‘Good Government’, the Better Government Initiative’s (BGI’s) recent report, received a predictable reception in the press. Its criticisms of ‘sofa government’, excessive and poorly drafted legislation, and the expansion in special advisers’ numbers and influence appeared in headlines such as: ‘Top mandarins in attack on New Labour’.

 

Along with evidence to the Chilcott inquiry and various comments by former Whitehall bigwigs, the report is seen in some quarters as part of a concerted attempt by the senior civil service to ‘get its own back’ on New Labour, while encouraging an incoming government to be much more respectful of the service’s benign influence and impartial expertise. 

 

I welcome the focus of the report. When I worked [as a Blair special adviser] in Number 10, my criticism of the Cabinet Office’s departmental capability review process was that it tended to leave untouched the important and problematic interface between the politicians, political advisers and the civil service. In particular, it seemed to me that ministers wanting quick results and facing official resistance found it very hard to distinguish between arguments soundly based on analysis and experience, and those which reflected bureaucratic inertia or institutional prejudice. In making this judgement, ministers were sometimes encouraged by self-interested special advisers to be suspicious rather than open-minded.

 

In areas ranging from cabinet committees to public consultation and parliamentary scrutiny, the BGI ideas would give officials a set of more demanding criteria to be met before policies are enacted. But while I agree with many of the report’s aims and findings, it is lacking on two fronts.

 

First, although it has been portrayed as a comprehensive critique of the functioning of government, it is in fact a strangely conservative document. Its underlying message is that if we had wiser politicians, with less political interference and more official and parliamentary checks and balances, then once again a Rolls Royce Whitehall service could rule a grateful citizenry with purring efficiency.

 

Leaving aside whether this is a fair impression to create about the world before 1997, both Whitehall and Westminster face problems more fundamental than alleged flaws in the governance style of New Labour. In a nation that faces complex challenges in a shrinking world and is inhabited by a diverse and post-deferential population, it is increasingly clear that Whitehall is – to paraphrase the American sociologist Daniel Bell – “too big for the small things in life and too small for the big things”. In many areas, particularly locally-delivered public services, many believe that we’re past the point where national interventions began to do more harm than good.

 

Equally, the idea that the executive’s accountability deficits can be addressed by reliance on Parliament sidesteps huge questions about the appropriateness of our system of party-based representative democracy to the kind of demands we now face – both in making policy and in maintaining legitimacy. The issue here is not – as the BGI report would have it – how best our representatives should consult their stakeholders, but how we might create new forms of decision-making which involve citizens themselves much more directly. Such thinking appears to be far off the mandarins’ radar.

 

My second observation concerns the report’s lack of context and analysis. The BGI was supported in its work by the generally excellent Institute for Government. But while the BGI argues that the centre should interfere less in departments’ business, it ignores the institute’s persuasive analysis that in the UK we have a highly centralised system up to the Whitehall level, but one that is highly decentralised within the centre.

 

The BGI report complains both about what it sees as failings in policy analysis and evaluation, and the undue expansion of centrally-based cross-cutting units of government. But the development of the Prime Minister’s Delivery and Strategy Units not only enhanced the analytical and evaluative capacity of government but were seen, in part, as a way of challenging departments to be accountable for achieving key public policy outcomes.

 

So determined are the BGI report authors to leave the impression that the last few years have seen a deterioration in governance that they abandon any serious attempt to analyse either what has improved, or what has failed not because of ill intent but because of the intractability of core governance challenges in the 21st century. It is, for example, in the area of what used to be called home affairs that we have seen the worst examples of excessive and sometimes badly prepared legislation, but this is also the area which has been subject to the greatest levels of both external shock and public unease. It is not only ministers who have concluded that the risk of doing nothing is greater than the risk of doing something which may not succeed.

 

Whilst the report contains valuable material, it feels like a blueprint for governing a world that may have existed 20 years ago. In the world Whitehall and Westminster now occupies, we need both to recognise how tough is the challenge of good and effective decision-making, and to be willing to explore radically different models of governance.