Stephen Webb argues that we should replicate what we can from the style of administration that worked in earlier centuries
It might have been easy in the past to dismiss some of this as hostility from a political quarter that has always had a deep suspicion of the Civil Service. But that would be dangerous. Such criticisms have more resonance than we have heard for decades. When asked in a recent poll to choose between “our political and social institutions are worth preserving and improving, not destroying” or “when I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn’”, the public only opted for ‘preservation’ by 62 points to 38. Among those aged 18-24, there was a clear majority for burning it all down.
Condemnation of the failings of the state used to be seen as ‘right-coded’, driven by paranoia towards the ‘deep state’ or a distaste in principle for the public sector. But it did not take long for ministers and officials in the current Labour Government to begin making similar complaints about Whitehall’s performance and responsiveness.
Much of what has been written in this area fails to explain why the administrative state operates as it does. In recent times, for example, its most dysfunctional aspects like grade inflation and constant job churn can arguably be explained by individuals’ perfectly rational responses to civil service reforms championed by both main parties since the 1990s.
For all the enormous leverage a developed bureaucracy can give political leaders, however, the relationship between governments and their officials has never been straightforward. As far back as you look, even to the first ancient empires, there was an inherent tension between rulers and the administrative class, beset by misaligned interests and different time horizons.
At the same time, British people aren’t wrong to feel we used to be able to govern far more competently than we do now. Over a range of periods, roles and circumstances, you can find case studies in which the British state has performed remarkable feats: from Thomas Cromwell in the reign of Henry VIII to great ‘proto civil servants’ like Samuel Pepys, father of the Royal Navy and the administrative machines supporting ministers like Robert Peel in the Home Office, David Lloyd George delivering the first social insurance and Aneurin Bevan founding the NHS.
Then there’s the Admiralty’s blockade of French-held ports, direction of fleet movements, and general logistical support for the Navy during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century, and the great local government reforms of Joseph Chamberlain in Birmingham. Given our current preoccupation with operational delivery and infrastructure, it’s salutary to recall the Regency Post Office and the first ‘communications revolution’ provided by the mail coaches.
Nothing preoccupies critics today as much as our inability to build. Yet during the early build-out of the UK’s civil nuclear programme, the UK led the world. In its 18th century struggles with France, that strange and brilliant hybrid organisation the Bank of England was described by Adam Smith as “not an ordinary bank, but a great engine of state.”
Citing case studies where the heat of the policy battles has faded makes it easier to set aside our personal prejudices and concentrate on understanding the conditions that made previous achievements possible. For the most interesting questions here are, what is it about the way we governed then that we don’t do now, and is it really not possible to return to approaches that bore such fruit in the past?
History offers some common themes. The first is the clarity of purpose that high functioning organisations enjoy. We have a habit of describing government in mechanical terms – the Civil Service as a ‘Rolls Royce’ (or a less flattering make). The implication is that if we design and build the machine properly, it will serve us well, irrespective of the task. But institutions are composed of humans, with human motivations. Not even the best organised civil service will perform if neglected, subject to constant change or directed at confusing or trivial ends.
It is also striking how little attention great reformers tended to pay to the workings of the administrative system itself. They did not see themselves as ‘government reformers’ as such, being preoccupied with bigger strategic goals. Typically they would do whatever was necessary to the administrative system to land their immediate strategic aims, with little concern for consistency.
Even the lauded Northcote-Trevelyan reforms and their counterpart, the Pendleton Act in the US, were arguably motivated more by political and cultural factors than by compelling evidence of the failure of the systems they were looking to reform. For all its limpid prose, the Northcote-Trevelyan Report puts forward very little actual evidence for the supposed poor performance of existing departments. Historians vaguely point to the administrative shortcomings demonstrated in the Crimean War. This would be ironic, as one of the main bodies criticised, the Army Commissariat, fell under none other than Charles Trevelyan at the Treasury. Rather, the move to a strict merit-based system and the end to patronage was a stake demanded and secured by the rising middle classes in the running of the country. Similarly, in the United States, civil service reform was a push back by the WASP classes on the (then) semi-literate Irish, Southern and Eastern European immigrants who were accused of selling their votes to the corrupt party machines in return for jobs.
