Who is to blame for state incapacity?

One advantage of Labour taking office is that complaints about the British State, previously dismissed either as right-wing cope or constitutional vandalism, now have a bipartisan flavour. First we had Paul Ovenden, formerly Sir Keir Starmer’s director of strategy, lambasting the “stakeholder state” in the Times; now we have Darren Jones, former minister, blaming the Civil Service for thwarting Starmer’s short-lived “missions”:

However, within months of Labour’s landslide victory, references to missions became fewer and further between and other metrics to frame delivery were introduced, including “foundations” and “milestones”.  

Jones, who served as chief secretary to the Treasury and then chief secretary to the PM in the Starmer administration, told a PACAC session yesterday that institutional opposition had stymied the missions drive – and that lessons should be learned.

But every silver lining has a cloud, and we’re also seeing Labour figures pick up the same bad habit their Conservative predecessors so often indulged in: exaggerating legitimate complaints about the Civil Service (or the courts) in order to displace responsibility from politicians.

Consider Jones’ case. The Starmer Government wanted to create cross-departmental committees to coordinate spending around the then-prime minister’s five missions, which it did. It then tried to get these committees to submit their own proposals to the spending review and, it seems, assigned budgets. Civil servants, however, stymied this.

Or did they? Jones describes the problem as “a classic example of the system saying: ‘well you can’t do that because of constitutional norms’”, and I’m very familiar with the practise of turning “norm” into an irregular verb (the same is also done to “reform”, which describes changes you like; changes you don’t like are a “norm violation”).

Yet actually read his piece, and the mechanical problem the Civil Service highlighted seems legitimate. Under our current constitutional mechanisms, funding is assigned to departments, and it is departments which are accountable to Parliament. Even as a strong supporter of executive power, it would nonetheless strike me as odd if there were no impediments to setting up an ad-hoc committee and assigning it serious state budgets.

It would be unconscionable for such a thing to be impossible, of course. But the impression one gets from the Civil Service World article is that Labour had simply not done any preparatory work for making institutional changes. This would not be surprising, given that it also managed to not have a housing bill in its first King’s Speech, but it must be weighed against any allegation of Civil Service obstruction. Even more baffling is this claim:

Jones also told the committee that he attempted to “abolish the Cabinet Office three times, but failed” as he was “not allowed” to do it.

The Civil Service can’t actually stop the Government abolishing the Cabinet Office, if the Government really wants to. The Cabinet Secretariat, as it then was, was established in 1916 without primary legislation, and could be disposed of in the same way. Indeed, the barriers to creating new departments are generally fairly low, which as the Institute for Government has noted comes with its own downsides.

Reading between the lines, I think the two most important pieces of information are this section Jones’ testimony (emphasis mine):

The trouble is, especially when you’re very busy as a minister, and the prime minister’s diary is obviously the busiest of them all, there’s not sufficient pressure on the detail or accountability for how this is being performed. And if there’s a reluctance to deliver change, you have to push really hard for it to happen.

And this line from CSW:

Jones refused to pin the blame for the failure of the missions drive on Starmer or any other minister. Instead, he suggested that civil service inertia and an over-focus on process were to blame.

The impression this gives is of a government which tried to freestyle its way through some fairly significant changes to the machinery of government without having adequately prepared for it, and which did not give the reform effort (or efforts) adequate political support once in office. 

Yes, there is undoubtedly an extent to which Civil Service reluctance played a role, and Jones is within his rights to feel aggrieved about that. But institutional inertia is also just a fact of long-established bureaucracies, especially those in the public sector which can persist for decades without being subject to the slightest competitive pressure from external forces. Reforming such a bureaucracy is difficult, but that is no reason to accept our politicians failing and then just bleating about how difficult it was.

The blunt truth is that too often, the idea that it’s all very hard and the officials aren’t playing ball is simply a convenient way of covering politicians’ blushes. Under the terms of our constitution, a majority in Parliament can do anything it likes. There is nothing — not the Civil Service, not the Supreme Court, not Strasbourg, nothing — which can gainsay the will of Parliament clearly expressed in legislation and backed by a government sufficiently determined to see that will done.

In fact, much of the power presently enjoyed by officials, quangocrats, and the judiciary is downstream of political decisions. Cutting the House of Commons’ sitting hours has led to it both passing longer, broader bills which offer more leeway for legal challenges and devolving decision-making to regulators and other bodies. The critical element of any “bonfire of the quangos”, for example, would be longer sitting hours, more spads, and more ministers — in other words, more work for politicians. Unsurprisingly, this is seldom proposed.

By the same token, many of the politicians now latching on to the idea that there’s a problem with the British State do, implicitly or explicitly, because they think it provides an alternative to the idea that politicians “just aren’t good enough”, despite this binary being entirely false.

As such, we should be wary that the current profusion of reformist rhetoric about the state heralds anything profound. If MPs are prepared neither to shrink the scope of the state nor expand their role in administering it, officialdom will and, in its defence, must expand to fill that vacuum. Ministers are within their rights to criticise the mote in the State’s eye — but not to ignore the beam in their own.