Remember Kate Bingham who led the vaccine task force during Covid? Giving evidence to the inquiry this week she spoke of ‘open warfare’ between government departments, the lack of expertise and the torpor of ‘group think’. But her most damning criticism was for the civil service where ‘…no one’s ever done anything. They’re all busy writing policy papers and sending each other stuff to review. None of that actually gets to the heart of what it is they’re trying to do. What are they trying to achieve? And are they measured against the delivery of their goals? And the answer is no.”
Politicians of all parties too often blame civil servants for failure, are blatantly offensive about ‘the blob, ‘the tepid bath of managed decline’ or in Liz Truss’s parallel universe, ‘the deep state’. There are many people doing excellent work and coping with the challenge of mediocre, bullying and constantly changing ministers and priorities. But the reality is that many enter the civil service with minimal if any experience of anything where if you don’t deliver, you’re out of a job. A lack of scientific, engineering, technical or logistics knowledge means it is desperately lacking expertise and instead, outsources and relies on external experts. As Dame Kate said, ‘….the more you outsource it to major management consultancies, the more you’re never going to build that capability internally. ‘
As Dame Louise Casey is asked to carry out yet another review, on top of the one she’s already doing into social care, one can’t help but wonder why Whitehall is not learning from her particular skillset and recruiting more people like her, pragmatic, sensible, focused and not afraid of speaking truth to power. Or indeed why successive governments have not implemented her recommendations be they regarding rough sleepers and homelessness, social exclusion, the Met police, sexual exploitation in Rotherham, community cohesion, anti-social behaviour or the pitch invasion at Wembley Arena in 2021.
Inquiries are long, extremely costly and while they might appease a baying mob temporarily, by the time the findings are reported most people have forgotten what the question was, governments may have changed and invariably the report sits on a virtual shelf gathering virtual dust while no one is held to account.
There might be a time when Louise Casey says no to carrying out yet another review so surely it’s time for the government to instil belief, confidence and passion into the civil service, speed things up a bit and get cracking. Its ambitions are bold but the risk to realising them comes not from across the floor of the Commons but today’s Sir Humphreys whose co-creator Jonathan Lynn once said: “Civil servants have an extraordinary genius for wrapping up a simple idea to make it sound extremely complicated.”
