Why Government Strategies are Useless

Or: Policy Based Evidence Making

The new Labour government has promised a whole series of new strategies. Civil Service Reform, Industrial Strategy, a National Food Strategy. Scrolling through the latest news of these, the eyes glaze over. International best in class; new tough legislation; targeted grants; new tsar appointed…

Haven’t I read this before? Come to mention it, wasn’t there another strategy on this a year or so back? Will any of this make the slightest difference, and is it even trying to?

A real strategy is about choices. If a reasonable person couldn’t disagree with every word you write, you aren’t talking strategy, but platitudes. But platitudes are safer than declaring any area with its army of vested interests and activists a lower priority. So Government ends up with no actual prioritisation, or with prioritisation having to be inferred by ‘revealed preferences’ eg where any extra money is actually directed.

All of this makes it extremely hard to use the tool of strategy to change the priorities of front line staff when they don’t want to change – as we discovered seeking to rebalance the relative priority of drug trafficking and organised immigration crime in the 2000s and 2010s. And strategies have to be produced for every obscure area, even if the Government has little will to do anything much about them, because pointing to the existence of a strategy is itself a demonstration of commitment. A huge proportion of the Whitehall policy centre (which has doubled since 2016) is engaged essentially in displacement activity, busywork in order to give the impression to activists and lobbyists in their area that the government cares.

Steve Jobs could return to Apple, slash 70% of the product line and end up basing the company on four products. But he had the luxury of telling customers for the discontinued product to look elsewhere if they really wanted. Which isn’t an option Ministers are prepared to risk.

So inboxes spill over with strategies and initiatives, baffling front line organisations with the number of inevitably contradictory plans they are supposed to implement.

Ministers and officials aren’t stupid – they’re following logical incentives. If you’re expected as a Minister to make a difference in no more than a year or two, you’ll focus on the short term.

Similarly for officials, the most ambitious need seven promotions in at most 35-40 years. Promotion in post is vanishingly rare, and there’s little chance of pay rises in post either. So the logical thing is to hop to the next role to broaden experience and maximise the chance of promotion. 2-3 years per job is usual.

The next interview panel will probably know little about the work the candidate has done. The civil service is a large organisation, and (contrary to popular scepticism), individuals work longer hours now and are busier – meaning people have a much poorer idea of what is going on in the rest of the department, still less Whitehall, than they used to. Embarrassingly, consultants from the big 4 firms working for you at vast expense usually have a better idea of what is going on in other departments than you do.

In the interests of a ‘level playing field’, interview panellists are often told by HR they are even supposed to ignore things they personally know about candidates and their claimed achievements but which cannot be found in the paperwork (not always observed, fortunately). So the logical step is to portray crisply how you came into an area; found it a mess; identified a better way and implemented it. Saying you built on what you inherited is less exciting. And given the lack of time, portraying your success as culminating in a White Paper, a new strategy or legislation is a lot easier than waiting for improvements to show up in the real world.

All this could explain how we had five national security strategies between 2008 and 2015, and 6, largely indistinguishable, CONTEST (counter-terrorism) strategies between 2003 and 2023.

Even if officials wanted to learn from the past, they probably couldn’t find the papers. When I started, you could browse paper files with the comments of far distant predecessors. An army of clerks maintained the files (to varying standards). Whitehall myths included a story that during the Falklands, officials wanted to look at a formal declaration of war, but couldn’t lay their hands on the declaration of war on Germany in WW2, only for it to turn up years later in a file marked ‘Miscellaneous’. MOD colleagues swore there had previously been a file classification, reserved for reports on the misdemeanours of sailors ashore, classified ‘For Male Eyes Only’.

Ask a senior civil servant now about filing and you are likely to be greeted by some uncomfortable feet shuffling. Since departments went fully digital around the turn of the century, all the filing clerk roles were abolished, delivering a major headcount saving (and a much smaller cash one). Since then people are supposed to do their own filing.

Electronic files aren’t comfortable to browse. The search facility is rubbish – Ministers don’t prioritise departments IT systems as they don’t serve the public, so cheap and nasty versions are bought. If there’s a disaster (and an enquiry) expensive tools will be found. Caseworking areas have to put some effort in, given the likelihood of judicial review. But for policy and strategy work (which the public might wrongly think would be a priority), the system has basically broken down. It is hardly worth bothering to search departmental systems. And chances are there’s nothing much in the files anyway. All departments have policies and check up on how documents are named, but I’ve never heard of one checking to make sure people file in the first place. Most civil servants keep their own papers in their inboxes (the more senior the official, the more likely this is). And generally, once someone leaves the department their mailbox is deleted.

You can’t even find useful material on government websites since the Government Digital Service swept them clear. Google is your friend if you want to know what your own part of the department was doing five years ago. Hopefully there may be a university unit out there dedicated to your area.

