Wolf! Wolf! has been the motto of the National Farmers’ Union for so long that the British public can no longer tell a silo from a subsidy. Yet last week England’s 120,000 farmers had a legitimate grievance. They were stunned to be told that last year’s subsidy cheques are still not in the post. They may not get them for another month, if then.
Only 20% of cheques have been signed, partly because a £37m government computer has declared more than 95% of claims “unvalidated”. As a result some £3 billion cannot be released from the exchequer. Ministry phones go unanswered, forms are lost, banks are preparing to foreclose on overdrafts. The BBC’s Farming Today programme is like a daily dispatch from a banana republic.
England’s new single farm payment scheme has collapsed. Two weeks ago Margaret Beckett, the relevant minister, declared: “I take full responsibility.” She meant she had just sacked one of her officials, Johnston McNeill, so as to save the skin of her farm minister, an obscure Tony crony called Lord Bach. The latter had spent six months deriding critics of his scheme as “shoddy” and creating “unfounded alarm and uncertainty”.
The shambles at Defra, the rural affairs department, might win more publicity were a similar litany of woe not rising from every corner of Whitehall. The health department’s extravagant pre-election pay rise for the National Health Service has led to a £900m wave of health trust deficits. Accountability has taken the same track as at Defra. No minister has resigned but Patricia Hewitt has sacked an official, Sir Nigel Crisp, with the bung of a “back-pocket” peerage.
Part of the trouble at health was also Hewitt’s extraordinary decision to proceed with a £6 billion “choose-and-book” computer. This is an unnecessary machine for which no health professional ever asked and which was sold to her predecessors by the smooth-talking salesmen now beating a path to the softest touch in global computer procurement, the British taxpayer. A leaked report in February suggested that the NHS computer may end up costing a mind-numbing £ 50 billion.
Meanwhile, the Commons public accounts committee has just declared the maladministration of Gordon Brown’s new tax credit scheme “systemic”. As computers struggle to “claw back” some £2 billion in overpayments from people who have already spent them, post offices resound to hysterical claimants trying to reach officials on mobile phones, having been denied money to which they felt entitled.
The list continues. At the Child Support Agency a backlog of 350,000 cases and a dud computer have led to uncollected maintenance of £3 billion. The culture department was last month castigated by a Commons committee for its 24-hour drinking law, “a shambles . . . dilatory and completely unacceptable”. The education department has blown £1 billion on a “truancy and behaviour initiative” from which government auditors could find no benefit.
John Prescott has spent £168m on “consultancy fees” involved in demolishing 150,000 houses in the north of England. The row over the principle of identity cards has obscured a greater scandal: Charles Clarke’s gullible acceptance of a computer contract whose cost is escalating past £12 billion towards, on one estimate, £30 billion.
A forthcoming study of public sector IT (by Patrick Dunleavy and Helen Margetts) has British government the worst of seven leading purchasers, with the highest “scrap rate”, the least contract discipline and the most unbalanced dominance by big suppliers. The American firm EDS has 51% of the UK market and is invulnerable to its own failures.
Something is wrong with British public administration. Britons are not used to having their central government so comprehensively trashed. Since the days of Northcote-Trevelyan it was the envy of the world. The integrity of the civil service was taken for granted and the accountability of ministers was the rock on which the constitution was built.
The traditional partnership between ministers and civil servants has collapsed, destroyed by Blair’s sofa government and his miasma of agencies, consultancies and private firms. These lack continuity, leadership and accountability. The relationship between Whitehall and such shadowy entities as EDS, KPMG, WS Atkins, Serco and Capita seems immune to scrutiny. Yet Brown has granted them multi-billion-pound contracts, some for as long as a quarter of a century. Serco describes itself as having “a culture infused with the spirit of public service”. It runs Britain’s speed cameras.
Rod Aldridge, chairman of Capita, calmly resigned last month rather than embarrass his company over a £1m secret loan to Tony Blair, after a sequence of lucrative contract fiascos. These embraced individual learning accounts, London housing benefits, the Criminal Records Bureau and a mysterious contract for a “government literacy and numeracy strategy” that cost £177m, not a penny of which went on teaching. Capita’s turnover under Blair has soared from £112m to £1.4 billion. Aldridge, “a government adviser on outsourcing”, has become a multi-millionaire at our expense.
The establishment of “agencies” under Margaret Thatcher was intended to spotlight executive objectives, not enrich the private sector. Responsibility was clear. There was still a civil service profession, secure and trained to “speak truth to power”. It had its failings, well satirised in Yes Minister. Its virtues are becoming the more apparent by their absence, leaving behind a regime more reminiscent of Paraguay or Peru.
The introduction of what a Blair aide, Jonathan Powell, called a “more Napoleonic” style of government was meant to traumatise the old regime and did. Civil servants were all but banished from the upper echelons of government in favour of sycophants and entrepreneurs. Last year Blair rejected the demand of the public standards watchdog to end “mistrust and cronyism” by no longer letting ministers give top jobs to their friends such as Bach and Lord Birt.
Privatisation shifted advice to ministers away from the civil service towards “para-government”. What had been the work of officials is now undertaken, at vast expense, by McKinsey, UBS Warburg, Price Waterhouse Coopers, KPMG and others. Favouritism and waste run uncontrolled by parliamentary or value-for-money audit. Fees paid by Brown to privatise the London Tube ran to more than £500m — without buying a single train.
The Office of Government Commerce, supposedly charged with cutting 70,000 civil servants in three years (the “Gershon” cuts), has so far cut 3,000, while increasing its spending on consultants from £5.8m to £9.2m in a single year. When asked what it could cut, the health department said it could lose £500m in overheads “with no loss of efficiency”. Meanwhile, anyone visiting a London accident and emergency department might be forgiven for thinking themselves back in Nightingale’s Scutari.
This is not public administration but public chaos. Downing Street is deaf to the cry from across the public sector: please, no more reorganisation. Primary care trusts are about to be reorganised for the umpteenth time, from 330 down to under 100; police forces from 43 down to 24; and planning offices from counties to eight regional outposts of Whitehall. The trend of this reorganisation is everywhere centralist, despite protestations from the minister for making speeches about localism, David Miliband. The police force amalgamations will cost £500m without buying a single extra policeman. Upheaval buys consultants, not services. It is Trotsky’s “perpetual revolution”.
If there is one thing this government hates being told, it is that someone else does things better. Yet devolved government in Scotland and Wales has implemented the new farm subsidy scheme a month ago with no trouble. The one arm of government that is meeting the Gershon staff targets is not central but local. No local government is running a deficit. The only public sector computer project to be working properly is London’s congestion charge, commissioned free of Whitehall involvement.
Last week British local councils went on strike. They did so because Brown had conceded gilt-edged pensions to all central government staff, including MPs, but insisted that workers in local government do an extra five years before retiring. It was a class arrogance no Tory chancellor would have dared. As snobbery it was magnificent. As public administration it was dreadful.
