Monday’s descent of Mr Blair from the war-on-evil to the local government elections was like Arnold Schwarzenegger attending a conker fight in the school playground. He hit the conker but left dismembered bodies all over the asphalt. Mr Blair declared three targets met and threatened to exterminate the wretches running his schools and hospitals. He then raced to the nearest airport to commune on higher things with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Two hours of British politics were as much as he could stomach. As the old politician’s maxim goes, “Home is hell”.
How Mr Blair must wish he could hand the NHS over to George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Tommy Franks and all those nice people who gave him such a good war. Why not put hospitals and schools, law and order, museums and galleries in the competent hands of the US Marines? They seem so much more macho than Mr Blair’s moth-eaten Cabinet. Bring in those Desert Rats of the public sector, Jarvis, Capita and Bechtel plc.
Tomorrow is the one day of the year when public and media attention focuses on Mr Blair’s least favourite agency of public service delivery, locally elected councils. He simply cannot see the point of them. Local diversity, fiscal responsibility, community empowerment were part of the mood music of his days in Opposition. Now he runs the most centralised government in the world. Why anyone should vote in tomorrow’s election and give credibility to this charade of local democracy is a mystery, I fear, that few will bother to resolve.
Last week, Charles Clarke, the Education Secretary, signalled that he might run every school in England from Whitehall. Nigel Lawson pondered doing that, but balked at removing the last substantive service still “owned” by local government. As a test step down this route, Mr Clarke is blowing £1.9 million on the engineering firm, Jarvis, for bizarre websites and seminars for 700 “failing schools”. He has money to burn. Had the Tories proposed such a gratuity to the private sector, Labour backbenchers would have gone ape.
Mr Clarke is in exalted company. His colleague, Alan Milburn, runs every hospital in the land and has been stopped by Gordon Brown from freeing them from Whitehall’s grasp. Another colleague, David Blunkett, has targets for every policeman. Another, John Prescott, has targets for every new housing estate. Another, Alistair Darling, is meeting his targets for congestion by using motorway hard shoulders — and to hell with rescue services. As Bill Shankly said of football, Mr Blair’s targets are not a matter of life and death, they are far more important than that.
The Prime Minister’s irritation at dwindling public satisfaction for the performance of his welfare state is palpable. He is a clone of his patron saint, Margaret Thatcher, who wailed in 1987 “where is all the money going?”, and ordered her third restructuring of the NHS. Mr Blair is now a shameless privatiser. He has tried to get W. S. Atkins and now Jarvis to run schools, Capita to vet paedophiles and Metronet to run the Tube. His attempt to improve the trains has led him from Railtrack to Network Rail to four layers of oversight and administration, costing three times the subsidy to the old British Rail. Blair privatisation makes old-style nationalisation seem like Liberty Hall.
What Mr Blair cannot accept is that it might be precisely his obsession with command and control that is causing the failure. Like many war leaders, he cannot understand why public services do not respond to orders. In most countries, this presidential superiority complex is checked by legislatures and constitutions. George Bush would not dream of abolishing the New York School Board or sending in civil engineers to run San Francisco. In Britain there are no such checks. Mr Blair can do what he likes, and does.
Yet the system does not respond. Management theory has long held that big bureaucracies are seldom beautiful. Mr Blair’s rule by target, name and shame makes any organisation inflexible to individual or local need. Mr Clarke yesterday named and shamed councils he regards as responsible for his “loss” of £500 million in grants to schools. Yet the reason for his embarrassment is the replacing of the old block grants to councils by Treasury micro-management. Seeking to deprive local councils of financial discretion, he introduced a fiendish capitation formula, enhanced with a battery of ring-fenced initiatives. School budgets went haywire and councils happily blamed Mr Clarke.
Last year the Government staged a comprehensive performance assessment of these councils, to award the 22 best “earned autonomy”. It proved a charade. Instead two of the best had their much-prized education budgets fixed by edict in Whitehall and all have had them suborned. A school near me has asked parents to help to pay teacher salaries. This is London, not Baghdad.
In a recent letter to The Times, a teacher, Pat Young, reported a missive she had received from Mr Clarke. It thanked her for her “contribution to education” and wished her “a long and happy retirement”. Mrs Young in fact retired three years ago. Thanks from a dysfunctional computer are meaningless enough. More significant is that Mr Clarke thought it his duty to address individual teachers direct from Whitehall, when the appropriate thanks would have been from the children, parents and neighbourhood to which she was accountable.
This is the Mr Clarke who, on radio last week, suggested that he was better qualified to run England’s schools than elected councils. His is the department which two years ago lost hundreds of millions of pounds on “individual learning accounts” for further education. It is the department that thought it could vet local teachers for paedophilia, leaving classes empty on the first day of term. It thought it could reform A-level marking, as a result of which pupils must this week begin the Government’s obsessive exam regime in April as opposed to June. What conceivable competence test has Mr Clarke’s department passed that ranks it above the London Borough of Hackney on a bad day? Such is the arrogance of central government.
Nothing handicaps reform of public services more than a belief that they are best run from above. Mr Blair and his Chancellor have let a thousand targets bloom, and pegged ten thousand grants to them. Not surprisingly schools, hospitals and police forces are working to target, not to their local public. The cost in money and skewed priorities is huge. Policemen were ordered back “on the beat” but refused to walk alone, thus doubling the cost.
Quantified targets satisfy ministers, but they do not in themselves rebuild morale among teachers, nurses, parents or patients. Every survey suggests that this depends on local people being able to claim some ownership over the service. Schools, colleges, hospitals and police stations are not like shops and garages. They are part of the emotional architecture of a community. People must feel that they can choose them and raise taxes to pay for what they choose. If Mr Blair seizes them for the centre, people will shirk all public duty and retreat into their private lives.
A vigorous pamphlet, Citizen-consumers by Catherine Needham (for Catalyst), published this week, points to an alarming dichotomy in Mr Blair’s concept of a user of a public service. By treating users as consumers and customers (a crib from Thatcherism) he forestalls “a robust and active participatory citizenship”. Miss Needham argues that responsibility for local institutions is crucial to a community’s self-respect. Stop it happening and you get today’s democratic lethargy, a culture of name, shame, blame and litigation.
Given the money Britain spends on public services, they ought to be sensational. They are not. But then no state on Earth tries to run an entire welfare state without relying on a devolved and empowered local government. Lenin tried, and it did not work. It is not attempted in America, France, Germany, Spain, Russia. There is no evidence anywhere that the central control of local services yields efficiency or public contentment. Yet Mr Blair and his Cabinet soldier on, confident that he who rules must surely win.
sjenkins@thetimes.co.uk
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