In fact, thought, any civil servant who has been in an area for a long time and built up expertise before moving on can tell you that you rarely get consulted on your past experience in the area anyway.

You’d like to think the best possible evidence is commissioned to weigh up options. But the Freedom of Information Act means Ministers and officials are reluctant to commission research or collect evidence that might be embarrassing. It is probably no coincidence that data in the immigration space is worst in the area where it might be most embarrassing – the nationality of criminals and the net contribution made by those arriving on different routes, for example.

In theory devolution and local mayors ought to provide some more scope for local innovation and natural experiments, but there is limited sign of this.

Few officials have much idea what is going on in other countries. Nobody in post for 2-3 years is going to build good enough relations with foreign partners (who do tend to stay in post for longer) to work out what we might have to learn from them.

None of this makes for very profound policy making. But with Ministers having equally short time horizons, still more journalists, the chance of anyone asking awkward questions about reinventing the wheel are quite low.

The structure of the government machine also militates against striking and radical policies. The larger the civil service gets, the more autarkic it becomes. When Peel became Home Secretary he had 17 officials working for him. He carried out radical reforms of huge areas of government, collaborating with people like Jeremy Bentham. The Lord Chief Justice even took his pioneering reforms of the criminal law through the Lords.

Civil servants today are highly conscious of the vested interests that those influencing policy might have. As a result, I have spoken to dozens of people from business who have been surprised and offended by the brush offs they receive from officials when offering to help out. Officials are much more comfortable dealing with intermediary bodies of business representatives (who don’t tend to be businessmen themselves, as well as having internal political balances within their sector to manage).

Civil servants are rather less sensitive to their own vested interests. For example, any strategy might have as an option abolishing, downsizing or reforming agencies or parts of the public sector. As it happens these are usually much better paid roles than civil servants in central government, and moving from the latter to the former is a common career move. Radical and painful changes in these bodies are rarely suggested.

Ever since the Blair government, civil servants have been judged by their ability to get on with ‘stakeholders’ even though this combination of trade associations, other departments and other parts of the public sector all have their own vested interests which don’t necessarily reflect the public interest. Small businesses have a weak voices, those yet to be created obviously none at all. This could explain the steady accretion of complexity and regulation which is in the interest of most of the larger players.

Cross government approvals process strongly discourages radicalism. To be allowed to publish a strategy or take through legislation, department Ministers need to take this through the cabinet system. Cabinet secretariats don’t generally see the cabinet or its committees as a forum for thrashing out agreement, but have a very strong preference for agreeing the issues in advance then to be rubber stamped. So any Minister bringing a strategy or legislation can be held up by pretty much any other department, meaning that fudge is always a major part of the solution.

For a general, the whole point of a strategy is ultimately to inform orders to troops. In the case of government, however, the explosion in arms length bodies with varying degrees of independence and in some cases different local political leadership means that Ministers’ ability actually to direct the front line is limited.

So what can she or he do?

o New units. Always a popular sign that an area is taken seriously. This ends up with multiple overlapping units. Possibly even create a new department or Ministerial role

o New laws. Towards the end, Blair’s Principal Private Secretary mused to senior civil servants that Blair was in favour of legislation even if not strictly required because it sent an important signal about the direction the government wanted to go. Law is the one thing Ministers can definitely deliver. Unfortunately the more there is, the more the system gums up¹.

o New grants. Everyone will accept more money, even with strings attached. But by definition this is paying for activity which the receiving agency considers lower priority than anything it is currently doing.

o New IT systems. Slightly less popular than it used to be, given the track record, but still an option

o New ‘tsars’. The last refuge of the desperate (which is what the individuals chosen soon become).

o Random lists, and lots of alliteration

All of this gives a curious nostalgia for the wisdom that used to dwell in an organisation like the Circumlocution Office in Dickens’ Little Dorrit. There is something to be said for a time when

“How not to do it was the great study and object of all public departments and professional politicians all round the Circumlocution Office. It is true that every new premier and every new government, coming in because they had upheld a certain thing as necessary to be done, were no sooner come in than they applied their utmost faculties to discovering How not to do it”

The Westminster system combined at its peak an extraordinary degree of centralisation and the ability to make radical changes rapidly. But this worked best when combined with an inherited wisdom about which areas were most likely to benefit from government action, and which were best left well alone. My Policy Exchange paper Getting a Grip on the System tells the story of how this central power has been dissipated, and how it can be restored. But any such restoration ideally needs to be accompanied by a cultural change - a return to a more modest approach; a kind of ‘self denying ordinance’, which would see government engaging in the minimum number of areas necessary, but doing so with maximum energy.

1. I distinctly remember seeing this note from Sir Jeremy Heywood, but, infuriatingly, haven’t been able to track it down