Lord Bichard: Here are the hard questions we need to ask of government

This article was originally published on Apolitical on 13 August 2020.

This article is written by Lord (Michael) Bichard, Chair of the National Audit Office, former UK Permanent Secretary and a Commissioner for the Commission for Smart Government

I recently agreed to be a member of the Commission for Smart Government, a UK cross-party, cross-sector group which will look at how our governance system could work better.

Some might ask “why bother?” when countless attempts to reform Whitehall, in particular, have delivered little significant change such that the academics Drechsler and Kattel recently observed, “If Winston Churchill came walking down Whitehall to his old office, he would not need much updating on how the system worked”.

For some of us who have long argued the need for reform, that is a painful observation, so why should we expect things to change now? I’d argue there are two good reasons.

Firstly, the pandemic has exposed some of the shortcomings of the current arrangements in the harshest possible way, notwithstanding the superhuman efforts of many frontline public sector workers.

And secondly, I see a growing consensus not just of the need for change but about what that change should look like. Hence the need for the Commission and the hope that this is a moment when it could make a real impact.

We want to move swiftly but we also want to take time to hear what citizens and public sector workers themselves think needs to change, which is why we are asking some fundamental questions about the issues which will define the future of public services in the UK. How can we, for example, attract the best talent, I would say, from a wider talent pool to encourage creativity and avoid groupthink? How can we then ensure that there is training in place to help develop the skills we need to succeed in a world that is changing exponentially?

Asking the hard questions

As Chair of the National Audit Office, I see all too often the failures to deliver projects and policies on time and within budget. They cost the nation massively in scarce resources and they mean that good policies fail to deliver the intended benefits to communities across the country.

So, how can we improve government’s capacity to deliver? Do we still have a culture which values delivery and operational management less highly than policy development and do we have the necessary skills to deliver projects successfully?

For several decades joined up government has been one of the battle cries of the reformers because the big issues of our times do not fit neatly into the narrow, siloed departments of Whitehall. And yet, we have built a fragmented structure which encourages departments and agencies to work in isolation to achieve their own narrow targets by which they are judged.

Is structural reform the answer or do we need to find new ways of ensuring that citizens receive the simple, coherent services they need? And how can we shift the emphasis from process to outcomes so that fewer resources are wasted on bureaucratic procedures that are often put in place to try and eliminate rather than manage risk?

It is often said that we have the most centralised system of governance in the developed world and that is probably true. Could greater devolution lead to better outcomes and liberate better the potential of placed based communities which have become too dependent on the State? Have we given enough thought to what is best done at the centre and what is best delivered locally?

Not another blame game

Certainly, during the pandemic, there have been occasions when the centre has sought to take responsibility for things which might have been better handed to local services with their greater local knowledge.

Is that because of a lack of trust or a fear that there is now insufficient local accountability to protect the quality and efficiency of services? Might it be because we have no tradition of one public service but rather local or central officials with too few examples even now of movement between the two?

In New Zealand this is being addressed by an explicit attempt to foster a unified culture around a spirit of service to the community — a sense that public service leaders work within a single team. Could the UK benefit from something similar given that the current tribal identities mean little to the public who just crave coherent, effective services?

A further problem of our fragmented governance arrangements is that it is increasingly difficult to track accountability. If things go wrong is it because of failures in a government department, an arms-length agency, a local authority or health trust or a private company contracted to deliver services for public good? Blame can easily be shifted around the system, lessons are too rarely learned and, sad to say, incompetence (political as well as bureaucratic) is too often recycled.

Let’s celebrate what’s working and recognise what’s not

No one wants to see blame becoming the default culture, but there has to be clear accountability where public money is being spent and it is hard to claim that currently exists. How could we do more to help Ministers and advisers become more effective when at present they have few personal development opportunities and move from post to post so frequently? How could we better understand the strategic opportunities now presented by digital technology and AI and realise the potential of data analysis to target our efforts more effectively?

The Commission will seek to address all these issues and more. But we are also aware that there is much to celebrate in our public services and we will be keen to learn lessons from this good practice.

The challenges we grapple with are not unique to the UK, and I hope our work will be useful to the global community of forward-thinking public servants. So we hope public servants themselves will draw our attention to the exemplars and help us to understand why they been successful. The state of government and our public services can be the difference between life and death for citizens. We have to continue the struggle to improve them.