Credible manifestoes must demand public service reform

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Any political party credibly seeking office next month must place deep public service reform at the top of its manifesto if all its remaining promises are not to be made hollow.

Our problem has never been ideas and always been execution. No promise made so far can be kept without the public service implementing it. The incoming government will be a crisis government: an ineffective public service is no longer an option.

In the last few weeks the British government has effectively sacked the head of its public service, and permanent secretaries in the Home Office and the Foreign Office. This approach might be ham-fisted, but the mission remains sound. Serious overhaul is needed to meet the crises upon us.

This is firstly a political as much as it is an administrative problem. When legislation is passed, the amounts appropriated from the budget are not based on projected data of the needs and requirements of citizens. Agencies cannot tell how many public servants are necessary and operate in an almost total data vacuum. We therefore have both too many and too few public servants.

As George Mason University economist Alexander Tabarrok has pointed out, developing countries face constrained resources. When we attempt to do too much, we inevitably achieve much less. If any party summons the will to say: “We will do less, but we will do it well,” I am certain that would resonate strongly with voters tired of broken promises.

Part of that means demanding changes in the public service. One of the accusations often levelled is the excess of procedure. Yet ironically, the greatest problem that most citizens face is that there is too much ambiguity in government processes.

Most legislation does not include a detailed process that determines how decisions are carried out. Typically, a minister generally has discretion over this. However, few ministers dive into the minutiae of public service process. The can is continually kicked between the public service and political appointees.

There are vast numbers of processes which remain unmapped and left to individual decisions. And as officials fear the sack or being passed over for promotion, they avoid making decisions or communicating anything formally to the public. No small part of this stems from imprecisely drafted legislation and lack of political leadership.

As a result, the government almost never provides a timeline or a decision tree to citizens for government approvals or processes. This significantly depresses investment on all levels and wastes considerable amounts of citizens’ and businesses’ time.

This accountability stretches to finances. The State does not even publish its accounts payable. This results in tremendous uncertainty for any company that does business with the government. Uncertainty is the real killer of growth. Businesses would be more than willing to negotiate longer, extended payment terms with the government – if they had certainty of payment.

We have many sound measures in place – in theory. However, without publishable data on online platforms, we have no way of knowing whether we can access a grant or a tax incentive. Again, the problem is the cost of uncertainty, not a lack of announced public benefits. If every public benefit already on the books could just be accessed quickly and simply, a tremendous number of problems would be solved.

Technology is critical to this. Technology can allow citizens to track the status of interactions with the government. This forces accountability within government. No longer can documents be “moved to the bottom of the file” without anyone being responsible.

By using technology, tracking demand and, finally, defining decision-making processes, we can ensure accountability and extract ambiguity. Citizens will finally have clarity on when their applications will be processed and exactly what is required, for anything from welfare payments to import licenses. This will save time and will allow many processes to be removed altogether.

Of course, that is the kicker: I’ve spoken to several committed and intelligent senior public servants and even unionists. They are also frustrated. Within the service there is a powerful inertia, driven by the fear that greater efficiency will be used to cut jobs.

Public service reform, if framed without blame and led by political changes, is actually very popular within the service. To give in to inertia is not only unfair to the public, who have lived through more than a decade of stagnation and decline, enabled by a state indifferent to progress. It is unfair to those good people in the service who still care about the country. We must not let them down.

Kiran Mathur Mohammed is a social entrepreneur, economist and businessman. He is a former banker and a graduate of the University of Edinburgh