This is what bad government looks like. Do civil servants ever dare stop it, and who is ever held to account? Evidence-free policy-making by rightwing ideologues has been the history of this government since 2010.
However often the right raises scares about the “loony left”, nothing Labour proposes begins to compare with what the loony right has actually done. The list of recklessly extravagant ideological policy disasters grows – even forgetting Brexit. Labour is now the sensible party of practical policy-making, while the Tories are the evidence-free fanatics.
Let’s start in Oldham. A UTC – university technical college – opened there in 2014, with a purple building, places for 600 pupils aged 14-19, and a venture capitalist as chair. After spending a stupendous £14m, the school closed in August: it attracted only 127 pupils and not one of them gained an A*-C grade in English or maths at GCSE. Meanwhile, £18m was cut from the rest of Oldham’s schools, which lost 100 teachers and £480 per pupil.
Oldham’s Collective Spirit free school also closed this summer, ejecting its 210 pupils after what the local MP, Jim McMahon, said was the worst Ofsted report he’d seen. “I am sick of Oldham being the test bed for the next big idea, when at the same time basic educational needs are being cut to the bone.”
No minister should be blamed for trying a new idea: how to give technical education status is a serious problem. But why roll out experiments far and wide on a whim before testing them? Far from being disqualified, the former education secretary Michael Gove is back in government, eager to try new ideas on the environment department.
At least 62 free schools, UTCs and studio schools have failed, at a cost of £138.5m. But undaunted, the government has pledged another 500 free schools by 2020. Some succeed, but consider the sheer extravagance of opening schools in the midst of austerity, whether places are needed or not. And consider another astonishing scandal, revealed by the Observer this week: the collapse of Wakefield City Academies Trust, accused of “asset-stripping” funds from its 21 schools.
The ideology driving all this was “freedom” from everything – from local councils, democratic accountability, regulation, even basic financial scrutiny and due diligence with public money. The National Audit Office has been strongly critical. But frankly, who cares?
That’s just education. Look around, and see the same story across Whitehall. Remember what Andrew Lansley did after he was let loose on the NHS in 2010. He threw in a grenade of re-disorganisation that wasted billions – billions that will never be fully counted. Ever since, the head of NHS England has struggled to stitch back together its blasted fragments, as hosts of acronyms and new brass plates come and go.
As communities secretary, Eric Pickles set to work wrecking local authorities, even dismantling the Audit Commission – which Margaret Thatcher had devised to monitor and improve councils. Under this government the Department for Communities and Local Government has overseen the biggest drop yet in housebuilding, social or private. However, it did oversee the £10bn help-to-buy scheme: Morgan Stanley reports it inflated house prices by exactly the same sum, gifting most of the gains to housebuilders. Even the Adam Smith Institute called it “petrol on to a bonfire”.
But so what? The chancellor is about to do it again with another £10bn – because politically and ideologically it appeals to better-off first-time buyers of homes up to £600,000, even if it makes property still less affordable for most.
In welfare to work, this government put all its trust in private companies, which Margaret Hodge’s public accounts committee found to have squandered a fortune to no particular effect, other that enriching those companies.
What of the Learndirect disaster? Privatised by David Cameron in 2011, it was taken over by private equity and suffered a damning Ofsted report on its apprenticeship programmes. The Institute for Public Policy Research reported that the company received £631m of public money. A Financial Times/FE Week investigation found that after it was sold off, its parent company spent 84% of its cash generated by the operating business (most of which came from the taxpayer) on managers and financiers, with many apprentices not receiving their entitlement for training. But another multimillion-pound bung will see it through to next year. The National Audit Office is investigating.
Or look at the east coast mainline railway line: handed back to the public sector by a failed franchisee, it made a tidy profit for the taxpayer. But that was too ideologically embarrassing, so the government sold it. Now Stagecoach, its present franchisee, grumbles that it can’t make enough – upsetting the government’s conviction that private enterprise trumps public management.
Universal credit was another big idea – a good paradigm of this government’s mismanagement of just about everything. From the start Iain Duncan Smith was never open about its intent or effect: for all his promise of its strong work incentives, the taper rate was always going to see claimants lose 63p from every extra pound they earned. (If 63p were a top tax rate, they would call it an outrageous disincentive to hard work.)
The six-week payment delay for this new benefit may be cut to four, but that still leaves those without savings debt-ridden and trapped in rent arrears, as the new Smith Institute report from the London boroughs Southwark and Croydon proves. At vast cost, what started as a minor administrative improvement leaves all families that are moving on to universal credit heavily out of pocket, many of them forced to rely on food banks. Seven years after it was conceived, the system is worse, not better.
Governments make errors – none worse than Tony Blair’s Iraq war. Labour blundered on the private finance initiative and early implementation of tax credits. It wasted effort on minor value-for-money public service “reforms”. But if you hear anyone raising fears of loony-left policies, just point them to the unravelling privatisations of the Thatcher era – and to all these post-2010 failures, imposed out of pure ideology.
Philip Hammond asked the cabinet for some “big new ideas” for his budget. Please, no more.
• Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
• This article was amended on 27 October 2017. An earlier version referred to Learndirect’s parent firm’s income, when cash generated by the operating business was meant. An earlier version also said that many apprentices received no training. This has been corrected to say they didn’t receive their entitlement for training.
