The 6-7 craze is about to turn from a meaningless, but ultimately fun, meme into something decidedly more serious: the number of UK Prime Ministers in the last 10 years. British firms and families are battling spiralling energy bills while our towns and cities are disfigured by rashes of vape shops, epidemics of shoplifting and roads full of potholes. Police, health and other public services are struggling to cope, but politicians and bureaucrats seem incapable of fixing the problems.
No wonder people are asking whether Britain has become ungovernable.
But that would be looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Britain hasn’t suddenly become stroppier or more complicated than before. The real problem is politicians and their officials who expensively bandage symptoms rather than curing underlying causes. It’s the leaders, not the led.
The latest example comes from Keir Starmer’s ‘Mr Fixit’ Minister Darren Jones, who announced new delivery units for every Government Department in Whitehall this week, to navigate the process blockages that are holding everything back. But the answer to sclerotic bureaucracy can’t be more bureaucracy. Rather than teaching officials to play better hopscotch by dancing around the pitfalls that block progress, they should be filling in the holes to run over the top of them instead.
The real problem is politicians and their officials who expensively bandage symptoms rather than curing underlying causes
What should that look like? The first step is to help public services work better by throwing proceduralism off its bureaucratic throne so ministers and officials can’t argue they did everything right even if results are terrible. That means a Public Sector Productivity Act to give each quango and regulator a small number of sharp, new outcomes and results they’ve got to achieve in place of the dozens of flabby, red-tape-riddled processes they follow today, and then replacing the leaders of any that don’t deliver them after that.
As part of the same reform, we must take an axe to the process-based judicial reviews of official decisions which currently make public services so cautious and slow. Courts should still decide if public bodies have broken laws or exceeded their official powers, but elected representatives should hold them accountable for whether and how they delivered their new outcomes and results.
These public service reforms are a vital first step, but won’t be enough on their own. We will also need a Red Tape Reduction Act to cut everyone’s cost of living without diluting standards, by repealing or replacing a slew of well-meant-but-disastrous deadweight rules and regulations which make everything slower, stodgier and more expensive. The list is worryingly long, from over-complicated corporate sustainability reporting, to disincentives on hiring new staff, or restrictions on UK-produced fossil fuels in favour of higher-carbon and higher-cost foreign ones instead.
The new act should also embed a new, stronger and broader fiscal rule to limit red tape costs in the same way that governments limit taxpayer-funded spending and borrowing at the moment, to stop the thickets of red tape regrowing uncontrollably in future. And it should clear away Britain’s ‘license raj’ of official pre-approvals, consent conditions and interim reviews which bog everything down in regulatory treacle at the moment. Most of them can be replaced by pre-approved standards and outcomes that are checked after work is complete, and which guarantee compliance providing they’ve been achieved.
Last but not least, we will need changes to the way political parties change their leaders while they’re in government. There’s an old Hollywood adage that sequels cost twice as much to make and are only half as successful as the original films, and the same rule often – although not always – applies to prime ministers who are midstream replacements rather than leaders of a winning General Election campaign themselves. The danger is that manyof the governing party’s MPs treat a mid-term leadership election as a personal career development opportunity, trading their support for promises of ministerial red boxes or factional advantage. It’s a process that rewards people with good Westminster bubble skills like political horse-trading and personal loyalties rather than executive competence, judgment or leadership.
For the Conservative Party those problems can mostly be solved with extra transparency, by publishing the details of how each MP voted in each round of a leadership contest so it’s clear who switched sides and why. And by creating a short, intense ‘public crucible’ moment before the final rounds of voting, where the last few candidates face detailed grilling by the country’s toughest and most feared political journalists as a proxy for a full general election campaign, to cut through the soundbites and discover who can handle pressure when the heat is really on.
Restoring public trust and confidence in our country’s government will be no small task. But to avoid 6-7 becoming more than a bit of harmless online fun, we can’t just claim the UK is ungovernable. We have to fix the leaders, not the led.
This article is the latest in a fortnightly series of policy proposals by John Penrose and the Centre for Small State Conservatives, published in CapX
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