To defeat the bureaucracy, you must first understand it

Populists always call for a new breed of honest politician but you never catch them being honest with the public (or themselves). They call for radical tax cuts while talking about boosting spending on everything from defence through to infrastructure, but they never pin down how they're going to pay for it. There's only so many times you can reallocate the foreign aid budget.

They will speak in generalities about cutting waste and bureaucracy and cuts to welfare, but nowhere will you find credible specifics. They start off on the rather arrogant premise that waste and bureaucracy is easily identified, and will yield massive savings, then hit the reality barrier within weeks of election, not least because if they even attempt half of what they say they'll do, they're not getting re-elected.

This is what feeds the disaffection cycle in British politics, and it's why people don't believe political parties even when they agree with them. I'm of the view that if parties don't respect voters enough to provide details on what they'll do and how, they cannot expect to mobilise them when it matters. If you want to be taken seriously, you have to be serious.

It’s true that there are some easily identified areas for scrutiny. Personal Independence Payment (PIP) payouts are a major driver of increased spending, projected to rise by £14bn to £19bn over the coming years. Total welfare spending is set to increase significantly, with 3.7 million working-age people receiving health-related benefits.

PIP caseloads and costs have risen sharply post-pandemic, driven by factors like mental health conditions (e.g., anxiety and mood disorders seeing record claims), broader ill-health trends, and assessment processes. Working-age health-related benefit spending is forecast to keep climbing, with some estimates putting total incapacity/disability benefits toward £60-70 billion annually in the coming years if unchecked—more than defence spending in some projections.

Not for a nanosecond does anything think this is sustainable but even then it’s going to require a careful look at how we bring the overall bill down. You can’t simply swing the axe and hope for the best. Here I keep thinking back to Theresa May’s so-called dementia tax which cost her a working majority in 2017.

Meanwhile, parties of the right claim there’s a lot of savings to be made by cutting benefits for immigrants. Data obtained earlier this year by Conservative MP Neil O’Brien reportedly showed that a total of £941 million a month in Universal Credit payments was made to households with at least one foreign national. This equates to roughly £11.3 billion annually if sustained, though it’s a snapshot and includes households where a foreign national is present (not necessarily the primary claimant, and often long-settled or entitled groups like refugees, EU settled status holders, or those who’ve passed habitual residence tests).

Though this is pure speculation, I think it’s reasonable to assume that whatever pots you can identify for cuts, any government, at best, is only going to save about half of the headline figure. My feeling is that identifying savings at the national level will prove as challenging as Reform UK’s flawed local efforts.

I base that speculation on the fact that the right as a tendency to inflate numbers to build its narrative of endemic waste, when a more nuanced look at the data suggests they’re pulling a fast one. It’s easy to rack up big numbers and cumulative spends, but trimming fat from annual budgets requires a more detailed look, on a level that most right wing outfits simply can’t be bothered with. They’re more about manufacturing outrage.

That is not to say that manufacturing outrage does not serve a political function, but somebody in the background has to be doing the real work spelling out how future governments can get things under control. Even then, though, there is not much room for manoeuvre. Any future government will have to choose between tax cuts and investment. Supposing £30bn in annual savings could be credibly identified, it’s going to take at least half that to get the Royal Navy back up to strength, and the rest will need to go on an emergency interim energy policy to avoid blackouts. There’s then not much room for tax cuts.

As I identified in my piece on quangos the other day, 90% of spending goes on the top ten organisations, including NHS England, and as such, that’s going to require researched-based policy to see how we can get the health bill down, but it might turn out to be one of those areas that requires serious investment in order to realise efficiencies.

This is the kind of serious work any party on the cusp of power needs to be doing, but there’s no real evidence that’s happening. We can assume that if Restore/Reform gets around to producing policy papers, much of it will be padding citing the usual collection of TPA and CPS reports rather than original structured thinking. It’s the sort of work I would do if I thought for a nanosecond anybody in that world would actually read it.

Consequently, we’ll head into the next election with the slop parties of the right making largely unsubstantiated claims without a serious plan of action, to find that they cannot make good on their promises, and that which they can do is so politically toxic, they’re out on their ear in 2034.

They will, of course, do what they always do and blame the civil service. I’m starting to understand this dynamic a little more now. Just the other day I was watching Rupert Lowe’s performance at the Public Accounts Committee. This is similar to what Ukip did in the European Parliament. They enter the room with the intention of creating a spectacle they can later use for social media, but it’s not actually productive.

In this instance we see Rupert Lowe hectoring civil servants on the assumption hat they are incompetent woke lefty wastrels rather than low level functionaries who couldn’t in a lifetime of trying have detailed overview of a massive organisation like the MoD. I’ve seen this before, with grandstanding MPs barking questions at civic servants, purely for the purposes of self-aggrandisement, and demanding they sort themselves out. In reality, it is for politicians themselves to instruct civil servants and provide them with policy direction.

Certainly it does Lowe’s public image no harm - to be seen as the ruthless businessman giving the bureaucrats what-for, calling the civil service to account where other MPs do not, but ultimately this is how governments end up butting heads with the civil service. They barge in with no real idea of the size and scope of governmental organisations and make demands for immediate improvements when nothing happens rapidly in large organisations.

Again, I have some insight here from my career as a database developer and administrator. Large organisations very often have several IT systems, some of them so intricate and complex that they can’t be easily replaced and don’t easily talk to each other, where getting data out of them isn’t always straightforward. I can easily understand why the MoD doesn’t have reliable aggregate data across the entire organisation. This could be resolved my modernisation of IT system, but that’s slow, expensive and requires a lot of consultancy - which the likes of Lowe would regard as waste - perhaps justifiably given the track record of government IT programmes.

In the real world, though, there is no reason why a Whitehall defence official would have detailed knowledge of inventory systems in vehicle maintenance hangar in Gloucestershire. In all probability it’s running on twenty year old software that just about works but nobody sees as important enough to replace given the likely costs of doing so. This is where luminaries from the private sector have limited use in government. Very few have any concept of how large and diverse organisations function - not least because the delegate the details.

It’s very easy to talk about streamlining government, but the MoD is a very good example of where streamlining is actually quite hard. The MoD is tasked with everything for estates management (housing through to defence installations) while also being tasked with developing cyber warfare and submarine delivery. It helps that some functions are broken out into arm’s length bodies (DIO etc), but these are the very quangos that Lowe rails against. You can’t have it both ways.

Moreover, if this is true of the defence establishment then it is especially true of the NHS. The point here, is that governing is a lot harder than the populist assumes it is. They can all bang the desk and tell me that government is bureaucratic and wasteful, and I’m not going to disagree, but you’ll have a hard time telling anyone who has worked in the real world that the problems are easy or cheap to resolve.

This is where you have to go back to first bases and decide what it is you want government to do, and shape it accordingly. If, though, you're starting out on the faulty premise that it will work better after ideological axe swinging, you’ll end up axing parts of the administration that actually keeps it all running - thus incurring the additional cost of rebuilding institutional knowledge from scratch.

If you start out on the premise that the civil service are the enemy (as Rupert Lowe does), you immediately make an enemy of the very dedicated men and women who could help you (and don’t even oppose you). I strongly suspect this is why ministers like Priti Patel, going in with all guns blazing, accomplished so very little.

This is why it’s necessary for those who would depose the establishment must develop their own expertise, drawn from people with some experience of running things at the micro level. In the end, the world turns on bureaucracy, and our bureaucracy with all its rules and regulations are what set us apart from the third world slum. If you want to master it, you must first understand it.