The Blunders of Our Governments

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What changes might make the UK government less blunder-prone? Institutional reforms should be designed to inject a larger measure of formal policy deliberation outside the executive, including pre-legislative scrutiny in Parliament and formal public consultation of organised interests and expert individuals. Higher priority should be given to improving two-way collaboration between policy designers and policy implementers. The rotation of civil servants and officials should be significantly reduced and their public accountability increased. Behavioural change is more difficult to engineer, although there is scope for the recruitment, training and promotion of officials with skills in risk assessment, project management and policy evaluation. In addition, the gene pool of ministers should be widened: the UK is one of the very few democracies in which ministers must be recruited from the ranks of parliamentarians (largely MPs) and members of parliament are effectively recruited by local constituency parties for whom competence in governing is a minor consideration. In Britain, politicians and senior officials are also disparaged for the simple reason that our governments get things wrong, sometimes very badly wrong. They blunder, probably increasingly, probably on a greater scale than at least some comparable countries, and certainly unnecessarily and too often. Anthony King and I have completed a study of major government blunders committed by the UK government between 1980 and 2010 to see if there is a pattern that explains these missteps. What is a blunder?

the Poll Tax that cost the country millions, caused riots and helped to bring down a Prime Minister; In the British system blunderers go unpunished. Indeed, achievers often go unnoticed and unrewarded. The main reason is that ministers and senior officials typically stay in post for a couple of years. By the time a blunder becomes apparent, they have moved on or out. They do not even appear before the Public Accounts Committee or the relevant select committee. It is left to their hapless successors to do the explaining and apologising.The effect of the changes has been to distract and fragment an NHS already facing severe financial pressures. Billions have been spent rebadging bureaucrats, while the reforms have ignored the central problem for health systems in all advanced economies – how to merge social care for fast-ageing populations with the traditional diagnose-and-mend approach. The UK is not the only country to have a blundering government. James Thomson's famous analysis of the disaster that was the Vietnam War makes both entertaining and sobering reading.: How Could Vietnam Happen?: An Autopsy. There is also too little attention to the issue of what Alasdair Roberts has recently called ‘large forces’ – the big shifts in society, economy, technology and politics that force governments to confront new problems, or old problems in new ways. All the blunders in this book were (failed) responses to these ‘large forces’, where in other areas governments have done well confronting large scale change (see Chapter 2 of this volume). The common feature of the dozen case studies of blunders is that the Government did not engage in serious deliberation. Almost all of the blunders were gestated largely in-house, within the executive branch. The Government did not deliberate with the people most directly affected, with those whose job it is to apply a policy, with independent experts, and with those who were opposed, before arriving at a decision.

In the featured case studies all this is frequently made worse by “operational disconnect”. “No feature of the blunders we have studied”, say the authors, “stands out more prominently than the divorce between those who make policies and those charged with implementing them...Most of the policy makers responsible for the blunders...assumed they had done the hard bit when they had decided what Government policy should be. Clearly they were wrong.” If you are reading this in HMRC, DWP or any other big operational department, you are probably already cheering the authors on. The second problem is what they call ‘musical chairs’ – the tendency for both Ministers and senior Mandarins to frequently change their jobs, so that the senior team in any Ministry rarely lasts for more than a couple of years. This problem compounds another – ‘ministerial activism’. As most Ministers can expect to be in post for no more than one or two years, they have a very little time in which to make their mark with some signature policy or reform. This encourages over-rapid decision-making and repeated reform initiatives. As most serious reforms take 4-5 years at least to bed down, Ministers and Mandarins have often moved on, along with the policy agenda, long before anything has been achieved (or not). The later part of the book seeks to draw out the lessons learned and here it is stronger on analysis than on solutions. The list of lessons is familiar and the authors have to a large extent drawn them from interviews with experienced politicians and civil servants. But that begs the question, why then aren’t the lessons learned? Why don’t things get better? A recurring theme in the book provides, I think, most of the answer. low capability in central and local commissioning bodies: government is still developing its capacity to design and steward systems that rely on independent service providers. As the Institute argued in its System Stewardship report, the shift towards decentralised delivery models necessitates a much more open and iterative engagement between providers of public services (public, private and voluntary sector) and those setting policy or ‘rules’. We found, however, that government has yet to think systematically about how its role and ways of working must adapt.

More books by Ivor Crewe

But where to start? Well, a very good place would be Anthony King’s and Ivor Crewe’s The Blunders of our Governments whose subject is This is a must read book for anyone interested in British public affairs, writes Prof Colin Talbot. It is seminal, not so much for the insight it offers – much of what it says has been said before – but in the way it brings together in one place the list of catastrophic blunders of government and their causes. There is something for everyone with an interest in government and governing here. policy-making and their desire for long-term thinking. Council house sales have been a major blunder,