Apr 2009 20

The quango bites back3

Last year's SATs fiasco has been discussed at some length on this page before (such as here and here), both in terms of why it arose, as well identifying those who should take responsibility.

In fact the answer to the second question is really the answer to the first, and it applies much more broadly to the problems of modern government than just this one issue. For when no one is really responsible for anything, everything quickly goes wrong – as it has done repeatedly at the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), and did at the QCA over SATs.

Service delivery disasters – such as with SATs or this years scandalous handling of the 'Building Schools for the Future' programme – come about because Government (or more accurately Ministers) have developed a system in which they may avoid political responsibility but maintain managerial control, by out-sourcing tasks to large 'independent' quangos.

Over the past 25 years Governments' have spun a web of 'arms length bodies', agencies and independent authorities, which now carry out most of the vital (and expensive) functions of government. No doubt bodies were occasionally set up with good intentions (to improve efficiency or quality) but too often they exist primarily as a firewall for political responsibility. And as suggested above, the spread of this form of government has elicited a concurrent rise in service delivery disaster, failing the citizen and over-burdening the taxpayer. With critical decisions now taken by several different people in several different bodies, confusion reigns. Investigations into service failures (such the SATs problems) reveal this again and again. But the system subverts the idea of 'responsibility'; with no one really in charge no one can be really held responsible, particularly ministers. At most the extremely well paid head of a quango will fall (or be pushed) onto their sword, no doubt with the promise of more fantastically paid public sector work in the future if they take their handsome compensation package, shut up and disappear for a few years.

But now and then a quango will bite back. The Sunday Times reported yesterday that Sir Ken Boston – chief executive of the quango notionally in charge of examinations (the QCA) during the SATs problems last year, but who has since resigned – is to break the silence he has maintained since his departure. In a session with the Parliamentary Committee for Children, Schools and Families, Boston plans to explode the idea – maintained by Ed Balls and other minister in DCSF – that they had no knowledge that things were going so wrong with the SATs until the last minute. (Although that admission alone should warrant their resignations). Boston will tell the Committee that ministers were fully briefed on the problems, and that in fact ministers and top civil servants had been forewarned that a disaster was possible for years.

Ed Balls assiduously distanced himself from the mess at the time, dumping the blame squarely with the QCA, and ultimately Sir Ken Boston; (note a very similar pattern last month with the head of the Learning and Skills Council). As is becoming clear from the news about Mr Balls associations with Mr McBride, Mr Balls has no intention of taking responsibility for his mistakes and will no doubt go out of his way to discredit Sir Ken Boston. But Sir Ken (who to his credit resigned as soon as the full extent of the problems become clear) is clearly unhappy with fact that the system has once again shielded those ultimately responsible – Mr Balls and other Government ministers- from the criticism they deserve. For once at least, it seems a quango boss is not happy to carry the can for his recent political masters, and the public will hopefully get a first hand account of how 'government-by-quango' really works when he makes his case before the Committee.

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  • http://benefitfraud.blogspot.com John Page

    So Mr Balls will need to trash Sir Ken.
    Where is Mr McBride when Ed needs him?

