to review it.

After reading about a third of Clement’s 330 pages, I still admired her lucidity and scrupulousness, but had begun to weary of the repetitions inseparable from bureaucratic intrigue, and found myself reverting to my earlier view that large bureaucracies are almost impossible to reform, and we should instead devote our energies to finding ways of abolishing them.

Dedicated bureaucrats can almost always foil attempts by transient reformers to get them to behave differently. As Barber confides in frustration to his diary, “the system still has no respect at all for delivery”.

The interests of the bureaucrat take precedence over the interests of those who need the bureaucrat to do something. Anyone who has had dealings with a council housing department will know this.

The tendency of any bureaucracy to enlarge itself has long been noted. Parkinson’s Law by C Northcote Parkinson was published in 1958. “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” he observed, and went on to explain:

“(1) ‘An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals’ and (2) ‘Officials make work for each other’.”

To illustrate this, he cited the fall in the number of capital ships in the Royal Navy from 62 to 20 in the period 1914-1928, and the rise over the same period in the number of Admiralty officials from 2,000 to 3,569. Far more horrifying figures could be compiled for more recent periods. Gladstone with his respect for candle-end economies might as well never have lived.

Parkinson died in 1993, so was spared the sight of HS2, where one would guess the number of officials reviewing the ballooning costs, and indeed reviewing each other’s work, has long since exceeded the number of men employed in laying the track.

Clement’s study reminds us that Blair soon realised from bitter experience how difficult it was to reform the bureaucracy. In July 1999 he addressed the Venture Capital Association, and in the question and answer session afterwards said:

“You try getting change in the public sector and public services. I bear the scars on my back after two years in government and heaven knows what it will be like after a bit longer. People in the public sector [are] more rooted in the concept that ‘if it has always been done this way, it must always be done this way’ than any group of people I have ever come across.”

Six years later, in his diary for 25 June 2005, Barber quotes Blair saying in “despair”,

“It’s incredible how the system slows down change at every stage… Awesome.”

By 2001 Blair had realised:

“We had to divest power away from the dominant interest groups, unions and associations and put it back into the hands of people, the consumer, the parent, the patient, the user.”

Clement also quotes Professor Julian Le Grand, from 2003-2005 a senior adviser to Blair, who in his book Motivation, Agency and Public Policy stressed “the importance of having a responsive system for users”, and remarked that however committed public service professionals are, “they can never have the degree of concern for users that users have for themselves”.

From this insight sprang “the choice agenda”, and the attempt to imitate how markets work. But these imitations, such as the NHS’s internal market, could never quite be authentic.

One of the wonderful things about a genuine market is that we can choose to do things which cannot be justified on grounds of cost. We can go on getting a particular garage to service our car because the people there know us, and this relationship is of value to us, and might even mean that in an emergency we would be treated with consideration.

We can go to a pub where the beer is more expensive, but tastes no better, because we like the people we meet there, or alternatively because we enjoy not meeting anyone.

In other words, we are free to take our own decisions, and to deal with the consequences when we get it wrong. If we employ a cowboy builder, we have to sort the problem out, and somehow it is sorted out, which it wouldn’t be if we were waiting for an official to sort it out for us.

How can a bureaucracy be as responsive as we ourselves are? Blair saw the obvious truth that it couldn’t be. But he was already Prime Minister, so it was a bit late for him to start wondering how to dismantle the great public service bureaucracies.

He instead looked to Barber and others to get the best out of the public sector. In this book we find Barber behaving with superhuman self-restraint, learned in his Quaker family, in order to avoid antagonising the officials he must carry with him if he is to have any success.

We are reminded that in some ways this was a different time. Public sector debt fell from 42.5 per cent of national income in 1996/97 to 30.7 per cent in 2000/01.

There was money to spend on public services, and spent it was. Blair and Brown spent heavily on the NHS, and so have their successors.

Problems occur which are still occurring today. On page 124 Clement describes a meeting in 2001:

“Barber attended a three-hour asylum summit on 18 October with Blunkett, Irvine, Blair, Brown, Wilson, Heywood, Balls, Macpherson, Andrew Smith and Home Office officials in the Cabinet Room to discuss the various (competing) proposals… Barber remarked that from the official minute you would think it was an ‘ordered, rational event’ but ‘in fact what happened was an unholy row’. In short, it was Irvine and Brown versus Blunkett, with Blair chairing and questioning where necessary in order to ‘make a judgment’.”

Blunkett wanted accommodation centres to be built for asylum seekers, and Blair sided with him, but the Treasury under Brown prevented “the full rollout of the proposals”. In 2050 we shall read a report of a similar meeting held in the summer of 2025, only with different names.

During the great reforming Labour Government which took office in 1945, Douglas Jay, a junior minister, gave memorable expression to the spirit in which officialdom intervened in people’s lives:

“in the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman from Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves.”

Eighty years on we are still behaving as if Jay was right.