Hacking the State

Writing in the Sunday Times, Kemi Badenoch has set out her vision of what government would look like if she becomes Prime Minister. The principles, which she calls "reprogramming the state" could be more accurately described as hacking it. Into smaller and smaller pieces.

In her argument, Badenoch does not attack the people who work for the state. Her target is bureaucratic process. Drawing on her time as business secretary, she says the inability to pay out compensation to the victims of the sub postmasters Horizons debacle in a timely fashion was symptomatic of the problems afflicting the state. Every decision has to be backed by x number of reviews, y gaggles of consultations, and z quantities of impact assessments. Attempts to abbreviate the process would find ministerial decisions subject to court challenge and, therefore, more delay. The risk averse culture afflicting the civil service, she concludes, is not a case of the mindset of staff but their experience of having to satisfy all the reporting requirements. These, Badenoch acknowledges, might have grown out of sensible concerns for accountability and transparency but in practice they only lengthen administrative processes and make them more opaque. The more laws that are passed, the more the state grows, the more the prospect of litigation enlarges, and with it the risk averse culture. A perfect doom loop.

If this is her problem ("I made this diagnosis the central plank of my campaign to become leader"), the solution is reprogramming the state. Government must stop rewarding managerialism among ministers, and every level of the state needs looking at afresh - but "box ticking" and "judicial review" must be avoided if the problem is to go away. In all likelihood improving "accountability", Badenoch style, will be the subject of suggestions churned out by the Tufton Street think tank complex. As well as the churn from Elon Musk's anticipated evisceration of the federal state in the US.

There are a few things of interest here. Or rather, interesting absences. If this is the culture of the state and it's so irksome, the Tories had 14 years to change it so why didn't they? Was it a symptom of talking conservative but governing left? Well, no. There were plenty of changes to governance over that period of time, and all of them embedded the Thatcherite settlement further. I.e. The counter revolution that started under her and was consolidated in the Major and the New Labour years, which saw bits of the state sold off, or forced into debt relationships with private finance, or forced to "compete" in internally constituted "markets" with one another. This was consolidated under the Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition. To put it another way, the proliferation of performance indicators, targets, "market intelligence", and the requisite legal expertise to go alongside them increased the amount of administrative work required. Neoliberalism is the bureaucrat's friend. But this was in the context in which the coalition government slashed at the state. Form filling multiplied as form fillers were laid off. More work was demanded from a shrinking workforce, and so the system was prone to seizing up. This is the first "inefficiency" Badenoch "forgot" to mention in her article.

The paradigm of this consolidation of neoliberal governance was the vandalism committed against the NHS during the first term of the Tories' long stint in office. Effectively, Andrew Lansley abolished the NHS as was and replaced it with a market, underwritten by state money, in which NHS organisations and "any willing provider" competed for contracts handed out by the hundreds of fund-holding Clinical Commissioning Groups. This meant huge sums diverted from health care to the maintenance of a wasteful and needless internal market, and rampant profiteering as private health concerns won contracts and subcontracted them to NHS organisations, creaming off layers of profit in the process. This was supposed to run autonomously of government and, formally, responsibility for the NHS no longer lay with the health secretary. As it happened, increasingly CCGs and NHS trusts found ways around the market and established cooperative relationships contrary to the designs of the legislation. With the immediate first wave of Covid out the way, the Tories belatedly discovered this and returned sweeping powers to the health secretary - then Matt Hancock - with unprecedented range to intervene and micromanage. The kind of model Badenoch seems to be hinting at. I.e. Ministerial direction unchecked by established procedures and remits to enhance accountability. And how has the NHS looked since this innovation was introduced? Yet another slice of pertinent recent experience from government the leader of the opposition chose not to dwell upon.

Lastly, completely by coincidence her "reprogramming" of the state is consistent with Tory efforts to wind down its capacity to do things. It bears comparison that Badenoch's view is a reskinned version of Jacob Rees-Mogg's planned civil service cull. In short, the state has not failed because of a magic theory of bureaucracy. It has virtually collapsed because under the Tories this was the policy objective. It has been starved of resources, saddled with extra responsibilities, and forced into a governance strait jacket that could only produce sub-optimal outcomes. And Badenoch's answer is to make this crisis of capacity the desired goal of the next Tory government. Her big idea is the regurgitated pap of the recent past, a programme and an agenda that saw the Tories crash to their heaviest ever defeat.

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