UK Politics
Nanny knows best
Published 16 April 2007
By chasing the efficiency of the private sector, Whitehall has lost sight of how to tackle big problems in a long-term, focused way. But statist Finland could have found the solution to joined-up government
I think I am going to emigrate to Finland. It is the least corrupt and sixth-happiest country in the world, as well as the most sparsely populated in the EU. It has brilliant comprehensive schools, the world's freest press and lots of wild berries. It should also escape the worst of global warming and, if it's too snowy for me, the admirably nannying Finnish state will give me free spikes for my shoes. Now, thanks to Demos and the Institute for Public Policy Research, I learn that it has come up with the most sensible idea for government I've heard of in many years.
What Finnish governments do on coming to power, apparently, is to publish action plans. These comprise a small number of policy programmes cutting across departmental and sectoral boundaries.
At present, there are four, concerning citizen participation, employment, entrepreneurship and the information society. (I'm sorry these all sound rather technocratic and boring, but there are some Tory sorts in the ruling coalition just now, and you can't have everything.) Each is led by the most relevant minister, with a senior civil servant as programme director, supported by a delivery team of officials who work across the different ministries. In other words, the Finns are having a stab at joined-up government.
Hopeless fragmentation
This sounds far more sensible than leaving antisocial behaviour to the Home Office or obesity to Tessa Jowell. It suggests a government that might tackle the big problems in a long-term, focused way instead of randomly reacting to press headlines with a series of discrete departmental initiatives.
British government is hopelessly fragmented. Policy is remote from delivery, and money is handed out to dozens of separate bodies that work to narrow targets and never talk to each other. This explains why so many Whitehall initiatives come to nothing. It is largely the result of the "new public management" (NPM) ideology that has swept the industrialised world. In a revolt against Weberian bureaucracy, the public sector has been remade in the image of the private, with many functions contracted out or hived off to semi-autonomous, single-purpose agencies. Accountability is a nightmare and co-ordination almost impossible. Meanwhile, Whitehall makes policy in a vacuum without adequate input from the people who will try to put it into effect on the front line.
It's all very well to keep saying "what matters is what works". The trouble, as Guy Lodge and Susanna Kalitowski argue in a new IPPR report (Innovations in Government: international perspectives on civil service reform), is that policy-makers often don't know what works.
Moreover, because its functions are now divided between so many agencies, the public service no longer has a collective memory. The same mistakes are made again and again (notably with attempts to computerise services), just as they are in the private sector.
Initiatives are evaluated - you'll find two-dozen reports a month on some departmental websites - but this evaluation is mostly to do with service delivery and the achievement of specific targets, not whether the policy was properly conceived in the first place.
For example, the Department for Education turns out vast quantities of data about whether children reach attainment targets at seven, 11, 14 and 16. But are the targets reasonable? Should we have attainment targets at all? Do they have adverse effects on school ethos and children's learning? Such questions go unaddressed.
The old model has failed
The idea of the NPM model was that it would make government leaner, fitter and more efficient. It is hard to see how it has achieved any of these things.
The public sector may indeed have been bloated and inefficient but, in its old form, it at least had the advantage over the private sector of a unified purpose. It also, being largely free of targets and performance indicators, had a degree of flexibility. As a new Demos report (The Collaborative State, edited by Niamh Gallagher and Simon Parker) observes: "National targets can seldom meet all the complexities of local need, and so risk either missing the point or creating unintended consequences." If the rule book was the abiding weakness of the old public sector, the list of targets has proved just as inhibiting to the new one.
It is increasingly clear that we've got the wrong model for the 21st century. First, the problems that governments face - climate change, crime and terrorism, family breakdown - cut across international, never mind departmental, boundaries. Second, the model freezes out citizens, who are seen merely as "customers" with no active role in forming policy and making public services work. So we must all hope that Finland has found the solution. But I must check out the wine prices before I leave.
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