Are you accountable? Not if you're a public servant

Our public services are unaccountable which makes them badly run. Genuinely local government with real powers of scrutiny and taxation might help

I’ve been meaning to write about accountability and why we seem to have so little of it in government today and was struck by this observation from Helen Dale and Lorenzo Warby in their article on why people are Marxists:

“A classic problem with state production is that, if losses can be loaded onto the taxpayer, there is much less incentive to manage resources efficiently. If decision-makers are paid regardless of profitability or revenue, there is also much less incentive to engage in the discovery of economic opportunities.

The failure to perform, or even value, these functions has much to do with why command economies persistently underperform their mercantile equivalents. Indeed, lapse into economic stagnation.

Command economies select for elite domination, not for discovery, innovation or efficiency. Their structures for the latter are dysfunctional, being typically reduced to copying production techniques discovered by mercantile societies that are oriented toward such discovery.”

Although this doesn’t answer my question as to why the management and direction of public services is so unaccountable, it does point to the inherent lack of what we might call real accountability in monopoly services. And state services are, in almost every case, monopolies. Real accountability comes from the public having the choice to buy from a competitor or to purchase a substitute. And within this organisational accountability, we will see personal accountability for the tasks undertaken by workers, managers and directors. Tasks that should be directed to the profitability and survivability of the organisation.

Within a monopoly, and especially a monopoly lacking in a commercial objective, this institutional accountability to the public is not present so we construct other means to ensure the institution and its workers, managers and directors are held to account.

The most obvious artificial mechanism for accountability to the public is democracy, us choosing people to represent our interests in the administration of state services. This role, however, is compromised by these representatives also directing the services thereby reducing the incentive to hold them to account. Moreover, as anyone who has watched a parliamentary select committee in action or listened to a local council scrutiny panel will know, elected people are not really interested in understanding how the service can be improved. The currency of representative democracy is the vote so representatives focus on saying and doing things that maximise the number of votes they might receive. This is not especially conducive to promoting the accountability of services.

Because representatives have noticed their limited capacity especially given the size of the state, other systems have been designed to foster accountability as well as to promote a faux-commercial environment. The most common of these is placing services in state agencies rather than under the direct administration of central or local government. In Britain most notably this applies to the National Health Service (NHS) but right across government the services are cordoned off in an agency - HMRC, The Environment Agency, The Highways Agency, The Arts Council, Sport England, and so on. Each of these agencies has a chair and a board of directors, all ostensibly appointed by the relevant Secretary of State. The boards bring together the senior executives of the specific service and these appointed, non-executive directors whose task, at least in part, is to hold those executives to account. We have literally thousands of these roles across government and, while I’m sure that there are examples of strong non-executive action in response to poor outcomes, the general impression given is that these boards largely fail in that part of their role we might call public accountability.

To deal with this problem (boards essentially becoming advocates for their service rather than fulfilling that accountability role) governments have set up inspection services - Ofsted, Care Quality Commission, etc. - that seek to ensure published standards are met by organisations. While this is a form of accountability, it is not especially responsive and, as with boards, there’s not much evidence of executive accountability as a result of inspections. Also, the process is largely programmed rather than reactive and the inspection takes a broad view of the operation rather than the sort of narrow focus on outcomes that we see as accountability in commercial environments.

The result of this complicated set of accountability mechanisms is that objective failures by state agencies do not result in any holding to account, let alone any change in direction or leadership. We have seen plenty of services failings, from the worst such as the Mid-Staffordshire Hospitals scandal or the Croydon tram crash, to repeated failures such as water pollution and social housing conditions. At a local level we see the disasters of local energy companies like Robin Hood Energy and the forced takeover of children’s services in places like Bradford. Despite institutional admissions of failure, there is in all this precious little to suggest that the people responsible, the leaders of these public agencies, are held to account.

One of the most significant and egregious failures of public accountability relates to multiple cases of exploitative child grooming and rape across England. The cases at Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford have all been subject to investigative reports that identified a catalogue of failures across the police, local authority social services departments, schools and health services. Various mealy-mouthed apologies have been issued but no actual people have been identified as those responsible for decisions or choices that led to the prostituting of exploited girls continuing despite authorities knowing about these activities. There is no real accountability.

Within the public sector itself there is, as you would expect, a lot of talk about accountability - I wrote about the work of one such “expert”, Toby Lowe,  in 2019. Here’s what Lowe said:

“It’s also not just about the traditional hierarchical relationship. There are multiple accountable relationships. Your peers could ask you to account for your decisions, as could a member of the public who is receiving the service – or an ombudsman or professional body. The main thing is that real accountability involves a conversation.”

My comment on Lowe’s description of accountability (or “new form” of accountability as he styled it) was:

“The problem here is that accountability becomes just a management tool - Lowe talks about 'learning' and 'autonomy' but at no point recognises the central requirement that the service is, first and foremost, accountable to the public. The process becomes personal or management development rather than accountability…”

What we see here is that the public sector understands that being accountable is important but seeks to redefine the idea as a tool rather than as a condition. Moreover, as the Surveyor in Kafka’s The Castle discovered, the one thing accountability isn’t for is holding individuals to account for their mistakes - this would be to assume something about the administration we are not permitted to assume, that it makes errors.

