The Blunders of Our Governments

"This was published in 2013, so a lot of it is previous generation. It’s the canonical text in this area in Britain. It’s a very good book. It’s covering things like the poll tax, the Millennium Dome, the ID card scheme and Metronet, which people will have forgotten about but was a huge privatization of the London Underground engineering. In many ways, it covers similar ground to my book, although their focus is more on the policy flaws than on the delivery challenges. It’s also an outsider’s book, whereas mine is an insider’s book, which is unusual. The biggest example is the poll tax. It was a flawed policy that the Thatcher government held on to long past the evidence saying that it was going to be a disaster. They were going to get rid of the rates and put in place a local tax based on how many people lived in a house. That’s naturally regressive, but they thought it would be okay, because the amount of money would be quite low and nobody would be getting huge hikes in their bills. In fact, what actually happened was that people got huge spikes in their bills. There was a revolt, really, and it was one of the things that cost Margaret Thatcher her job. John Major quickly scrapped it. The reason the poll tax was a disaster wasn’t because they couldn’t build the IT system. The problem there was the policy itself rather than the practicalities of putting it into operation. If I have one criticism of this book—which is true of a number of these kinds of books—it’s that it’s far too long: well over 500 pages. One of the best things that my publisher, Emerald, did was to give me what I thought at the time was a very mean word count. The Delivery Gap is about 170 pages. Consequently, I think quite a lot of people who started it finished it."