When it comes to delivery the UK Civil Service is ranked 4th overall InCiSE . But it does not feel like we have good governance. Democratic Audit identifies "unprecedented declines in the core institutions of the UK’s democratic system, particularly at the centre" Democratic Audit 2 .
In many ways the UK is not as good as it likes to think.
Instead of engaging with its citizens the state now habitually sells assets and outsources or hives off services. With few exceptions these go to (usually large) private organisations. Even though they are running public services, commercial confidentiality throws a veil over transparency and hinders accountability. Public Services have a direct bearing on our lives. If they go wrong we suffer, our experience of the service is degraded.
Good governance is simply about management processes and accountability. When we insulate or remove services from users (who are citizens) by creating agencies, or by outsourcing, when we have cursory oversight there is no clear accountability. Management failings come in many guises: short term thinking, lack of investment, over-charging, loss of continuity because of management career hopping, hubris and the abouse of the right to manage, bullying, laziness, lack of direction, abuse of position power, group think, the list could go on an on. These are ever present, they are not selective they can occur in both the private and public sectors. Our current political economy does little to combat them, instead it provides a huge space in which they can thrive.
Not as good as we think we are
The sources above, that give the UK a civil service a high score intentionally have a narrow technical focus - they are looking at the managerial processes of what is left, and they are, understandably, only look at things are as they are. In this chapter I am deliberately going to pick some low key examples to illustrate just how pervasive and insidious the degradation of public accountability has become.
Before I do that here are just three justifications for the statement that we are not as good as we like to think;
- Education; we now have 50% of students going to university: "For England, a further concern is that young adults perform no better than older ones. So although adults approaching retirement age (55-65 year-olds) in England compare reasonably well with their counterparts in other countries, younger people are lagging badly behind (see Figure 1). Other things being equal (including migration) this means that in time the basic skills of the English labour force could fall further behind those of other countries. In many countries rising education attainment has driven better basic skills. But while in England many young people are more likely than their parents’ generation to continue to further and higher education, too many still have weak basic skills."
OECD Skills Report
- Health; we pride ourselves on the NHS, and it scores very highly in many, except outcomes. "The UK’s NHS performs worse than the average in the treatment of 8 out of the 12 most common causes of death, including deaths within 30 days of having a heart attack and within five years of being diagnosed with breast cancer, rectal cancer, colon cancer, pancreatic cancer and lung cancer, despite narrowing the gap in recent years." Nuffield Trust Assesment
- Services; If you are benefit claimant or fall foul of nationality legislation you will experience at first hand some callous and inflexible aspect of the state. The inflexibility of process does not allow, even sympathetic staff, any latitude Note: Staff Discretion . In the current administration you are not treated like a citizen. Most people who are in work and doing OK just don't get it and the narrative of scroungers is relentless. There is a something like folk memory of a more generous system that no longer exists. I don't think most people understand what is being done in their name. We only notice it when we collide with it, volunteer in a Food Bank or go to see a film like I Daniel Blake.
These types of problems are not simply about funding, there will always be a debate about how much is enough, nor can they be fixed by winning an election to deliver top down (do it to you) change, a Ministerial power seeker on a mission with less than 50% electoral support, can wreak plenty of havoc. A good minister with expertise may not last long enough to do anything and turnover is real problem Being a Minister
Devolution is a positive development and there have been some positive developments Democratic Audit . In government generally there is much more information available within a few clicks thanks to the governments use of IT. I have been able to use it to make this assessment.
If we step back and look at the system as a whole we can see the decline in democracy and accountability in a number of trends. These are ongoing centralisation, outsourcing and the hiving off of services. The bonfire of the quangos may have been announced Note: Bonfire of the Quangos but its successors can be just as bad.
The trends are;
Creeping centralisation and the removal of power from local government, a long term trend with only Scottish and Welsh devolution going in the other direction
Direct control being replaced with outsourcing. The idea is that this will improve efficiency and effectiveness but it frequently fails because monitoring changes to contract compliance which is very different - contracts can be gamed, all business sales lead with low bids and make profits from add ons. In this setting targets can have perverse effects for the public use and quality of service as we say with the number of claims the have to be rejected to meet targets.
Hiving off government (that is executive) responsibilities to arms length organisations such as trusts and agencies. These are still paid for out of the public purse but the oversight is variable, perhaps as little as a bi-annual ministerial review, the chairmanships and other appointment become patronage to be handed out.
