Lord Maude reviews 'The Art of Delivery'
Downing Street, July 2004: Tony Blair at his monthly press conference with Michael Barber | Image by: Independent / Alamy Stock Photo
4 min read
Michelle Clement has produced a brilliant account of the creation of the No 10 Delivery Unit and the travails of the Blair government to implement its public service reforms
This book recounts the travails of the Blair government in trying to get public service reforms implemented. (In passing, the subtitle “The Transformation of Public Services” might raise even Tony Blair’s eyebrows.) It covers the, in many ways, admirable initiative led by Sir Michael Barber which created the No 10 Delivery Unit, intended to circumvent the institutional inertia and innovation-averse culture of too much of the Civil Service.
His efforts were hampered by the additional drag anchor of a chancellor deeply hostile to the ideas of patient and parent choice, which were – eventually and rightly – central to Blair’s ambitions for reform in health and education.
The real tragedy is that – too late – he saw what needed to change in Whitehall’s institutional arrangements but, by then, he lacked the authority to make it happen. He understood the dead hand of the Treasury, whose attitude to reform often echoes Lord Melbourne, who when presented as prime minister with a proposal for reform expostulated: “Change!? Aren’t things bad enough already?”
Blair understood the lower value placed by the Civil Service on implementation capability over policy formulation: “white collar” policy officials are more than twice as likely to occupy senior Civil Service grades as their “blue collar” counterparts in finance, commercial, digital and operational delivery, and overwhelmingly more likely to be appointed to the top permanent secretary positions. Sir Peter Gershon, the distinguished business leader brought in to drive efficiency, commented that as an outsider you quickly find that all the key decisions are taken behind a wall; after a few months you find the door – but it only opens from the inside.
Blair wanted to have a crack at splitting the Treasury
Blair’s preference was to appoint as head of the Civil Service someone who had a proven track record of success in implementing change in a complex environment – but that didn’t happen.
He wanted to have a crack at splitting the Treasury, which is the key that will one day unlock the door to a serious and effective public service. But that key was firmly clasped in the iron grip of Gordon Brown, and he was never going to let it go.
If Blair had succeeded, the work I subsequently led in the Coalition government – when over five years we cut a cumulative £52bn from the running costs of government and created a world-leading digital transformation programme – would have been even more successful.
Why does it matter? Our centre of government is out of line with every comparable country with similar systems to ours. Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand all have a department of prime minister and cabinet, a proper strategic centre of government, that contains the secretariat elements of our Cabinet Office alongside the prime minister’s office. They then have a budget ministry, separate from the macro economic responsibilities of the finance ministry (the names vary confusingly but the concept is clear).
In the UK, you would bring together the public expenditure functions of the Treasury with the leadership of the cross-cutting implementation functions – commercial, project management, digital and so on – to create an office of budget and management, with a full-time dedicated head of the Civil Service with an explicit mandate from the PM to drive implementation and improvement.
None of this would make the successful delivery of ministers’ reform plans certain. But it would make it possible. Until that happens, prime ministers and others will rage against the dying of their high-minded hopes and ambitions; and will resort ever more desperately to ingenious workarounds such as the Delivery Unit initiative brilliantly described in this book. One day these workarounds will have become redundant because one day – just possibly – the whole Civil Service will have become the delivery unit for the nation.
Lord Maude of Horsham is a Conservative peer and former minister for the Cabinet Office
The Art of Delivery: The Inside Story of How the Blair Government Transformed Britain’s Public Services
By: Michelle Clement
Publisher: Biteback
