The next Labour government will need to reform Whitehall

—Before 2010, the Conservatives sought to make political capital out of ‘Labour waste’ – implying that all would be improved once Tory rather than Labour ministers were steering the ship of state. There were plenty of examples of Whitehall’s multibillion-pound waste they could cite, from the maladministered NHS supercomputer project to the Nimrod anti-submarine aircraft procurement overspend. But since 2010 Conservative ministers have found their departments facing the same criticisms that were levelled at Labour – that their government is insufficiently competent. The idea that there was nothing wrong in Whitehall that a change from Labour to Conservative ministers would not fix has proved a painful Tory self-delusion.

It is clear that the ineffectiveness of government is not simply the fault of the politicians. Nor can it be solved simply by a change in the political hue of ministers. Moreover, this is the view of civil servants themselves, as evidenced by the latest civil service staff survey. Only 39 per cent of civil servants have confidence in the decisions made by their senior managers. In some departments it is worse: only 16 per cent have confidence in the decisions made by the Department for Work and Pensions’ senior civil servants.

But there is little appetite at the top of Whitehall for meaningful reform. The Department for Transport claimed in its 2012 capability review: ‘There is a strongly embedded culture at the DfT of using evidence to inform policy development and strategy. DfT’s spending review directorate built a rigorous financial planning model to allow scrutiny of budgets which was used to ensure that individual decisions were considered in relation to the department’s wider objectives and priorities.’ This self-description is difficult to reconcile with the recent West Coast mainline franchising fiasco.

With one exception, Whitehall’s own capability review process to ensure improvement of management and performance has become a whitewash. That exception is the Department of Energy and Climate Change, the single ‘delivery’ department that used external assessors rather than a process of ‘self-marking’.
Ed Miliband has placed the ‘green growth’ agenda at the heart of Labour’s aspiration to boost Britain’s economic performance and support greater investment in public services. To succeed he will need to have a top-flight government machine. But DECC’s own capability review concedes: ‘Recruitment of delivery skills has been slow and DECC does not have a basis on which to prioritise resource allocations, or to understand the impact of scarce resources on delivery timetables and policy outcomes.’

DECC’s capability review reflects systemic problems afflicting Whitehall: a style of employment and career planning that rotates people between unrelated roles too frequently, devaluing the very expertise ministers need Whitehall to build and a failure to act on performance, whether good or bad. Across Whitehall only 37 per cent of civil servants agree that poor performance is dealt with effectively in their team and the civil service’s own reform plans actually defend the practice of rotation, saying that it ‘advances the needs and priorities of departments’.

The problems are not new. The Fulton commission that Harold Wilson created to examine the capability of the civil service ‘took minutes and wasted years’ – most of its meaningful recommendations were simply ignored by the Whitehall regime.

The evidence in the capability reviews shows that civil service reform is not some optional luxury, but an essential underpinning to sustaining a successful Labour government. The important new report published by IPPR on this subject last month makes several important recommendations based on rigorous analysis of international comparisons that Labour would be foolish not to support. But Labour will need to go considerably further. Unless Miliband’s team can hit the ground running with a fully worked-out plan for how they will ensure that Whitehall can deliver what is needed, his plans for growth risk the same fate as Wilson’s of 1964.

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Greg Rosen is author of Old Labour to New: The Dreams That Inspired, the Battles That Divided

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Photo: KyussQ