Civil servants at the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) who sanction benefits claimants are classic bureaucrats. A ruler (Iain Duncan Smith) gives them a task – cutting welfare spending, say – and they apply the rules. Poor households may suffer but conscience doesn’t come into it. Any resulting hardship isn’t their fault. They are mere cogs in the machine.
That’s how British public service works, at least in theory, but it makes measuring the effectiveness of the cogs very difficult. Permanent secretaries say they have no values, no beliefs of their own: they proffer their minister’s options in private, but in public they just get on and do their bidding. That’s why civil servants virtually never resign because of government policies. As a breed they are conditioned to say (wait for it) yes, minister.
So who is responsible when – as the Institute for Government finds – only a smattering of Whitehall departments have done what they said they would do in 2010? The IfG’s Gavin Freeguard and colleagues went back to the early days of the Cameron coalition when each department announced a “business plan” with a set of performance indicators.
They found the plans had largely been abandoned, indicators had been forgotten or the data on which to make a judgment simply did not exist. The “worst” department – in the sense of aligning what it is doing in 2015 with what it said five years ago it would be doing now – is the Ministry of Defence.
Here’s the problem. If you asked Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, or his predecessor Philip Hammond, they would say the MoD is performing a lot better (thanks to the Tories). Job done; the minister is happy – what other outcome should there be?
Similarly at the DWP, Duncan Smith goes around saying that thanks to the introduction of universal credit his department is now performing much better than before he took over. The point is not whether the objective evidence supports him – successive reports from the Commons Public Accounts Committee say otherwise – but that as far as he (the ruler of the system) thinks, its impact has increased. As far as Robert Devereux, the DWP permanent secretary, is concerned, that’s all that matters.
What the Institute for Government (IfG) has done is a useful reminder of how yesterday’s performance indicators get sidelined and, as Freeguard caustically observes, “no army of armchair auditors appears to have been enlisted” to chase them. (Remember the 2010 promise that ordinary members of the public would be enrolled as monitors of public managers’ performance? Meaning there would be therefore be no need for professional auditors.)
Are the failures registered by the IfG attributable to the civil service or to coalition ministers? Are they bureaucratic failings or a result of the policy decreed by ministers? Energy and climate change is credited with moving forward on its 2010 objective of cutting fuel poverty – the number of households unable to afford heating. How to square that with various DWP’s objectives in cutting support to working-age households which, by accident or design, have increased poverty?
The IfG is disappointed that the education department doesn’t publish enough data on their indicators to test whether there has been improvement over the five years. That’s not really the issue though. During the past few years, we’ve seen the DfE become increasingly ambiguous about who is responsible for what schools do or the fate of looked-after children. Its permanent secretary, Chris Wormald, has on several occasions as good as said: “It’s not us, gov.”
Responsibility for many services is shared between Whitehall and local authorities, semi-autonomous schools and various intermediary bodies, ranging from private contractors to local enterprise partnerships. They all have a stake in performance. How it is subdivided between them, however, is often obfuscated – precisely so that exercises such as the IfG’s end up confused and unable to form a clear judgment.
Did they do well, the report asks. Answer: there’s no way of knowing, and ministers like it that way.
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