Government should stick to its knitting
Back in the 1980s, Sir Robin Ibbs got the Thatcher Cabinet to recognise that good civil servants were not usually good managers and vice versa. He persuaded them, with some difficulty, that there should be only two types of units in future:
A core unit - responsible for policy and money.
The executive agencies - responsible for delivering the required objectives, i.e. the managers.
Unfortunately, they both continued to be called “civil servants” which rather blurred the distinction. Quangos, i.e. non-departmental public bodies staffed by public, not civil, servants, would cease to exist. The revolution never happened partly because the civil service number 1 skill is resisting change and also because incoming ministers are completely untrained and never understood it. They still don’t.
Now would be a good time, with cross-party agreement, to follow Ibbs’ logic. Government should fund public services but that does not mean it should provide them. The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) routinely makes a mess of managing the NHS and fails to fund social care. The solution is obvious enough: abolish the DHSC. The Levelling Up department already funds social care; it might as well fund the NHS too. The NHS would become a public corporation, like the Bank of England, and it would no longer be managed by civil servants.
Evidence of the government’s managerial incompetence is provided by this winter of discontent. Strikes are bad news for employers, employees and customers/users alike. There are many variations on Napoleon’s observation that problems are never down to bad soldiers; their leaders will be to blame. The problems are exacerbated by government’s tendency to want to find national standard solutions rather than allowing natural units, e.g. hospital trusts, to find their own.
Further evidence is routinely provided by the Ministry of Defence (MoD). When I was a 2nd lieutenant in Singapore in charge of supplies, the MoD was, mercifully, so far away we mostly had to look after ourselves. No trouble. Today MoD-purchased materiel is over budget, years late and defective. We need, maybe, a few hundred in an MoD core to design policy and fight the Treasury for money but, beyond that, the armed forces should be seen as a public corporation staffed by professionals, not civil servants.
Arts Council England employs (using the word loosely) 639 people when all it should do is pass on the money it receives to arts providers according to a set of criteria. That should not need more than 39 people, and not the other 600 who spend their time telling arts deliverers what they should do.
Over 40 museums and galleries were part of the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) in 2022 and are a classic example of public services that should be funded, but not provided, by government. Why should ministers designate who sits on their boards? The February 2023 reshuffle has broken up the DCMS but added departments when they should be reduced.
The bottom line here is that those functions which should not be part of government at all should become independent public corporations, notably the NHS, the armed forces and delivering public services or returned to the judiciary if that is where they belong, e.g. managing law courts.
That would allow government, following Ibbs, to focus on policy and financial matters in its core departments, staffed by civil servants, and executive agencies, staffed by public servants, for delivering those policies. A better focused government would do a better job.