Once upon a time, many moons ago, when newspapers came in black & white only with lots of words & few pictures, a national broadsheet carried, bottom of page two, a short story under the headline Whitehall gets its sums wrong.
I was surprised by the number of colleagues who found a reason to ring me that morning. Each conversation ended with a By the way, have you seen The Daily Broadsheet this morning?
For, on this unique occasion, to those in the know Whitehall meant me.
Of course I had not got my sums wrong with a careless slip of the pen, or finger on the calculator. They formed the basis for one part of the then fiendish process for setting the next year’s budget allocation to local authorities; naturally the local authorities felt the resulting allocations to be too low. It was blindingly clear, to me at least, which one of their negotiators had briefed the journalist with the story that the assumptions behind the forecast were wrong.
Actually I belong to the generation which abjured the use of the word forecast to describe such an exercise, preferring instead to speak of projections ‘if current trends continue’, as if there were no question about what those trends might be, or in what form they might continue.
I was listening to Radio 5 when the news of the abandonment of the new franchise for the West Coast railway line broke at one minute past midnight, heard the stunned voices of all those asked to comment or explain this totally unexpected development, all blamed on unacceptable mistakes by civil servants, felt personally both sick to the stomach & wanting to cry. Surely this must be the ultimate proof of the fact that they are not up to the job, deserve all the carping & complaint they have been getting from ministers recently.
Well maybe. But something is not quite right with this version.
Perhaps the traditional Oxbridge generalist qualifications do not equip today’s mandarin for the modern world of competition, contracts & information technology. Perhaps the quality of recruits has sunk alarmingly in an era when the brightest & best graduates all fly straight from university to the financial industries. Perhaps ministers cannot be expected to understand complicated spreadsheets & so must operate on trust, taking these very important decisions entirely & literally ‘on advice.’ But in my day – go back far enough & I was one of those young turks who understood statistics & computers – I would have expected to be called upon to explain in plain language what were the differences between the bids & why our model said that Bid X was best. And the most impressive ministers (& senior civil servants) had a way of unerringly putting a finger on the difficult points – not all of which you would have thought of yourself - & if necessary telling you to go away & think again.
In this particular case there were many commentators outside government who, having probably never had to read a spreadsheet in their lives, were able to spot why the original bid decision came as a surprise.
The idea that taditional civil servants were in charge of this process is not exactly & entirely right.
The Permanent Secretary previously worked in Vince Cable’s DTI & before that was a corporate finance banker at Morgan Stanley; one of the suspended civil servants, who has made her own public statement on the matter, is a former Goldman Sachs banker. Even the minister who made the original decision to award the franchise to First Group has an accountancy qualification & an MBA from the London Business School as well as experience in industry. And the Cabinet Secretary, who according to one newspaper report was asked by the prime minister to cast his own eye over that decision once Virgin had made their legal challenge, that manadrin’s mandarin with years of experience in the Treasury & as Private Secretary to chancellors & prime ministers, also spent three years as a Managing Director including as co–head of the UK Investment Banking Division at Morgan Stanley also reportedly failed to spot a flaw in the process.
The Department for Transport also had the benefit of advice when devising the franchising system from a major transport consulting company & an outside legal firm.
But it was not until an outside firm of accountants was called in to assist the department, presumably in its defence to the legal challenge, that serious flaws were discovered.
So if it is not the quality & experience of civil servants that explains the disaster – by no means the only one to have engulfed our system of politics & public administration of late, what could it be.
The hoped for stability & clarity, following the long years of annual ministerial reshuffles, sofa government & trying to serve two masters, in Treasury & Number 10, with their own different agendas, has not really emerged, with tensions between the coalition partners
The Secretary of State for Transport who had to make the hapless decision to pull the plug had been in the job for a month, the thirds Secretary of State since the election, & his impressively qualified permanent secretary has been in post (his first at that level) for only 6 months.
And governments are still just trying simply to do too much, blown hither & yon by the frenetic & unpredictable pace of comment & news & changes of sentiment.
Not to mention the small detail of a major economic & financial crisis.
