David Gauke is no Michael Howard. Somewhat less nocturnal, Ann Widdecombe might say. But the present justice secretary shares with the former Tory home secretary a problem that has bedevilled Whitehall for many years and is now getting worse. What happens when arm’s length bodies, such as the Parole Board, use the autonomy they have deliberately been given to behave, well, autonomously?
If those who chair boards are sacked when they do what it says in their job description, why bother with the length of an arm? The Parole Board case, which has seen the sacking of chair Nick Hardwick, has particular elements, of course, but surely a judicial review of a board’s decision-making should be welcomed as a demonstration of its autonomy, not become the reason for dismissal.
This takes place against a wider public management crisis about accountability. It has been boiling away in local government – look at the semi-autonomous organisation responsible for Grenfell Tower - and in schools, as multi-academy trusts pay their chief executives exorbitant sums and no one, least of all parents, know who’s checking.
Hardwick has stated his concern about the Parole Board’s independence. He’s addressing more than the specifics of the Worboys case. Does the Ministry of Justice really want civil servants to decide on the release of killers, which means in practice Gauke and his successors having to appear in the Commons and answer specific and detailed questions?
The very reason the former health secretary Andrew Lansley hatched the 2012 Health Act was to stop health secretaries being held responsible for what happens in clinics. He was repeating what umpteen predecessors (mostly Tory, as it happens) had said when they created “next steps agencies” in the late 1980s to manage operational delivery of policy through focused and lean public agencies, with their own staff, strategy and leadership structures.
The trouble was that agency managers then did things ministers didn’t like or started to edge into the political spotlight. It turned out agencies were a convenient way for ministers to blame managers – leading Howard, when home secretary, to sack Derek Lewis, head of the prison service, in 1995 after prisoners escaped.
The same question, about who should be ultimately responsible for what, keeps arising. Take the Charity Commission, another arm’s-length, would-be autonomous body. Tina Stowell has resigned the Tory whip in the House of Lords but are MPs and the public really going to be satisfied if the secretary of state Matthew Hancock refuses to answer questions about the commission’s work? He will try to say that it is independent, but will not convince.
Then there is the Office of Students. Its chair, Michael Barber, says he regrets the attempt to appoint a minister’s crony in the shape of Toby Young, but where does the episode leave the assertion that this is a body that is going to exercise judgment and diverge from its parent departments – education and business?
Councils are rushing to set up wholly-owned companies to do things that they are forbidden to do; NHS trusts are establishing arm’s-length bodies that can employ staff on different terms and conditions but are still, mysteriously, part of the NHS.
In 1959, a distinguished professor, Brian Chapman, in The Profession of Government said that “the haphazard creation of semi-public, public, quasi-private and partly autonomous bodies complicates law, operation and control”. The growth of outsourcing in recent decades has made things even more opaque. Carillion’s collapse has exposed, not for the first time, a web of non-accountabilities and irresponsibilities. The Parole Board affair makes it even more tangled.
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