Structural and cultural challenges
Download the full report in PDF format.
Working this way in government is not easy. Several structural and cultural challenges make it difficult.
Since the 1980s, the New Public Management approach (NPM) orthodoxy of making government more ‘business-like’ has profoundly shaped Whitehall culture and process. This way of thinking has had some positive impacts but also served to embed certain preferences: such as outsourcing or rigid cost-benefit analysis.
One effect of NPM on central government is a tendency to focus accountability on measurable medium-term outputs over long-term outcomes. That can lead to excessive box-ticking of deliverables rather than delivery; symptoms rather than cause. The vertical lines of departmental accountability also make it hard for teams to work across organisational boundaries in the interest of the outcome they are seeking to achieve.
Programme funding rules, as set out in HM Treasury’s Green Book, encourage front-loaded cost-benefit analysis and discourage incremental funding proportionate to risk.
Whitehall operates in this way for reasons that make sense within the context of its history and power structure. Public service leaders are not wilfully incompetent. Focusing on outputs over outcomes is extremely tempting because of the long lead-in times to achieving and being able to measure outcomes, especially for long-term, national-level ambitions.
Vertical lines of accountability have the virtue of simplicity and fit with a centuries-old prevailing culture of bureaucracy. The alternative isn’t easy to organise in terms of line management, and changing it would doubtless create some painful disruption. Hypothesis-driven cost-benefit analysis as demanded by HMT in business cases is a good thing, provided these hypotheses are tested against realities, and the analysis is iterated over time. But: all too often, the hypotheses are not tested until it’s much too late to iterate anything.
In the past 30 years, this model has been buttressed by a dysfunctional relationship between public sector organisations and outsourced, enterprise technology and consultancy contractors.
There are too many examples where these relationships have failed to deliver value for money or accountability for either senior officials or their suppliers.
Public service management practice and organisation is a domain few ministers have chosen to enter. The current orthodoxy is entrenched and very hard to change. Even political leaders who want to change it rarely have enough time in office to even start thinking about how.
To use a common phrase in Westminster, it is what it is.
It doesn’t have to be.
Next: