Andrew Haldenby is part of the Effective Governance Forum.
Anyone wanting to run the country needs to explain how they can make government work better. Levels of performance are unacceptable in much of the public sector. Taxation is at record levels. A long list of scandals (Horizon, infected blood and most recently Grenfell) means that government’s basic ability to act on behalf of citizens – its duty of care – has come into question.
Sir Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick, James Cleverly, and Tom Tugendhat may therefore be tempted to read Tony Blair’s new book, On Leadership, published last week. The temptation should be strongly resisted.
The book is not uniformly terrible. It has good analysis of the problem. Civil servants deal in process which has “a tendency to take on a life of its own, thereby embroiling the desired objective of policy in a continuous loop of deliberation not decision”. Their default setting is “to advise against action of a transformative nature, and to create a mood of hesitation in political leaders”
Spot on. This preference for process over decision-making is at the heart of the current problems of the NHS. It was called out by the reviews of NHS leadership by Sir Stuart Rose (who said the health service was “drowning in bureaucracy”) and General Sir Gordon Messenger two years ago.
Blair is also right to say that “we’re at the limit of public acceptance of tax and spend as the answer”. The goal should be “better public service outcomes at reduced cost, which therefore allows lower taxes”.
This is no pipe dream: between 1997 and 2019, private sector service productivity increased by 24 per cent compared to four per cent for the public sector. Closing that gap would release £100 billion a year for tax cuts, additional spending or paying down the national debt.
Current and future leaders should accept all of this. But they should entirely reject his key recommendation which is to beef up 10 Downing Street and leave the rest of the Civil Service untouched.
He is right that 10 Downing Street should have teams for tracking policy and monitoring longer-term trends (I suspect they exist already). But what matters are the performance and efficiency of government departments and public services themselves: of the 10,700 employees of the Cabinet Office, 93,800 staff of the Department of Work and Pensions and the 1.3 million people working in the NHS.
Blair’s biggest error is to misunderstand who is in charge of public delivery, and how that should change. He says that ministers should be like chief executives of their departments (“Winning power is all about being The Great Persuader. Exercising power is all about being The Great Chief Executive”).
This is a fatal misconception. Secretaries of State do not have the time or energy to contribute to setting objectives, plans, and budgets for their department (let alone its agencies), or to hold them to account.
In recent times ministers have stayed in post for less than two years on average. They cannot provide the stability of vision and ethos that comes from the chief executive in almost every successful organisation whether a business, charity, school or football club.
Part of the answer is for government departments to have actual CEOs, highly experienced in management, and recruited from outside so that they are not imbued with the existing culture. Conservative governments came close to making this key change in 1988, and something similar in 2023, but never did it. Much good would have followed if they had.
Blair places great hope in technology (“AI is the only realistic answer to improve productivity in the public sector”). Certainly public sector technology must improve: Ara Darzi’s review of the NHS found yesterday that health service technology is 15 years behind that of the private sector.
But technology itself needs to be managed, and the wholesale reform of the public sector around AI will need management of the highest quality.
Sadly Starmer seems to have taken his predecessor’s advice. The Government has hinted at an enlarged “mission control” unit based at 70 Whitehall. But it has done nothing as yet to change how government operates.
In the end, Blair falls into his own trap. He warns that without fundamental reform, “we are locked in a fruitless and ultimately dispiriting debate about how we extract more from the same system with tweaks”. But the same system with tweaks is what he offers.
He was far better in his speech on civil service reform in 2004, reflecting on seven years as prime minister, where he called for “a Civil Service equipped to lead, with proven leadership in management and project delivery”.
In the current leadership campaign, Jenrick has argued that the last Conservative government “increased the money, the doctors and the nurses the NHS has by a fifth but the number of patients being treated in our hospitals barely increased”. He concluded:
“The management in the NHS at every level wasn’t good enough. Who runs a hospital, or for that matter, a school or a police force, really matters.”
Badenoch has said that “nothing is more important” than to “reboot, reset and rewire the way that government works so that it can serve the public”. These are good ideas to build on.
Blair should have called his book On Management. Determined political leadership should go hand in hand with better management throughout government. Over to you, Starmer et al.
Andrew Haldenby is part of the Effective Governance Forum.
Anyone wanting to run the country needs to explain how they can make government work better. Levels of performance are unacceptable in much of the public sector. Taxation is at record levels. A long list of scandals (Horizon, infected blood and most recently Grenfell) means that government’s basic ability to act on behalf of citizens – its duty of care – has come into question.
Sir Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick, James Cleverly, and Tom Tugendhat may therefore be tempted to read Tony Blair’s new book, On Leadership, published last week. The temptation should be strongly resisted.
The book is not uniformly terrible. It has good analysis of the problem. Civil servants deal in process which has “a tendency to take on a life of its own, thereby embroiling the desired objective of policy in a continuous loop of deliberation not decision”. Their default setting is “to advise against action of a transformative nature, and to create a mood of hesitation in political leaders”
Spot on. This preference for process over decision-making is at the heart of the current problems of the NHS. It was called out by the reviews of NHS leadership by Sir Stuart Rose (who said the health service was “drowning in bureaucracy”) and General Sir Gordon Messenger two years ago.
Blair is also right to say that “we’re at the limit of public acceptance of tax and spend as the answer”. The goal should be “better public service outcomes at reduced cost, which therefore allows lower taxes”.
This is no pipe dream: between 1997 and 2019, private sector service productivity increased by 24 per cent compared to four per cent for the public sector. Closing that gap would release £100 billion a year for tax cuts, additional spending or paying down the national debt.
Current and future leaders should accept all of this. But they should entirely reject his key recommendation which is to beef up 10 Downing Street and leave the rest of the Civil Service untouched.
He is right that 10 Downing Street should have teams for tracking policy and monitoring longer-term trends (I suspect they exist already). But what matters are the performance and efficiency of government departments and public services themselves: of the 10,700 employees of the Cabinet Office, 93,800 staff of the Department of Work and Pensions and the 1.3 million people working in the NHS.
Blair’s biggest error is to misunderstand who is in charge of public delivery, and how that should change. He says that ministers should be like chief executives of their departments (“Winning power is all about being The Great Persuader. Exercising power is all about being The Great Chief Executive”).
This is a fatal misconception. Secretaries of State do not have the time or energy to contribute to setting objectives, plans, and budgets for their department (let alone its agencies), or to hold them to account.
In recent times ministers have stayed in post for less than two years on average. They cannot provide the stability of vision and ethos that comes from the chief executive in almost every successful organisation whether a business, charity, school or football club.
Part of the answer is for government departments to have actual CEOs, highly experienced in management, and recruited from outside so that they are not imbued with the existing culture. Conservative governments came close to making this key change in 1988, and something similar in 2023, but never did it. Much good would have followed if they had.
Blair places great hope in technology (“AI is the only realistic answer to improve productivity in the public sector”). Certainly public sector technology must improve: Ara Darzi’s review of the NHS found yesterday that health service technology is 15 years behind that of the private sector.
But technology itself needs to be managed, and the wholesale reform of the public sector around AI will need management of the highest quality.
Sadly Starmer seems to have taken his predecessor’s advice. The Government has hinted at an enlarged “mission control” unit based at 70 Whitehall. But it has done nothing as yet to change how government operates.
In the end, Blair falls into his own trap. He warns that without fundamental reform, “we are locked in a fruitless and ultimately dispiriting debate about how we extract more from the same system with tweaks”. But the same system with tweaks is what he offers.
He was far better in his speech on civil service reform in 2004, reflecting on seven years as prime minister, where he called for “a Civil Service equipped to lead, with proven leadership in management and project delivery”.
In the current leadership campaign, Jenrick has argued that the last Conservative government “increased the money, the doctors and the nurses the NHS has by a fifth but the number of patients being treated in our hospitals barely increased”. He concluded:
“The management in the NHS at every level wasn’t good enough. Who runs a hospital, or for that matter, a school or a police force, really matters.”
Badenoch has said that “nothing is more important” than to “reboot, reset and rewire the way that government works so that it can serve the public”. These are good ideas to build on.
Blair should have called his book On Management. Determined political leadership should go hand in hand with better management throughout government. Over to you, Starmer et al.