The system works as designed but the system also doesn't work

It will be a long haul to recover from the error of 1988, which took twenty years to implement, but we need to start if we want a better and more accountable government.

Kafka Castle by Catalan architect, Ricardo Bofill

“The system is working as intended”

So runs the oft repeated line from Dominic Cummings, former chief-of-staff to Boris Johnson and self-appointed guru of this viewpoint. In summation, Cummings view is that government - the state, if you prefer - has been designed purposefully to work “as intended”. In a vaguely conspiratorial way, every failure of the state is, to Cummings, simply the “system working as intended”. Now this could, I suppose, be satire, but it also implies a surprising level of competence, organisation and structure in “SW1” which, given Cummings tells us it is filled with NPCs, comes as something of a surprise.

The system is not working as intended. The repeated failures of government at all levels, whether babies dying unnecessarily in hospitals or scared girls in council care hiding from rapist gangs, should remind us that the system doesn’t work. And this was not the intention when the evolution of the modern British government began in the 1980s. The plan, really a vague assertion rather than a strategy, was that the functions of the state needed to operate in a more businesslike manner in order to get the innovations, efficiencies and productivity associated with the private sector. And Dominic Cummings, for all his personal positioning as anti-system, is wholly wedded to this analysis of why public administration fails. Cummings merely thinks that the state is taking the wrong lessons from business.

Margaret Thatcher was a great prime minister but we should not be blind to her and her government’s failings, especially in the hubristic time after 1987 that Auberon Waugh referred to as the Iron Lady’s “mad period”. In this period the seeds for many of Britain’s administrative failings were sown, all in the name of efficiency:

“Real change came with Improving Management in Government: The Next Steps, which was published in February 1988 (the Ibbs report), which recommended the creation of agencies to 'carry out the executive functions of Government within a policy and resources framework set up by a department' (para 19). If the main agency programme is completed at the end of 1997, three quarters of Civil Service staff will be working for agencies.”

We underestimate the degree to which, in ten years from 1987-1997, the way in which we were governed completely changed. Nearly all the services we receive from the state were no longer under the immediate purview of elected people but were directed by boards appointed either by the civil service or by ministers. This process was continued, in some aspects (such as the legal and fiscal systems) even accelerated under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. This is the system that Dominic Cummings tells us is “working as intended”. We have a system of state administration that sees ‘arms-length’ executive agencies inspected by independent regulators while the people we supposedly choose to oversee this system have no idea how it operates but spend their lives chasing casework from the people harmed by the system.

It is a system at once believing itself transparent, accountable and driven by a unique ‘public sector ethos’ while at the same time acting with secrecy, defensiveness and cover-up. We are perhaps living in the modern manifestation of Kafka’s Castle:

“You’re very severe,” said the chairman, “but multiply your severity by a thousand and it will still be as nothing compared with the severity that the authorities show toward themselves. Only a total stranger could ask such a question. Are there control agencies? There are only control agencies. Of course they aren’t meant to find errors, in the vulgar sense of that term, since no errors occur, and even if an error does occur, as in your case, who can finally say that it is an error.”

Our system of public administration doesn’t do what it was designed to do, quite the opposite. The system works primarily in the interests of those administering the system and, in doing so, will actively protect ministers from criticism over failures in administration. We have, for example, watched with incredulity as the Horizon scandal unfolds knowing that, despite the Post Office being wholly owned by the state, no minister will be held to account for the wrongdoing of that organisation’s leadership. An extensive enquiry was held into the fire disaster at Grenfell tower but, despite the housing being wholly owned by the state, no politician, housing director or council chief executive will have to account for why the management of the housing was so neglectful. And there have been repeated tragedies resulting from poor management in the NHS without any of the myriad chief executives, directors and board members being asked how it was that they screwed up.

When people talk about the ‘blob’, ‘swamp’ or, less poetically, the ‘administrative state’ they mean these structures and processes along with the panoply of support beyond the bounds of the state itself. We have seen how public administration builds a client network of consultancies, NGOs and media with the purpose of defending that administration from threat or criticism. Indeed, the development of policy within government doesn’t usually involve politicians but rather occurs inside a black box of advisors, academia, NGOs and senior leaders in public agencies. Politicians think they are leading the agenda because they are on telly arguing for ‘something to be done’ but, the usual truth is that these politicians merely promote moral panics and crises cooked up by that administrative state. As a result politicians create law on the basis of vibes and media applause rather than thoughtfully and with due consideration of risks, sub-optimal outcomes and costs.

“It is with huge sadness that the forum has closed on 16th March 2025 due to the requirements of the new legislation - the Online Safety Act. While this forum has always been perfectly safe, we were unable to meet the compliancy.”

The Online Safety Act, supposed to save us from paedophiles and terrorists, has instead had the effect of closing down small forums - the little statement above is from the Hamster Forum, hardly a threat to anything or anyone. Other forums for cyclists, community groups and green living have closed, unwilling to face the risks of massive fines or the costs of regulatory compliance. But the response to these unforeseen outcomes isn’t coming from the ministers and politicians responsible for the Act but from Ofcom, an independent agency outside the direct control of our government. In the manner of Pilate, political leaders simply point to Ofcom while washing their hands of responsibility.

But it gets worse because Ofcom will, inevitably anonymously - do you know who runs Ofcom? - simply tell us they are only obeying the orders of politicians contained in the legislation. This pattern is repeated across every government agency where, unless the failings are especially egregious, no attempt to challenge what the agency does cannot be batted away with a bland statement about the law or a reference to some hard to find piece of guidance. Even, as with Grenfell and the Post Office, where the failing is truly shocking, genuine accountability for ministers, directors and managers is unlikely. Instead, invoking that mythical public sector ethos - “one of the operating principles of authorities is that the possibility of error is simply not taken into account” - the blame is shifted to the private sector or to a ‘lessons learned’ conclusion encompassing the whole agency thereby exonerating the leaders of that agency.

The system is designed not to be accountable, to make its leaders untouchable, and to prevent wherever possible the public and their representatives from having any substantive route to change these arrangements. This is made worse because the lack of accountability, the untouchability of the arms-length agency, results in bad government:

“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.”

I don’t believe you can fix this with Dominic Cummings’ model of command and control from the Cabinet Office. Indeed his focus is on why the civil service obstructs ministers and their advisors - more vengeance than good administration. Resolving the problems of bad government means more things done locally, means more privatisation and a systems change that grants the service user (and his or her representative) more scope to challenge and better recourse to the resolution of error. Margaret Thatcher’s biggest failing was that, despite her enthusiasm for Hayek, she disliked local government and overlooked that private business succeeded because of competition and the profit motive not because of its management’s genius. It will be a long haul to recover from the error of 1988, which took twenty years to implement, but we need to start if we want a better and more accountable government.

The starting point is to get agencies back under the control of the elected part of government, the recent decision on NHS England is a start. We need then to get inspection and regulation under democratic control starting with returning oversight of health and care to local government (thereby abolishing Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission). Give local scrutiny more teeth as well as allowing parliamentary enquiries rather than requiring ministers to approve any investigation. And, having moved everything back into government, then make sure ministers know that the buck really does stop on their desk.