These trends are on top of cuts. Cuts mean the people in public life become complicit in lowering wages which in turn adds to the in-work benefits bill. There is no doubt that many (neo-liberals) regard the reduction of the state as an end in itself, the accompaniment of deregulation. Inevitably this reduces the civic space, it's perverse effect is to open the way to greed and provide a hiding place for poor service delivery.
Lets take a look at the public vs private debate which I think misses the point entirely;
Private; I was in the private sector for my entire working life, the very idea that the private sector can deliver better than the public sector I find laughable. As an employee, and on-assignment consultant I witness at first hand what is routine in the private sector. In competitive business the drive for profit means an endless concentration on cost cutting, making do with as little as possible - not something I want in my public services. In businesses with dominant possitions the term used was "fat and happy" they were often slow and unresponsive, waste was high - again not something I want in my public services.
In addition to that there are issues of scale, most of what the private sector does is dwarfed by the scale of public services. Interestingly the reverse of this has some truth, business experience would not easily transfer into being a Minister Being a Minister op.cit.
Public; I am sure some Public Works Departments were not efficient, what I also believe is that they could not compete against lower wages and poorer benefits. TUPE protections run out. Our elected councillors (obliged to take the lowest tender) are made complicit in the low wage economy. The public still picks up a larger bill because we now have a huge amount of spending on in work benefits.
Service Delivery is what matters and how it is delivered is simply a matter of managing the process with accountability to the user (that would be us, citizens). It always has been about that and always will be. I don't care if the dustbins are emptied by a private company if its employment practices and wages are fair and the owner makes what Schumacker called a right livelihood. I'd much rather it be a small local co-operative than a big provider, that would be so much better for the local economy. I'm also sure we have to build into requirements, at the tendering stage to specify the level of profit it is legitimate to take from running the service. We need to partner with public service suppliers in much the same way Japanse firms do with their suppliers Leeds Procurement .
To illustrate exactly how undemocratic and vulnerable to poor governance we have become, here are the two low key but fairly detailed descriptions. These are based on both public data and personal experience Note: Information on Public Bodies
Example 1– Leaseholders Advisory Service
This is responsible to the Department for Communities and Local Government. The Chairmanship is carried out by Roger Southam for £9,184pa. The professional work is carried out by Chief Exec. Anthony Essien for which he is paid £75,000.
The body exists “To provide front line advice service on residential leasehold law and rights in England & Wales and on Park Homes.” It has no regulatory role and is only subject to triennial review, it has 19 employees and is funded to the tune of £1,034,000.
Roger Southam clearly has some relevant experience, he works independently in the property sector as his biography makes clear; “Roger Southam has an ability to solve problems and produce results in all areas of real estate. In a career spanning nearly 40 years he has managed, advised, and problem-solved on billions of pounds of property. Whatever the challenge he has the skillset and aptitude to tackle, address and resolve.”
In 2012 the Secretariat of the All Party Parliamentary Group on leasehold reform, said in its Editorial, “Anyone who thought that last week’s annual conference of Leasehold Advisory Service, a quango paid for out of taxpayers’ money, would be a gathering of ordinary leaseholders, swapping ideas and experiences of managing their apartment blocks, would have been sadly deluded…It was, in fact, a very expensive trade show filled with representatives from RICS, ARMA, large-scale managing agents, landlords, solicitors and barristers who have twigged that payola is to be had in this unglamorous backwater of the law.”
In 2016 we get the scandal of ground rents doubling. In 2017 Peter Bottomley attended the Leaseholders Advisory Service AGM and threatend the organisation with privatisation (by 2020) unless it started to represent leaseholders. In April 2019 a new chair was appointed Wanda Goldwag.
So with a prediction that it looked bad in 2012, we are 7 years later and it just goes on Note: Doubling Ground-Rents
Example 2– The Canals and Rivers Trust
Ignoring Users - a small irritation
Here is a very local (parochial even) example of how degraded our so-called democracy has become. I was Secretary of Leeds Sea Cadets Management Committee from 2005-2018. The unit rents its site from the Canals and Rivers Trust. This is a successor company to British Waterways. The access road to our premises is their private road. In October 2017 with 4 days notice we were told that parking on the road would be banned, with no exceptions, 24 hours a day. The enforcement was outsourced to a private (that's a for profit company). We were unable to negotiate sensibly with the person responsible for this, no consultation with the tenants of CRT which included the Leeds Rowing Club took place. By the time we found out it was already a fait-accompli.
There may be a problem, it could have been solved by a parking ban between 9am to 5-00pm but if group think was in play that might have required some consultation. The organisation could not change policy, by the time we were notified the decision had already been made, money spent, signs erected and contracts let.