  • C.D.Hamer

    Also available as a blog at http://theworldaccordingtodougal.blogspot.com/
    After the invention of the written word all history become poorly reported news. Get a perspective that is in line with your genetic heritage. A thousand years is nothing.
    About 20000yrs ago there was no one in the UK and we were connected to the rest of Europe. Fast forward to about 7000yrs ago and Europe geographically speaking was a bit more like we know it. By this time the majority of the population had re-inhabited the available land following the retreat of the ice and there was probably some degree of tribalism emerging, but we still moved around quite a bit and we traded widely.
    Fast forward to the Roman empire. Now we have a tribe that thinks it can do something different by trying to subdue and incorporate all the other tribes into itself. Did the notion of ” Empire” emerge before the notion of “Tribe” mutated to the notion of “Nation”? Better minds than mine may be able to answer this. However, long after the collapse of the Roman Empire (and in other parts of the world the collapse of other equally “great” empires – lets not be too Europe-centric) the tribal instincts re-emerged.
    Tribalism does not necessarily equate to warfare and protectionism. Tribes either side of the English channel considered themselves to be relatives at the time of the Roman incursions.
    “Dark ages” – short hand for “we didn’t write it down” – there were no nations in the sense that we see them today. Europe and many other parts of the world existed on the basis of something close enough to the notion of the “City State” for us to use that as a Monica.
    A “city state” a.k.a tribal area, a.k.a. the biggest bit we can economically manage and control, was almost a norm.
    Fast forward to the “middle ages”. The Notion of Nation emerges as city states flocculate and form clumps. Why did this happen. Well communications improved. We wrote stuff down, we remembered more accurately, we shared information, and the economically manageable size looked seductively larger than it had. Men sensed opportunity to exert power and control which in the past only Religion had been able to do. A political ruling class emerged, and its prime motivation was self preservation and the accumulation of wealth at everybody else’s expense.
    Some sense of civic pride and civic duty did emerge here and there. Notions of fairness, even chivalry in some sense, are not alien to mankind, and good societies that sustain their citizens do tend to survive longer than the most oppressive ones.
    So “strong” nations emerged that had some economic advantage, often with a basis in geography, technology, or “management structure”. Later strong nations latched on to the notion of Empire again and “might is right” and “civilising influence” were used to “improve” the world. Empires, or ambitions of Empire clashed and world wars ensued.
    In the background the industrial revolution had been creating a twist in the evolution of “society” or “Civilisation” (your choice). We became more efficient at killing things. We became more efficient at consuming energy. Ultimately we became more efficient at writing things down and remembering them and adding them together to make more complicated things.
    It continues today. IT. Engineering. Agriculture. Exploitation of Energy. These are what drive our culture.
    Underneath it all we are still tribal. We carry the illusion that our “Nationhood” is powerful and enduring even though it may be only a few tens of years old or at most a few hundreds of years.
    The European disease.
    When I could first vote in the 1960′s I could elect one local councillor and one British MP. Now I and my children are coerced into electing a local councillor, an MSP (Scottish parish council at Hollyrood), MP’s and MEP’s and we are also forced to indulge in a form of proportional representation.
    The cost of this escalation in political overhead is astronomical (especially when they finally reveal all their expenses and allowances). We were never given the option of not paying for all this.
    When it was one councillor and one British MP they were reasonably accountable. They did not have many places to hide. The council ran your local area and if you did not like them you could vote them out. Your MP represented you at the “Nation State” level and while (s)he might sometimes try to blame the councillor it was pretty obvious if (s)he was culpable or not and you could change him/her.
    The expansion of the political establishment and the concomitant expansion of the civil service and other “support” functions is no longer accountable. There are so many layers that each can hide behind the other. It is always someone else’s fault.
    So what do you do? Well the logical extrapolation of the current European political establishment set up is a return to the “City State”. If we abandoned this modern notion of the “Nation State” which is what all devolutionary movements are striving for, and revert to a “City State” existence across Europe, then we elect a local council to run the “City State” and we make the head of that council represent us at a European Parliament level.
    He still does his day job. He does not live in Strasbourg (unless he is the Strasbourg City State council leader). He conducts his business using the tools of our modern age (video conferencing) and maybe has a face to face meeting with his peers once a year or in times of European crisis.
    We remove the MEP, MP and MSP level of representation. They don’t really represent us so we will not miss them. We hold our local City state council leader’s toes to the fire.
    We remove a hugely expensive and ineffectual hierarchy of government, including the civil service and other “support” functions.
    If you really wanted to be a Council Leader in this regime then you would only do it if you had a strongly developed sense of Civic Duty and believed you could represent your electorate. I don’t think there would be too many career politicians around who were into for the wrong motives – short lived if they were.
