When politicians want to sound like they are going to cut
without cutting, they almost always promise to protect ‘frontline services’.
The implication is that, unlike schools or hospitals, ‘Whitehall waste’ can be
cut with basically no inconvenience to anyone. A few paperclips here, a few
pointless penpushers there – who’s going to notice the difference? After all,
who knows what they do all day anyway?
This really bothers me. Because of course, what civil
servants do all day is develop the policies and regulations that govern schools
and hospitals, that keep corporations in check, that protect the environment, and
so on and so forth. And the hidden consequence of these unglamorous and so
largely un-noticed ‘backroom cuts’ is to accelerate the corporate capture of
politics.
My day job gives me a ringside seat at this particular
drama. I meet civil servants pretty regularly, and since the cuts began to bite
they are in a pretty sorry state. They aren’t allowed to have business cards,
so whenever I need an email address I have to pass them one of mine to scribble
on the back of. When I started my job in 2010, they’d just been informed they
could only serve tea and coffee in external meetings, which if nothing else
made them almost embarrassingly pleased to see me. Now, they’re not allowed to
serve tea and coffee at all, making them seem like the poor relation of the
private sector (and, to be honest, even the charity sector). These things matter:
they have a subtle but important influence on the dynamics of the relationship
between officials and lobbyists.
Most importantly, officials are now so thinly stretched, and
have been so disrupted and demoralised by the upheaval of departmental
‘restructurings’, that they’re in no position to resist corporate lobbying. Civil
servants already have both hands tied behind their backs by the ludicrous
policy of ‘one-in, one-out regulation’ (which, by the way, has now been amended
to ‘one-in, two-out’ - I despair). The massive inequality of arms between them and the
industries they are supposed to regulate means that the decks are, now more
than ever, stacked in favour of the rich and powerful.
The other day, I had a meeting with a couple of civil
servants to discuss new quality standards for a particular product. Although
the idea was at a very early stage, it rapidly became apparent that they’d
already had sessions with industry representatives who’d told them that the key
standard most consumer groups are calling for would be legally impossible. I
was pretty sure that this was bullshit, and told them so, albeit possibly not
using those exact words. In response,
one of them looked uncertainly at the other and said – I kid you not – “Well,
it sounded pretty convincing at the time…”
They then admitted that they knew they ought to get some
independent legal advice on this, but hadn’t been able to access departmental
lawyers. Feeling a rising sense of doom, I ended up offering to get some advice
from a retired lawyer who sometimes helps out my charity. Call me crazy, but I
don’t think it’s a tip-top ideal scenario when the government is dependent on
the mates of a tiny charity with a turnover of less than £500,000 a year to
resist the demands of an industry whose executives get paid more than that just
for getting up in the morning.
Another of the policy initiatives I’ve been working on – a car
crash all by itself, which I may blog about properly another time – started
life three years ago presided over by two longstanding and well-liked officials
who knew the area inside out. At least one of them was far more
business-friendly than I’d have liked, but they at least knew their stuff, and
were respected by those working in the field. Since then, I’ve dealt with a
string of about four different sets of civil servants, each seemingly more
junior and more clueless than the last. And, surprise surprise, industry has got
what it wanted: three years of consultations and deliberations have achieved a
big fat nothing.
As far as I can see, civil servants have basically been told to sit on their hands and not regulate, then denied access to the
resources and specialist knowledge they need to defend the public interest, as
opposed to the interests of whichever powerful lobby shouts at them the
loudest. Thank God we’ve done away with all that Whitehall waste!
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