As the Conservatives slump in the polls, and David Cameron admits the government must raise its game, what underlies the coalition's recent catalogue of errors?
It’s been a miserable few weeks for ministers, ever since the chancellor’s cost-neutral, but politically toxic, Budget hit the buffers.
From ‘pasty gate’ to ‘jerry-can gate’ to the hugely embarrassing revolt over its ill-conceived charity tax the government seems to have stumbled from one self-imposed crisis to another.
The Home Secretary's issues with time-keeping have merely added to the catalogue of errors. Ahead of the May 3 elections, the Opposition has taken solace from its resulting lead in the polls.
So has the coalition’s discomfort been down to a series of unrelated cock-ups – or are there deeper issues conspiring to give Osborne, Cameron and Clegg red faces?
No doubt the political tensions inherent in coalition government have not helped. And most administrations hit a period of mid-term jitters. But the scale of the problems piling up across departments and agencies suggest that something more structural is at stake.
As the Public Accounts Committee has intimated in its report on financial accountability, the drive to decentralise services away from Whitehall is leaving an organisational vacuum.
The committee’s redoubtable chair, Margaret Hodge, has pointed out that arrangements for overseeing the localist agenda ‘lack clarity, consistency and completeness’. Demands on regulatory bodies are expanding just as their funding diminishes, she says.
Criticisms of an increasingly dysfunctional centre are getting louder by the day – from the Treasury select committee, in its Budget report; from formerly sympathetic think-tanks; and from professionals baulking at mismanaged reorganisations.
The botched NHS reforms are a case in point. After a tortuous passage, the Health and Social Care Act is now in situ. But as Philip Collins asks in the May issue of Public Finance (Condition still critical), what is the legislation actually for?
Operating on the principle of if it ain’t broke, dismantle it anyway, the Act introduces new layers of pointless bureaucracy, creates confusion where there was none – and hands over responsibility for £60bn of funding to GPs who would much prefer to be tending to patients.
Break-neck reforms, which appeared bold when the coalition took office, now look reckless. Particularly when – in the case of the NHS – the Department of Health is upping the ante on the level of savings demanded of trusts.
What most people want in a period of austerity is a sense that someone, somewhere knows what they are doing. As the crises pile up, and the machinery of government looks ever more ineffectual, the risk for ministers is that voters will conclude the opposite.