    So is this a view of a “Federal Europe” that is different o that which seems to put up the backs of co many British people and politicians?
    Well I think it is.
    The fear of a Federal Europe is the fear of a federation of Nation States where a small agglomeration of strong Nation States can dominate the political agenda and frustrate the ambitions of the weaker ones. By limiting the size and strength of the constituent parts you weaken the threat of power blocks with distorting agendas.
    I have heard arguments that “the Germans” or “the French” would still dominate, but I believe those arguments underestimate the power of freedom, accountability and time. No Bavarian wants to be ruled by Saxons. No Basque wants to be ruled by Paris or Madrid. No highlander wants to be dominated politically by Glaswegian socialists or an Edinburgh elite.
    There is a dichotomy here though. The tribes know who they are by and large, right across Europe. However there are those of us who consider ourselves to be Europeans first, and whatever Nationality we are given second but recognise the tribe that we live within. Tribalism in its worst uncontrolled form could be narrow, xenophobic, insular and by being so, poor and un-nourishing.
    However, this is true today of those parts of the European conglomerate that are not affluent, well travelled, and well educated. Would it be any worse under the “city state” model. Probably not. It might even be better.
    The other old argument that is trotted out is the “Defence of the Nation” one. We are told we have fought hard and long to build our laws and defend our freedom as a Nation. However, we now find ourselves being told this by so many tiers of government that we did not ask for, and who use this as part of their justification for continued existence, that it becomes a very fragile argument with highly suspect motivations.
    What if I don’t want to defend “nation”? What if I only want to defend my tribal area and my livelihood? What if I think another political model can do this better than the one that has a vested interest in the status quo?
    Is this the USA model? Well in some respects it is and that may not be a bad thing. In other respects it is not. The USA is still too young for its present population mix to have settled into tribal patterns properly. It is still a melting pot. The old so called “Native American” tribes that migrated there probably about the same time that we repopulated northern Europe after the ice, are not politically or numerically powerful enough to influence that society strongly.
    The immigrant population that has arrived over the last 300 years or so is still morphing too quickly to establish stable tribal allegiances.
    They have devised a method of representation that is based more on manageable geographical areas than on any real sense of tribe.
    However, there is a lot we can learn from this and a lot of errors that we can avoid by doing so. The influence of dynastic money is one. Not easy to do but not impossible.
    Party Politics – Why do we need political parties? In the UK our present ones date back to concepts that are obsolete. They are embedded in a National History that, even if we retain the notion of the Nation State, has little relevance to today’s society. We are really given no choice but to vote along party lines because the “Party Line” is what each aligned candidate trots out.
    Why can’t we vote for the person who may best represent us and our views who is an independent thinker? Well it goes back to the election of representatives to a “Nation State” Parliament. Remove the nation state and you remove most of the motivation for have “national” political parties and you create conditions where holding an artificial “party line” would be much harder to make plausible.
    It is time to challenge the political status quo. It is time to ask why we have to pay for this overinflated political establishment. It is time to question the value of “nationhood” in modern times. It is time to give your politicians and councillors a very hard time indeed.
    Don’t let any of them off the hook.
    Remember Iraq and the WMD? Many good men died for a lie. Remind Blair and all his party frequently that they lied to the nation and your tribe.
    Remember how we all thought the housing boom and the financial arrangements that under pinned it were unsustainable? Remind your MP, MSP, MEP that it was them who let it happen and it is their debt that we are now all burdened with.
    Remind them that we are now looking at what they all cost us and whether they are worth it. Do they deserve all their allowances and expenses?
    We have a less accountable government who cost us a lot more than they did 30 years ago and provide a far less effective service in return. If they were a company they would have been bankrupt years ago. It is time that free market economic were brought to bear on the political establishment!!!!!

  • L Morgan

    Down to its logical conclusion re- tribalism, it is claimed by some sociologists that we can only recognise 350 people in community. Above that figure and we live mostly in a mix of strangers owing to this numerical ‘blur’.
    On the other hand, the writer is simply describing real life – and it has always been the nature of societies, big or small, to acquire the political vices he mentions, whether it was the city states of Germany or Italy, or the ancient Roman provinces and the kingship of Ur or Babylon. It is noteworthy that when most people like the writer get into a position of power, all altruism is ‘morphed’ into greed- the carrot dangling in front of the righteous and is irresistible.
    Empire building is not just in politics, but in companies great and small. Power ins an aphrodisiac. So the long article really says “There are always people who will get to the top by fair means or foul, rule a motley crew and take as much money out of those below as they can: and they are usually unstoppable. The period covered is from 100,000 BC (Chief of Caves has biggest with club-wielding thugs) to 2009 AD when the TPA is telling us roughly the same about our policiticians”
    L Morgan