Post-Brexit, those charged with keeping public services going are asking “crisis, what crisis?”. You don’t run a local authority or NHS trust without living in and with emergency. Senior civil servants, admitting that Whitehall was woefully underprepared for 23 June, are rolling up their sleeves and saying (at least to one another): bring it on. These days, financial drama is business as usual. Brexit comes on top of pre-existing problems of money and staffing. The threat to EU employees compounds the great gaps in rosters already faced by NHS trusts. Recession and reduced public revenues only heighten the stringency councils have been facing for six years.
But Brexit does change things. Senior officials are increasingly fearful that the political system may be broken beyond repair, calling into question conventions about their role and even their political neutrality. Behind the facade of getting on with the day job, there’s growing despair.
It cannot be voiced, audibly at least, because that would be considered “political”. Despite having important things to say about the viability of policies, fairness and good governance, and the dysfunctionality of party politics, among other things, public managers are trapped by the old, increasingly derelict doctrine that it’s the elected politicians alone who do values and “direction”. Only they are supposed to possess legitimacy; only they get to decide where to go. Officials deliver.
But how can ministers deliver if – Brexit provides ample evidence – MPs and councillors prove themselves incapable and incoherent? What if, putting ideology first, they reject the facts and evidence on which effective public administration must depend? Maybe it’s just that politicians simply cannot interpret the contradictory messages sent by the voting public. Either way, public managers are going beyond their usual dismay at the quality of decision-making by ministers and councillors into a darker place. They doubt whether the political system can deliver coherent policy lines, let alone the financial wherewithal to allow managers to put them into effect.
“How can we live” with politicians’ “doctrinaire liberty to expound their beliefs, cherry-picking statistics”, exulting in their ideologies, asked Abdool Kara, chief executive of Swale district and social policy lead at the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives, at a seminar this week. Gary Porter, Tory chair of the Local Government Association, says everything will be fine if councillors and elected mayors get more power.
But here’s a politician who – despite his obvious leave sympathies – won’t come clean about how he voted in the referendum. So who does he think will resolve the conflicts of interest around dealing with migration and making taxes and public spending fairer, if he and his colleagues prove themselves incapable?
In Whitehall, where you don’t get promoted for philosophising, the permanent secretaries’ line is that once the Tory leadership is in place, there will be a reshuffle and incoming ministers will (suitably advised by civil servants) choose a direction; the machine will then deliver what they ask. But what if, as is likely, there is no single party line, let alone cabinet position, and civil servants have to choose between listening to a minister and attending to her dogmatic special adviser or the cabal backing her in the House of Commons?
The old verities about politicians on one side and officials on the other are dissolving. The “sustainability and transformation plans” pushed by NHS England’s chief executive, Simon Stevens, deliberately invite council and NHS executives on to terrain once supposedly reserved for elected politicians – apportioning resources, envisioning the future of areas. With devolution, the push comes from the other side: elected mayors are starting to perform management tasks formerly reserved for their officers.
The post-Brexit shake-up must include the experts – yes, public managers are experts – in making complex systems work. Call it “technocracy”, if you like. We have no choice but to revisit and revise old and rigid ideas about democracy, the ballot box and accountability.
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