The UK public sector values innovation more than delivery. As a result, it wastes billions of pounds designing apparently ‘perfect solutions’ that simply expire on the drawing board
Over Christmas, my wife and I took delivery of our fifth child, baby Henry Jackson. What struck me most was how little we did to get him. In the preceding nine months, his mother ate a lot of wine gums and toffees and we drank a lot of tea, but we didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about how to improve his design. Henry is based on a template that has served the human race pretty well for a couple of million years, and my wife and I are happy with him, all things considered. He will do for us.
When it comes to babies, innovation is not seen as a good thing, whereas it is for everything else in life. Our culture has a fetish for new shiny stuff that overrides all other considerations. Because of this attitude, we waste a lot of money improving things that don’t need improving.
All my Christmas presents (apart from Henry) were variations on things I already had. My teenage daughter thinks she should be the subject of a Barnardo’s advert because she only has an iPhone 3. Meanwhile, in January, the National Audit Office revealed that the previous government wasted £32bn on poorly procured infrastructure projects, mainly to address needs that didn’t really exist.
Now £32bn is a big scary number but to make it more real, about third of the required spending cuts could have been avoided if only the public sector had not been so bad at buying stuff. Or to put it another way, one in three civil servants who will lose their jobs this year could have kept them if only their colleagues hadn’t been so profligate.
Predictably, the private sector is being held to blame, with suggestions that poor civil servants were duped by wily contractors and their cunning lawyers. I think this is only part of the problem and there is an underlying issue of the obsession with change that permeates our government.
The UK public sector is stuck in a mind-set of reinventing things that work perfectly well for everybody else. As a result, it spends an awful lot of taxpayers’ money with its head in the sand, saying: ‘If we didn’t invent it, it’s no good.’
We can illustrate this by comparing the Ministry of Defence’s procurement of personnel carriers with the Soviet T34 tank. Sometime in 1998 the MoD decided it had to have new armoured personnel carriers. No matter that every other army in the world had long since abandoned horses and hence probably already had something suitable that vaguely worked, the MoD decided they had to start with a blank sheet of paper.
So far they have spent £718m on design costs alone. We hope to get the final ones delivered in 2025, 27 years after we first had the idea.
By contrast, the Soviets decided in 1937 they needed a new tank. By 1940 they had started production and to date more than 84,000 T34s have been built. So, more than 60 years ago, without computers or the Internet, the Soviets could do something in three years that will take the MoD 27.
The reasons for this delay are mired in controversy. But there does seem to be a consensus that the pace of technological innovation meant that the MoD kept on revising the specification so our brave boys in the front line could have the latest gadget, albeit only on paper and in Whitehall instead of on the ground in Afghanistan.
I’m not saying innovation is a bad thing per se. It’s just that in our culture we value it more than delivery and this skews our approach to public sector procurement. We would rather spend years on design to get it just right than risk having something less than perfect.
The MoD is notorious for this approach but we see it in the Health and Education departments as well. Patient records are just patient records and every other health service and insurance business in the world has a working IT system apart from us. A school is a school is a school, so why do we need councils to have ‘education visions’ before we let them build them?
How do we stop wasting public sector money in the pursuit of perfect solutions that expire on the drawing board? We can start by changing our expectations of politicians.
Let’s be relaxed about people who don’t have big ideas to change the world. Let’s encourage minsters to go on the Today programme and say: ‘We are not going to deliver some groundbreaking solution, we are simply going to run the country more competently than our predecessors.’
I don’t want any more politicians spending my taxes on innovative vanity projects that take years and cost millions. I want them to empty my bins, educate my children and make sure we win the next World Cup.
Secondly, let’s not be coy about copying stuff. The problems faced by our government are universal. Other people run trains, build schools and invade Third World countries just as much as we do, so let’s steal ideas from everybody else. The first test for any new government project should be: can we ‘borrow’ somebody else’s solution?
Thirdly, make hard and fast rules for public procurement. Set a maximum of two to three years for the design stage whatever the project. If something is still on the drawing board at the end of this period, cancel it and spend the money on something that will actually happen. Do this a couple of times and departments will get the message.
Finally, I think we need to change our values when it comes to appraising the performance of civil servants. We need a consensus that’s says implementation is more important than innovation. It is easy to have ideas, it is very much harder to deliver results. If you want to be all creative, go and buy yourself a black polo neck and move to Hoxton. If you want to be a civil servant, wear a Marks & Spencer suit and make things happen.
So it seems we can learn a lot about public sector procurement from baby Henry. Mother Nature has been making these complex little machines for a long time and does not see the need to improve on the design. Getting him out into the world, fed and grown up is more important than engineering in every possibility he might face in the next 80 years.
Implementation triumphs over innovation every time. If one person can make something as complicated as Henry out of wine gums, toffees and tea in the space of nine months, then surely as a nation we can build hospitals, schools and IT systems without taking years and wasting £32bn in the process.
