Whoops! Home information packs have hit their first rocks, on the eve of their becoming compulsory. You will recall that once it became clear that this particular interference in private deals between citizens was unpopular and would not speed up the property market, the Government adjusted its focus. It said it would only apply to four-bedroom houses at first, and began to put the emphasis on the energy performance certificate or EPC element, claiming it as a vital green tool.

So The Sunday Telegraph got Jeff Howell, a chartered surveyor, to have his own house inspected. Mr Howell had replastered it with environmentally friendly hemp, insulated it widely and carefully, and monitors his energy use. He called in two separate inspectors “trained” on the Government’s programme, who both committed technical howlers, missing swaths of visible insulation, and coming up with a low rating and an estimate of power consumption four times higher than Mr Howell’s reality. “Box tickers, didn’t even tick the right boxes,” he said scornfully.

One of them protested: “Our assessment is supposed to be a purely visual one, we are not obliged to be thorough,” and the other said that the owner should have explained what he had done (but is there always an original owner present when a house is sold?). “I guess,” concluded this second inspector, “any system could be more robust.” Yes. Quite. But Hips are not wobbly picnic tables that we choose ourselves on a whimsical summer day; they have been foisted on us compulsorily. Nanny government is making us eat them up; but alas! Nanny is drunk again, and has put soap powder in the rice pudding. The EPC promises to be another bright idea ruined by shoddy execution, another bodge-up in Blu-Tack Britain. It recalls other fiascos: the Child Support Agency, the chaotic implementation of family credit, rail privatisation, the NHS computer system, the reforms to the Passport Office, even the newly reported shortage of judges (in a country that has lawyers like barns have mice).

It chimes with promises about border control promptly sabotaged by the reckless scrapping of immigration checks, and with the storage of brand-new flood barriers so far from floodable areas that they get stuck on a flooded motorway. At the extreme one remembers the Millennium Dome, and Peter Mandelson promising to launch “Surfball” as the game of the 21st century. Only there was no game, no rules, no ball, no surf – only a soundbite. It was the quintessential absurdity. Or you could go farther back and remember the expensive rise and fall of the poll tax idea, or the ERM debacle with interest rates whizzing up and down all morning.

Related Internet Links

• Home Information Packs: news, analysis and advice

The silencing of our Mr Spocks

Our public administration has specialised in low-level, chronic inefficiency with a counterpoint of big talk

BACKGROUND

• Hips

• Comment: Hips humble pie is long overdue

• This is painful. We need a HIP replacement

• A glimmer of sense amid the Hips fiasco

BACKGROUND

• Pack of troubles?

• Home Information Packs (HIPs) - Q&A

• Legal challenge to Home Information Packs

Hips will make us greener, or so the Government says

• Hips have already won hearts and minds and will make us all greener, or so the Government says

BACKGROUND

• Home Information Packs come under fire

• Q&A: home information packs

• Will HIPs pack a real punch?

• Home Information Packs branded as 'ridiculous'

For you can’t pin this brag’n’bodge culture entirely on new Labour. It goes back farther, and politically wider. Indeed, the more I think about it, the more I remember a speech by Tony Benn on a motion of no confidence in Mrs Thatcher’s Government. I do not generally buy unreservedly into Mr Benn’s visions, but cannot forget his words.

“Although we’ve been told we’re an entrepreneurial society”, he began, “this is now a country that has an utter contempt for skill. You talk to people who dig coal, run trains, doctors, nurses, dentists, teachers, toolmakers – nobody’s interested in them. The whole of this so-called entrepreneurial society has focused on the City news, every bulletin telling us what’s happened to the pound sterling, this and that per cent against a basket of European currencies. But skill is what built this country’s strength, and skill is treated with contempt.”

He was on to something: something odd and sad. Britain produced great inventors, engineers and makers: Brunel and Stephenson, Harrison and Babbage, Faraday and Whittle. In administration this is the nation that – leaving aside any wider moral questions – ran a vast empire with mostly clockwork efficiency, imposing perfectionism whether in civil engineering or clerical accurancy. In a novel of the 1930s I read the line: “One has a feeling that in Britain we construct, whereas other countries contrapt.” Whether that feeling was accurate then I cannot say, but it was a point of pride that we made things work. Kipling’s splendid poem about engineers, contrasting the practical “Sons of Martha” with the visionary sons of Mary, thunders: “They do not preach that their God will rouse them a little before the nuts work loose. / They do not teach that His Pity allows them to leave their work when they damn-well choose . / As in the thronged and the lighted ways, so in the dark and the desert they stand. / Wary and watchful all their days, that their brethren’s days may be long in the land.”

Wary and watchful, skilful and expert: the need for these qualities is as strong in systems – tax credits, child support, Hips training – as it is in railway tracks and bridges. We still see such pride in some corners: the Armed Forces, many emergency services, beleaguered parts of the NHS. Yet in recent decades – perhaps influenced, as Mr Benn suggests, by the gambling, short-cut, quick-rich ideology of the City – our public administration has specialised in low-level, chronic inefficiency with a counterpoint of big talk.

They prate of targets, benchmarks, inspectorates, initiatives. They toss out – sorry, “roll out” – innovations with little idea of how to make them work. They act like Star Trek captains saying, “Make it so”, only without installing a reliable team of Scottys in the engine-room or Mr Spocks to say, “Illogical”. When the Scottys and Spocks (civil servants or professions) raise practical objections, ministers carry on saying “Make it so” and stab buttons with showy energy as the ship lurches diagonally into the next asteroid storm. Basic ideas have often been good and intentions admirable. Which is not enough.

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