David Cameron has made speedy and sweeping reforms to the public sector, but the spirit of Sir Humphrey Appleby lives on and is determined to thwart change
The new play of Yes, Prime Minister now on in London’s West End relies a lot more on farce than its television predecessor, but is just as incisive. Those earlier scripts from the 1980s were unerringly accurate and spookily prescient. The subjects they tackled are the same as now: public service cuts, defence spending, open government, small state; and Whitehall waste.
Watching them again is to be struck by the eternal verities of politics. They depict a battle between the politicians who want to change things and the public servants who, by and large, want continuity and seek to frustrate their ministerial masters. Institutional resistance becomes a badge of honour.
In a famous observation after just two years in office, Tony Blair said he had the ‘scars on my back’ to show how hard it was to get public sector reforms past the civil service. After ten years in office and parliamentary majorities of around 170, he still failed to get much done where it really mattered. Will Prime Minister David Cameron fare any better or will he be parading his own battle scars a couple of years from now?
Unlike Blair, however, he has just got on with it. The best time to make unpopular decisions and begin large-scale reform is just after taking office. Leave it too long and governments start to run up against the next election. Short-termism is a political affliction that can easily be exploited by those averse to change.
On the other hand, the coalition has arguably started with too much of a flourish, opening up so many fronts that will be hard to contain. One reason why the NHS budget was ring-fenced was to neutralise health as a political issue, given its toxicity for any governing party. Yet Health Secretary Andrew Lansley has embarked on the biggest overhaul of the NHS since its foundation – a programme for reform which took even his own colleagues by surprise. The opportunities here for something to go horribly wrong are considerable.
Education Secretary Michael Gove – first out of the traps with his reforms – is already involved in a toe-to-toe scrap with his own officials, many of whom regard the free school plans with barely concealed disdain. And it is not just Whitehall: there is resistance throughout the educational establishment, notably among the teaching unions and councils.
In an article over the summer, the Spectator magazine revealed what it called a ‘campaign of intimidation’ against head teachers who wished to embrace Gove’s ideas. One head received a letter from the National Union of Teachers indicating that it might organise a strike at her school. In some areas, it is claimed that local education authorities have threatened to withdraw support services to schools that opt into the Gove reforms. And it is not just Labour councils that don’t like being cut out of the loop – Conservative-run Bromley recently came out against proposals for a new academy.
Institutional resistance takes other forms, too. Shroud-waving designed to scare governments away from their intended course of action and the cuts in departmental budgets offer plenty of scope for this, from claims of Kosovan-style ethnic cleansing to the removal of police from the streets.
Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles has told local authorities that they will have to make efficiency savings that do not affect the front line. But the councils have other ideas. The Local Government Association has warned MPs that home care programmes for elderly and disabled people might have to shut down completely in some parts of the country. If that happens, how long before more cash is found to forestall a political backlash?
The core civil service has also proved resilient to attempts to cut it back. Giving evidence to a Commons select committee recently, Cabinet secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell said compulsory redundancies were inevitable but the aim was to secure most through ‘natural wastage’. It turns out, for instance, that the 25% cut in the Ministry of Defence bureaucracy will include reductions in locally employed support staff in Germany when the army shuts up shop there.
The chances are that when the dust has settled a few years from now there will be just as many Whitehall officials as there are now. Sir Humphrey Appleby would have been thrilled.
Philip Johnston is assistant editor of the Daily Telegraph
