How I learned to stop worrying and love bureaucracy

I often disregard right wing critiques of the civil service because there’s an inherent hostility to its very existence. A lot of it is informed by Clarksoneque commentary about red tape. I have some sympathy with it, but I can also see the flip side - especially in farming, when you need a level of industry surveillance for things like biosecurity, animal disease prevention, wildlife conservation and trade monitoring, while also keeping tabs on pollution and soil health. I also don’t think farms should be exempt from basic health and safety rules and animal welfare rules.

For sure there are egregious examples of official overreach and onerous planning rules, but we have seen examples of criminal acts by farmers (illegal dredging of riverbanks) and wilful acts of pollution. According to research, runoff from agriculture is the biggest cause of damage to waterways after sewage overflows.

The Thatcherite libertarian bore will often work on the assumption that because they personally don’t see the value in something then it has no inherent value, but the countryside is not a wilderness. It looks the way it does because it is managed, and it’s because of things like planning rules that much of it maintains its character.

You can argue with plenty justification that there is too much red tape, too much duplication of paperwork, and too many administrative fees (which could probably be absorbed by general taxation) but whatever the cost of obeying the rules, it’s cheaper than regular outbreaks of FMD.

If you read any generic right wing tract, they will often talk about a “bonfire of quangos” and would happily delete arms of government regardless of what it actually does, and you can tell that they didn’t even spend thirty seconds looking at why it actually exists. This is the right wing slopulism I am fundamentally opposed to.

If they were to make their case having climbed in and come up with policy alternatives, based on industry knowledge, I would be a lot more sympathetic, but most of the time it’s recycled lazy rhetoric that’s often older than me. The people spouting it have usually never run anything, have no idea how anything works yet they expect us to believe they would do a better job of running the country.

Insofar as you can persuade a libertarian bore that regulation is necessary, they then default to the classic trope of pruning back office administration - which doesn’t tend to produce greater efficiency. Bureaucracy always finds a way.

I remember some time ago, I consulted on (ironically) an MoD cost control system. Project management requires reporting on all costs from staff costs through to building materials and office equipment. Because of strict rules on software consultancy and limits on IT spend, we weren’t allowed to use an SQL database server, so were instead forced to use a system of linked Excel spreadsheets.

For those who don’t know, Microsoft Excel has its own native programming language (VBA) which was one of my specialism at the time. My job was to develop this system of linked spreadsheets to do data imports, cost projections and reports, which ended up being one of the most complex things I’ve ever created precisely because it was replicating the functions of an SQL Server.

For the most part, it worked. It did what it was supposed to do 99% of the time. The 1% of the time when it didn’t, though, meant climbing in to debug code I hadn’t looked at for weeks, which usually means reading through it top to bottom to trace where the error is. That could end up being a three day investigation.

After six months, there was no more funding for my role, which was supposed to be a limited consultancy. I don’t know exactly what happened but what I do know is that within days of my departure, something will have broken and nobody will have had the prerequisite knowledge of Excel VBA or my design to ever get it working again.

Had they been allowed to use a SQL database, it would have had central IT support, and you could have hooked it up to Excel pivot tables that would have done most of the heavy lifting without requiring extensive VBA reporting routines, and (if civil servants had decent Excel skills) it wouldn’t have required a full time consultant to keep it running. Any which way you look at it though, it’s something that needed proper administration.

Often the complaint about the MoD is that it has no idea of overall departmental spending, which attracts the ire of Rupert Lowe types, but in reality, there is no one size fits all system for a department as diverse and security conscious as the MoD. There are hundreds of systems ranging from SQL servers through to small desktop databases, all of which require people who know the processes as well as the technology. By capping IT and consultancy spend, departments are forced to use the wrong tools for the job.

This, though, has always been the case. At the end of the day, government budgets are finite, you have to draw the line somewhere and expect your people to do the best they can with what they’ve got. That’s certainly always been the case with the army and air force. We didn’t use the Vulcan to bomb Port Stanley because it was good at it. We used it because it was the closest thing we had to a long range conventional bomber - even though it was never designed for the job. Make do and mend is the nature of the business.

What you then get, is the periodic consolidation phase of the cycle where a bright spark notices all the diverse and disparate systems with the brilliant idea of combining them all into one. That then results in even bigger, more ambitious government IT projects that end up doing a mediocre job of 90% of the tasks, leaving people like me to develop supplementary systems to fill in the gaps, and then within a few years you’re right back to where you started with hundreds of spreadsheets and bespoke desktop apps.

A wise man at Airbus once told me that bureaucracy is like a jelly mountain. You can exert pressure on it to change its shape but the moment you release that pressure, it will wobble back to its original form.

What makes the difference is administrators who know the system inside out. You can have a high rate of churn with frontline staff if the administration tier is at least consistent, but everything falls apart when administration is ad hoc, and increasingly reliant on short term consultancy and temp workers. There’s a lot to be said for retaining institutional knowledge.

What we’re now finding is thanks to efficiency purges, is that we’ve lost a lot of institutional knowledge and institutional memory that tells you when not to change things. We let a lot of experience go, only to dumb down the process and we then complain that the system no longer works.

As such, there is a certain merit in allowing a a margin of redundancy and bloat in large organisations, especially if they’re multifunctional. The right will often call for more private sector style management which will often cut everything to the bone that isn’t directly related to revenue, which is fine for commercial enterprises, but it doesn’t work in social services departments or any organisation with atypical functions.

Prima donnas like Dominic Cummings are ten a penny - who think you can come in like a Tasmanian devil, shake things up, bully the staff and turn things around, but the iron rules of bureaucracy always defeat them. They always complain about internal sabotage and entrenched interests, but the one thing that’s good about bureaucracy is that it tends to defeat disruptors. Disruptors are usually the ones who come in and wreck everything without knowing what anything does.

Again, I conclude that the way to optimise outcomes is to clarify what an organisation is for and give it proper instructions as to what is expected of it. When you have that kind of clarity you can at least measure its effectiveness. This why there is a role for specialist quangos to take care of mundane functions of government. There’s a reason why you’ve never heard of 90% of quangos and that’s because what they do is boring and uncontroversial, and they stay out of the news because they do their jobs without a fuss. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s probably because it works - and vice versa.

As such, we need to spend less time worrying about the bits that work, and more about the bits that don’t. That is not then a matter of accountants. It’s a matter for policy and politicians. For instance, I’m less concerned about the cost of the asylum system as the fact we have one at all. Meanwhile, I’d rather have the expense and overhead of a spawling estate of magistrates courts than a major backlog and criminals getting off scot free. Would-be reformers need to think about what it is they want government to do rather than how big it should be. If you want certain outcomes, you need certain inputs.