A second theme is just how much used to be achieved by so few. While the modern Treasury has about 3000 staff, Lloyd George passed the People’s Budget with 26. Peel ran the business of most of modern Whitehall from the Home Office with 17. The process of drafting Lloyd George’s National Insurance Bill seems astonishing now. Braithwaite, an assistant secretary (deputy director in modern civil service terminology) led the drafting with a single assistant, dealing with a single Parliamentary draftsman and close cooperation with one Treasury official. He dictated drafting instructions on the Bill to a team of typists between 4–8pm and then at home to his wife, finishing on one occasion at 2am. An exercise that would nowadays easily involve 60–100 staff was being carried out by a handful.
Thirdly, the case studies suggest that, at its peak, British administration seemed to strike a balance between recognising the importance of process, for example on appointments by merit and on procurement and audit, but without allowing the processes to become ends in themselves. Lloyd George’s civil service combined the first outstanding generation of senior officials who had come up through the exam route with brilliant mavericks like Beveridge, appointed on a more old-fashioned patronage basis. Procurement was characterised by multi-decade contracts, huge degrees of reward for success and an ability to set process aside when the situation demanded it.
Today, in contrast, all the pressure from organisations like the Institute for Government and the good government lobby is to take codification and processes through to their logical conclusion. Perhaps the good working of government resembles our perceptions of the human face. We appreciate growing symmetry but only up to a point – perfect symmetry can even be offputting, just as a fully codified and rules-based system risks stagnation and unresponsiveness.
The final striking difference between then and now is just how comfortable government used to be in conducting operations, building things and striking long-term symbiotic relations with private sector entities. Eighteenth and nineteenth century governments were small, but included large and effective operational arms like Excise, the Post Office and the naval dockyards. These organisations were frequently pioneers in the industrial revolution, as with the first introduction of mass manufacturing techniques in the Navy yards. Chamberlain railed against private ownership of the utilities, while the 19th century Post Office pioneered some extraordinary risk and profit share arrangements impossible to imagine today.
My generation grew up on a diet of New Public Management, of consultancy-driven dogma about government needing to withdraw from operations and acting instead as the ‘intelligent customer’ with a web of contractual based relationships with the private sector. But once you no longer know how to do something yourself, your ability to be an intelligent customer rapidly decays.
If this is strong meat for some, applying the lessons learned to the problem of administration and setting out remedies may be even harder. Given the critical policy challenges ahead, the trend of recent decades to give power away needs to be reversed. We have seen ministers and Parliament setting policy aspirations in statute, inviting judges to act as arbiters of what is proportionate. Arm’s-length bodies have been set up with broad powers in their specific areas, but with neither the political mandate nor the legal duty to take decisions in the round. Critical decisions are increasingly given to independent bodies or overseen by statutory oversight groups, justified by the competence that technical expertise supposedly guarantees but questionably demonstrated by many of these organisations’ performance over recent years.
The remedy to this is to bring power home to ministers, restoring the Westminster System which enabled democratically elected governments to make radical change rapidly and taking advantage of a strong but independent civil service. There is a ‘cultural cringe’ on both the Left and Right towards the US, with its separation of powers and the grandeur of its presidency – but who, looking at the challenges we face now, really wants to replicate the federal gridlock in the UK?
Restoring authority to ministers is part of the story, but anyone who loves public service and does not want to see it burnt down needs to recognise the poor state the administrative class has got into. Few have fully grasped the eye-watering scale of senior and, particularly, middle management grade inflation, while the decay of subject matter expertise is attributable in part to a pay system that is increasingly uncompetitive at senior grades even while the pension costs for the wider service are becoming unsustainable.
A stronger government would actually benefit from a stronger Parliament, too. It is no longer controversial to lament that parliamentary drafting and scrutiny of legislation is not what it used to be. Few are prepared to question whether the Cook modernisation reforms, the Nolan Principles and the growing layers of scrutiny by unelected bodies on standards and expenses are part of the problem, rather than the solution.
Indeed the focus on integrity and ethics, while obviously desirable, would have had a pretty devastating impact on otherwise great figures from history. Pepys’ sexual misconduct, corruption around Lloyd George, Bevan perjuring himself in a libel trial, the whiff of political violence around Chamberlain – modern standards of behaviour would have finished them all off. The only one who would have survived was Peel, which is perhaps why so many of his colleagues thought him a bit of a prig.
Analysing polling in this country and abroad suggests that the crisis of trust in government and politicians has less to do with behaviour than competence, and their ability or even intention to deliver what they had promised. If the system cannot be reformed to enable political leaders to match deeds to promises, we can expect a further groundswell of support for the ‘burn it down’ option.