“...you may be reproaching Sordini for not having been prompted by my claim to make inquiries about the matter in other departments. But that would have been wrong, and I want this man cleared of all blame in your thoughts. One of the operating principles of authorities is that the possibility of error is simply not taken into account.”

Kafka here was being purposely cynical but we all recognise the principle in play here. Individuals within a bureaucracy are not culpable for the failings of that bureaucracy. The Surveyor sought what he felt was a simple explanation but found himself instead within a numbing administrative nightmare where each seeming answer added to institutional denial. Harry Truman may have had “the buck stops here” on his desk but this rather assumes that the buck ever escaped its circulation round the administration's bureaucrats for Harry to stop it!

Given we began with the recognition that bureaucracy can never be truly accountable, asking whether we can fix the lack of accountability in public services now seems a foolish mission. Getting more of what the state does out into competitive markets would be a good start and this could happen across areas like roads, health and education without breaking the principle that everyone should receive these services free when they need them. But it is hard to see how other parts of the system - tax collection, policing, the military, benefits administration - can be commercialised. So we are stuck with an inevitable fudge in trying to make people managing and delivering public services more accountable. 

Back in the 1980s Dutch social psychologist, Geert Hofstede described a concept he called power distance - the extent to which the members of a society accept that power in institutions and organizations is distributed unequally”. The further power is from the individual consumer of a public service, the less that person feels able to influence the way in which that service is run. The distance could be physical (you have to travel to the castle to get an answer), cultural (it is in a language or style I struggle to understand, for example) or social (the service is administered by people who aren;t like me), but the bigger the distance the less the institution is accountable to those receiving its services. One way to improve accountability is, therefore, to reduce that power distance, to get the decisions about services made physically and psychologically closer to the service user.

A decade ago economic commentator Tim Worstall wrote a short article about how to turn the USA into Scandinavia. In this article he described just how much of Denmark’s welfare state was delivered at the commune level (about 10,000 people) pointing out that, at the time he wrote:

“…the national income tax rate in Denmark starts out at 3.76% and peaks at 15%. There's also very stiff, 25-30% of income taxes at the commune level.”

Communes in Denmark are around 10,000 people. Worstall went on to describe Bjorn’s Beer Effect:

“Instead they have what I call the Bjorn's Beer Effect. You're in a society of 10,000 people. You know the guy who raises the local tax money and allocates that local tax money. You also know where he has a beer on a Friday night. More importantly Bjorn knows that everyone knows he collects and spends the money: and also where he has a beer on a Friday. That money is going to be rather better spent than if it travels off possibly 3,000 miles into some faceless bureaucracy.”

Here we see a description of how accountability might work better if more services were paid for and administered at a genuinely local level. As a councillor for 24 years, I can concur that in your ward you are very visible, lots of people know who you are and will approach you, mostly politely, with questions and concerns. Maybe resolving our accountability conundrum is to turn around approaching 60 years of centralisation in Britain's basic services.

Right now the direction of public policy in the UK, regardless of the endless rhetoric about devolution, is still essentially centralising. The reason for this was articulated by former Conservative minister, Anne Widdecombe when she pointed out that central government would always opt for more central direction so long as the response to any local failing is to pull the minister onto the Today programme for a grilling about why she hasn’t done something. Coupled with a prevailing mindset about the naffness of local councils in Whitehall (and among London-based think tanks), we have a situation where local communities no longer have any real chance of taking control of the public services that community receives.

Here in Cullingworth - population about 4,000 - all our services bar the Christmas lights are delivered from a distant location which is often hard to find and which prefers to to engage via an anonymous on-line portal. Imagine if we are in a Danish-style commune - they average about 50,000 people these days - rather than a huge metropolitan district ten times that size? English local government prior to the 1970s looked like that (it was a geographical mess admittedly) but we changed this into ever larger bodies resulting in the lastest nonsense of a North Yorkshire council stretching from Sutton-in-Craven to Whitby, nearly 100 miles. On what planet is that local government?

I’m agnostic on the matter of elected mayors (but utterly opposed to the model used outside London where there is no elected assembly as in the capital) but believe strongly that public services - from job support and adult education right through to sweeping the streets and unclogging gullies via policing and benefit administration - are better delivered at the most local level possible. Moreover, where services need to be delivered via a national or regional system or are done via a dispersed, non-state system as with schools, the task of inspection and oversight should be done by those local councils not by another anonymous agency run from a big office in London.

I would make some other changes to limit malign influences like the political party whip - moving to a single transferable vote system for local elections, for example. And granting council scrutiny and oversight the right to information and to require service leaders to face public questions where needed. This isn’t a perfect solution - politicians will always be politicians and will always tend to prefer grandstanding to proper inquiry - but it makes those delivering services aware that they may be asked to account for their decisions in public and in the place those decisions affect.

We want, if we are genuinely believers in democratic government, the public to feel that there is some connection between how they vote and the quality of the services they receive. Right now this isn’t the case with the result that the debate is always about money rather than service quality. Of course the leaders in any public service are going to tell you it would all be sorted if you only hand over more cash. But if we can’t get even a semblance of accountability then it is little different to shovelling £50 notes into the power stations.

Making services accountable to the communities where they are delivering their services and having the quality of that process subject to local elections is the best available way to get better quality services. It can be done but only if we reframe the way we think about public services in Britain.