The point: A charity with a public service remit and a voluntary body using publicly owned land, had to plead with a functionary (whose allegiance is naturally to their employer) to get just 10 passes. This land is held in trust for the benefit of the public, rather than being told we are banned from parking should we not have some form of representation and democratic oversight?
Ignoring Users - a deliberate affront
This is a very minor issue in comparison to the Canals and Rivers Trust attitude to people who live on their boats. If you followed the link to the CRT pages above you could be forgiven for thinking that this is a body action on h=behalf of its users - the problem is if you look at the various advisory groups you'd never guess that anyone lived on a boat. Essentially, boat owners are allowed to pay for a mooring for 14 days and must then move on. There is no requirement for them to have a permanent mooring, indeed many marinas don’t allow residential use of boats. The CRT has adopted a policy of refusing licence renewals to boat owners who don’t move far enough between each 14 day mooring. The definition of far enough is their own concoction and has deliberately been made too long for people to hold down jobs or get children to school. Those in breach have their boats, often their only capital asset, impounded and so become indebted and homeless.
The CRT has implemented this policy to subvert a restriction placed on them by the Waterways Act of 1995, this denied them the right to force people who lived on boats to use permanent moorings and criminalise those who didn’t (which is what they lobbied for). Protesters have had to resort to petitions to Parliament Note: Canals & Rivers Trust
We own the waterways. The CRT should run a service on behalf of us and in particular the estimated 10,000 people who live on their boats. The CRT do not do this, they believe that all they have to do is make the waterways attractive for leisure users and have a hostile attitude to people who have escaped the housing crisis. Because of the way they are set up, this goes unchallenged unless there is a protest campaign. This is a case of 10,000 people with a direct interest have no participation and being deliberately disengaged. (Comment Jan 2024; Since I wrote this the CRT has become a charity, how much its culture has changed is moot)
I discuss the general causes of political disengagement in Timeline - Present - Limited participation and disengagement
Summing up, political implications
The examples I have provided show how we all loose out and how little control we actually have over our own services and assets.
The examples I have given are symptoms of a wider malaise that runs through our entire political and economic system, we are voters, users, consumers but not citizens, we are granted things when it suites but are comprehensively excluded otherwise. Most people don't want to push themselves forward and jump through the hoops. The system is a mix of patronage, self promotion and selection of those who can show that are acceptable.
To reiterate then, instead of wide engagement with its citizens, as of right, the state is pursuing policies that make public accountability difficult. Some organisations are more open than others, some appear open but have (deliberate) blindspots. Where there is good practice it is at the discretion of the local management and not by right of citizenship. Where there are vested interests and obvious wrongs they cannot be sorted out either easily or quickly. It is at best a bit of a hodge-podge. Agencies and outsourcing are difficult to challenge. Both our experience of the service as well as he underlying service is degraded.
The governance process should be wide enough to include the users of services and the wider community it serves. This is not a partisan point, but so far as I know no party is investing the necessary political capital to overhaul the constitution. It is obvious that Parliament cannot oversee these bodies, and the executive has over the years moved them from direct ministerial overview to an arms-length arrangement. At arm’s length the key appointments become a form of patronage and vested interests can be disproportionately represented. There is little break on cronyism and the general public less and less influence.
This whole swath of government has to be opened up to scrutiny. A great fuss was made about getting rid of quango’s but this entirely missed the point; they all exist to do something, what they need is scrutiny and for the people in them to be held accountable. They have to be pulled away from being a (small c) conservative part of establishment and be made into a tool of the new order; not defensive, but accountable and capable of change.
This probably makes up an effective form of social control but it is not democracy or anything like it. Most of use barely notice, and as a result fails to see that we should have solidarity with the people at the sharp end. The people who really suffer are the ones who fall foul of the Hostile Environment, or Universal Benefit rollout.
There are a number of ways to fix this, the various agencies and trusts could be returned to the government administration that they were originally part of. Party political oversight could be reinstated but this brings in the risk of tribalism and token appointments. The political appointees on Hospital Boards or Watch Committees of the past were often filled by the party worthies. The scale of the oversight required is huge, party political issues aside, parliament or local government does not have the bandwidth to do the job. A new approach is needed, a democratic one. The organisations can be revitalised and democratised whist continuing to exist in their own right. The way to do this is to create oversight boards which as well as experts, users, managers and workers also includes randomly selected citizens. This is know as Sortition Note: Sortition? . Random selection provides the necessary level of disinterest, it is a form of inoculation against cronyism and special interests and it brings in the wider representation citizenry.