As in car mechanics or home improvements, in government it is easier to destroy than to build. In some ways, though, the hardest task is that of reform – for while destroyers need no friends and builders start afresh, reformers must retain people’s support while threatening vested interests, skewing power structures and heightening organisational tensions.

Civil servants know all this, and often prefer to finesse a structure than to reform or dismantle it. Hence their tendency to add to systems rather than challenge them – a habit that adds new layers of complexity, often representing not the best solution but the path of least resistance.
Sometimes, politicians fall into the same trap: once its reforming zeal had ebbed away, the Labour administration often launched ‘initiatives’ to tackle the results of problems, rather than pushing through systemic changes to address their causes. Most such initiatives did some good, but as soon as the dedicated funding pot ran dry the problems resurfaced.

With the coalition’s reforming zeal in full flood, many ministers have wholeheartedly embraced the two alternative approaches: reform and demolition. Many reforms are, of course, long overdue. Cabinet Office changes to procurement and property management, for example, should save cash without damaging services: if there are hiccups, that reflects the complexity of reform rather than the need for it.

In other parts of government, the reforms are so ambitious as to verge on the dangerous: the NHS and Ministry of Defence both need surgery, but in each case too drastic an operation could kill the patient. The riskiest areas of government action, though, involve strategic destruction – and here, most eyes turn towards the communities department (DCLG).
Communities secretary Eric Pickles appears to believe that, to push powers down to local people, he must demolish all the layers of regional organisation: spatial strategies, development agencies, local authorities’ leaders boards, and government offices. But Labour spent 12 years refining and improving these systems; and though they weren’t perfect: they facilitated strategic decision-making about infrastructure and growth.

With regional structures disappearing, yawning gaps are appearing – and other actors are racing to plug them. The transport and business departments, for example, are both recreating regional presences. But until local enterprise partnerships (LEPs) are strong and unified enough to resolve complex, controversial issues and speak with a single voice, most of the work of sub-national planning will either revert to central departments – or be abandoned. Remember: Labour tried this with city-regions, and never got there. Meanwhile transport minister Theresa Villiers warned her select committee in December that the DfT might not have strategic partners at the sub-national level until 2015.

The problems caused by these aspects of localism may not become clear for years, emerging – for example – in a failure to build transport, housing and communications infrastructures serving economic growth. But in the meantime, other hastily-devised localist policies may give civil servants a headache much more quickly.

As our article on localismand civil service accountability explains, accounting officers will in future have to answer to Parliament for the spending of money over which they have less and less control. Here too, the government’s reform agenda is leaving ugly gaps in some systems and rendering others obsolete. It is worrying that these risks have not been worked through long before implementation: in this case, the issue is only coming to public attention because public accounts committee chair Margaret Hodge is getting increasingly noisy.

Number 10 permanent secretary Jeremy Heywood has told CSW that the government’s decision-making processes are stronger than ever. But the growing number of policy U-turns, and the emergence of localist policies that raise more questions than they answer, tell a different story. In the end, parliamentary scrutiny and select committee criticisms may address many of these issues before they cause too much damage in the real world. But if government was working at its best, civil servants’ mandate to ‘speak truth to power’ would surely head them off before that.

As Heywood says, ministers value “independent advice, impartial advice, fearless advice.” Even the PM, Heywood argues, “likes to be challenged.” Of course, civil servants must work to serve the elected government; but part of that service involves scrutinising ideas that might cause serious damage. It may be difficult to challenge ministers – particularly those who tend to see warnings as blocking techniques – but if civil servants end up implementing poor policies, they are serving neither the long-term interests of the country nor, indeed, the minister.