The Blunders of Our Governments

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the Child Support Agency and the bungled policy of trying to make absent parents (mostly fathers) pay for their kids rather than the state;

In the British system blunderers go unpunished. Indeed, achievers often go unnoticed and unrewarded. The main reason is that ministers and senior officials typically stay in post for a couple of years. By the time a blunder becomes apparent, they have moved on or out. They do not even appear before the Public Accounts Committee or the relevant select committee. It is left to their hapless successors to do the explaining and apologising. Human errors include the failure of politicians and senior civil servants to really appreciate how the majority of the population actually live – what the authors call ‘cultural disconnect’. This leads to formulating policy with a mental model of everyday living that reflects policymakers lives.The most calamitous blunder of modern times came as Britain began to benefit from the huge windfall of North Sea oil. Some argued that, as in Norway, the receipts should be invested for future generations in a sovereign wealth fund. This challenged the Treasury’s absurdly ideological objection to hypothecation. The result? All that money was squandered in booms that led inevitably to bust. The British public hold its governments and politicians in poor regard. Turnout in elections, membership of political parties and the readership and audience for the political news are all at historic lows. Surveys place MPs alongside estate agents and tabloid journalists as the least trusted occupations. People increasingly think of government and the political process as part of the problem, not the solution. I completely agree about 'The Blunders of Government'. It is a fantastic, historic analysis and essential reading for anyone working in the Policy area. It is very satisfying to see such thoughtful, objective analysis. One can get similar satisfaction from reading analyses by the National Audit Office (NAO) of flawed programmes. In fact, King and Crewe drew heavily on NAO analyses for their book.

Blunders also need to be distinguished from wrong judgement calls. The real world of government is often intractable and ultimately unpredictable. People in government, as in all walks of life, know only what they know and can find out, and in conditions of extreme uncertainty and limited evidence, they decide what, on balance, it makes sense for them to do. They will sometimes be right, sometimes wrong, but the fact that they turn out to have made a mistake does not mean that they were careless or stupid. The Treasury’s sale of half the UK gold reserves from 1999-2002 at the bottom of the market and the Labour Government’s handling of foot and mouth disease in 2001 are cases in point. All blunders are mistakes; not all mistakes are blunders. It is when the authors get on to the “why” question that the book gets really interesting. They offer 12 types of explanations which they say appear in different combinations in each case, but which seem to underlie these catastrophic failures. They divide their causes into two types – ‘human error’ and ‘systemic failures’.The contrast between Mr Cameron and Margaret Thatcher could hardly be more striking. He is hell bent for leather and makes a speech almost every day as though to ram home the point. Mrs Thatcher was at least as radical a prime minister but far more focused and cautious. She had a clear sense of direction but travelled only slowly during the most successful phases of her premiership. Following her first electoral triumph in 1979, she was in office for fully three years before launching her most ambitious projects: trade union reform and privatisation. It was not until 1982 that she abandoned her step-by-step approach towards reforming the unions and encouraged Norman Tebbit (who needed little encouragement) to radically overhaul trade-union law. It was not until 1984, well into her second term, that her government began to undertake the wholesale privatisation of state-owned industries, starting with British Telecom. She looked before she leapt, until, to her cost, she lost the habit. ’ Managing Contracting Out In Britain, politicians and senior officials are also disparaged for the simple reason that our governments get things wrong, sometimes very badly wrong. They blunder, probably increasingly, probably on a greater scale than at least some comparable countries, and certainly unnecessarily and too often. Anthony King and I have completed a study of major government blunders committed by the UK government between 1980 and 2010 to see if there is a pattern that explains these missteps. What is a blunder? The second problem is what they call ‘musical chairs’ – the tendency for both Ministers and senior Mandarins to frequently change their jobs, so that the senior team in any Ministry rarely lasts for more than a couple of years. This problem compounds another – ‘ministerial activism’. As most Ministers can expect to be in post for no more than one or two years, they have a very little time in which to make their mark with some signature policy or reform. This encourages over-rapid decision-making and repeated reform initiatives. As most serious reforms take 4-5 years at least to bed down, Ministers and Mandarins have often moved on, along with the policy agenda, long before anything has been achieved (or not). I have some quibbles with this shopping list of causes – not with the items listed, I think all of them are contributory factors. My problem is that there is far too little attempt to use the impressive collection of data and analysis in this book to look for patterns of causation that might help us understand better what sort of blunders are caused by what combinations or configurations of factors. Without such understanding attempts at reform might focus on the wrong things. Why do so many ministers fail to appreciate the benefits of careful deliberation? After all, they are formally accountable to Parliament for the performance of their department and run the risk of media exposure when things go badly wrong. In reality, however, they are not held responsible for the outcomes of their policy initiatives. Only one of the 80 ministers and senior officials most closely associated with the 12 policy blunders (excluding the chief executives of the delivery agencies) resigned or suffered demotion or sanctions. The exception was the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, who was ousted by her cabinet from Number 10 as a result of the unpopularity of the poll tax.