02 December 2021

Civil Service Reform

The dead hand of rules.

By Robert Kilconner

The music is too loud to be ignored. First it was Gove, an aggressive reforming minister then in charge of education, with his references to “the Blob”.  Then it was Cummings, an odd man in many ways but a ruthless implementer calling for root and branch civil service reform.  Now Kate Bingham adds her voice to the chorus: what a hopeless mess we would be in if vaccine procurement had been left to the civil service because they would still be faddling around as the numbers of dead rocketed. One can easily believe that. After all, it is the reason why the government circumvented normal channels in the first place.

But there is no need to rely on these luminaries to realise that something is wrong with the public administration. Take those on universal credit who find employment. What if they have been paid in advance but the new salary is in arrears? Will the DWP step in to help them bridge the gap, an obvious thing to do if the overall payments are to be minimised? No, whether because of the rules or those administering them, it doesn’t happen. Many people abandon the thought of work because of the disruptive interaction with benefits. Then there are those who are eligible for disability benefits. How often are they required to attend personally, often dragging themselves over considerable distances when a doctor’s letter should suffice? It isn’t a sadistic plot to make them suffer. It is a reflection of rules and of officers who do not have the discretion or sense to waive them.

It is of course inevitable that public administration will be rules-driven. Organisations like the DWP are enormous and it is desirable that the different officers carry out their duties consistently. Also, when things go wrong, the easy solution is to put a new rule in place. “We have introduced a new rule to see that that never happens again”, says the Minister fatly adding one more piece of rigidity to an already gothic system.

So if rules are the problem how can we improve matters? To have less of them would be one answer, but perhaps it is more important to increase flexibility. Successful organisations allow those on the ground to exercise their discretion. Nelson did not win at Trafalgar by dictating detailed instructions to his captains. He expected them to see what was necessary and to act accordingly. Yes, there was a risk that they would make mistakes but that was more than outweighed by the advantage of letting them use their own experience and judgement.

The DWP is no battle fleet and Therese Coffey is no Nelson, and the same can be said of the other main ministries and those running them. Still, the point stands good. Good administration requires flexibility and trusting the staff on the ground to make good decisions. If they cannot be trusted, the remedy is to improve the staff, not to tie them down by imposing restrictions on the way they operate. Good quality people exercising a reasonable amount of discretion will always beat monkeys following tight rules.

In today’s computer-driven age it is not just the public sector which has become rule-bound. Private businesses operate with detailed procedures and against checklists. But the private sector is different because if a firm takes rigidity too far its profits are affected and eventually it goes under. This serves as an automatic brake on excessive rules. In the public sector there is no such break and the deadly cycle of restricting flexibility to control stupid people and then appointing stupid people because the job seems an easy one, can easily run away with itself.

To break out of that cycle a number of things are needed. The first is an acceptance by politicians and the public that discretion will sometimes be foolishly or wrongly used. When that happens the reaction must be to fire those who are incompetent and not to impose restrictions to control them. The second is a higher quality of public administrator, better educated and capable of carrying through a function which requires a higher level of judgement. How do we find or create them? Mr Blair when elected said that his priorities should be “education, education, education”. He wasn’t wrong about that.