Conundrum: Why Every Government Gets Things Wrong and What We Can Do About it

"This is by Richard Bacon, who was a member of parliament. As an MP, he sat on something called the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) for many years. It sounds terribly boring, but if you work in Whitehall, you live in fear of the Public Accounts Committee. They can call in ministers, officials, someone from the arm’s-length delivery body, and grill them about why this has taken twice as long as you said it would. Senior civil servants will literally lock themselves away for three days before a PAC meeting and practise the answers to all these difficult questions. This is his book, written with Christopher Hope, a journalist, about ‘What are all the lessons from this?’ It covers similar ground to The Blunders of Our Governments and over a similar chronological period. What is interesting is that it comes from the perspective of an MP, and therefore somebody who does know a bit about politics. An awful lot of people will propose solutions to the problems of delivering these great big projects which work perfectly in the minds of a technocrat, but which just aren’t going to work politically. I think Bacon is less likely to fall into that trap than some of the others. There’s a lot in the book about IT projects. The big failures of IT projects tend not to be that costly. There are some exceptions, but you don’t need thousands of people in overalls digging holes to do IT projects. So they tend not to be all that expensive, but they can still represent a great waste of governmental time and effort and have a big negative impact on the citizen. This isn’t a book I would recommend anyone go searching for. If the website was four books, I probably wouldn’t have had this one on the list. But there really aren’t a lot of books written on this interesting subject of how to deliver great big things for the nation. Let me give you one. A long time ago, around 2008, I used to run a part of the Treasury that focused on how to improve these big projects. Because of this business that if you start the project badly, it will never recover, we invented what we called a ‘starting gate.’ Before you launch the project, before the minister stands up and says, ‘We’re going to do this, and it’s going to cost this much, and it’ll be finished by this date, and it’s going to have all of these benefits’, you must do an assurance review to unearth whether you really know what you’re talking about. After I left, the Labour Party lost the election and David Cameron’s government came in. Cameron wrote to all the secretaries of state in Whitehall and said that there must be no announcements of projects from now on that hadn’t been through a starting gate. He wrote to everybody about this, together with a list of other things that were technocratically good ideas. You cannot stop a politician who is in a hole and needs to burnish his reputation after three days of bad news stories about the state of infrastructure from standing up and saying, ‘I’m going to sort this out. We’re going to have a project.’ It sounds great from a technocratic point of view, but you just can’t. You have to acknowledge the reality that we live in a political world and find a way to help the minister to say something which is not a hostage to fortune and which may not get quite as many short-term political brownie points—but avoids everybody looking really, really stupid in five years’ time."