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{"source_url": "https://www.economist.com", "url": "https://www.economist.com/britain/2020/01/02/dominic-cummingss-plan-to-reshape-the-state", "title": "Dominic Cummings\u2019s plan to reshape the state", "top_image": "https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20200104_BRD001.jpg", "meta_img": "https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20200104_BRD001.jpg", "images": ["https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20200104_WOM555_0.png", "https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20200104_BRD001.jpg", "https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20200104_MAP002.jpg", "https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20200401_WBD001_0.jpg", "https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20200104_LDP002.jpg"], "movies": [], "text": "THE SUSPICION with which many Brexiteers have long regarded Brussels has come to be matched by an equal mistrust of Whitehall. After repeated delays to Britain\u2019s exit from the European Union, many Leavers became convinced that bien-pensant officials were out to subvert the will of the people. Yet for Dominic Cummings, the prime minister\u2019s chief adviser and brains behind the Leave campaign, the frustration with the civil service goes back much further. The subtitle of an entry on his personal blog, written in 2014, sums up his outlook: \u201cThe failures of Westminster & Whitehall: Wrong people, bad education and training, dysfunctional institutions with no architecture for fixing errors.\u201d Some Eurosceptics want to put a bomb under Whitehall in order to get Brexit done. Mr Cummings wants to get Brexit done so that he can put a bomb under Whitehall.\n\nFollowing Boris Johnson\u2019s triumph in the December election, the government has an opportunity to reshape the country. Labour is in chaos, the Remainers are defeated and the British system gives huge power to governments with a large parliamentary majority. Mr Cummings\u2019s thinking\u2014set out over hundreds of thousands of words in a blog that ranges from Sun Tzu and Bismarck to education policy and space exploration\u2014helps explain why many in Downing Street think that to get anything done in government they will first have to fix the civil service.\n\nGet our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks.\n\nMr Cummings has lambasted cabinet government as an outdated, oversized decision-making mechanism. Once Britain has left the EU, the number of departments is reportedly due to be cut, with Business absorbing Trade, the Foreign Office taking International Development, and the Department for Exiting the EU scrapped. A \u201csuper-department\u201d, including education, research and innovation, is rumoured, and the Home Office may even be broken up. If Mr Cummings gets his way these changes will be just the start.\n\nCivil service reform is not usually a priority for a new administration. Most turn their attention to it only after finding their initial vim frustrated. At the start of her second term, Margaret Thatcher tried to make officials more accountable and to focus them on outcomes. At the start of his, Tony Blair brought in Michael Barber, who had worked on school reform, to split the government\u2019s aims into measurable targets and pursue them relentlessly. Or, in the words of Mr Cummings, establish \u201cwhat should be minimal competence for people who do not know how to prioritise and are managerially incompetent\u201d.\n\nIn his view, this incompetence reflects a system that incentivises the wrong things. Mr Cummings has called for greater use of redundancy to get rid of people not up to it. He wants training to emphasise quantitative skills and for those who are effective to stay in place for longer (some departments lose more than a fifth of their workers each year, through rotations or exits). Job specifications may also change. According to Mr Cummings, permanent secretaries, who run departments, face an impossible job (as \u201cchief policy adviser, department CEO and a fixer\u201d) and are promoted on their ability to play the game. Almost none of them, and indeed almost no minister or adviser, is \u201c+3 standard deviations\u2026on even one relevant dimension (IQ, willpower/toughness, management ability, metacognition, etc)\u201d. As an ally notes, Mr Cummings \u201cdoesn\u2019t care if he hires socialists, he just wants people to be competent.\u201d\n\nAnother part of the answer, Mr Cummings believes, lies in hiring brilliant people to work on specific problems outside of bureaucratic constraints. He points to the success of America\u2019s work on intercontinental ballistic missiles and some aspects of the Apollo programme in the 1950s and 1960s, which brought the world\u2019s best scientists and engineers into government projects. More broadly, he argues that such examples illustrate the importance of clearly defined goals, the use of long-term budgets to save money and the need for \u201can extreme focus on errors\u201d. He has called for \u201cred teams\u201d, as used by the CIA and defence firms, to argue the opposite view in meetings, to counter groupthink.\n\nAll of this is likely to involve tackling what Nick Pearce, head of the Downing Street policy unit under Gordon Brown, calls the \u201ckey tension\u201d at the heart of Britain\u2019s bureaucracy: that ministers are held responsible for what their department does but do not have much control over it. Britain is unusual in that ministers have little sway over who runs their department and limited ability to make appointments, compared with similar political systems like Australia and Canada. Mr Cummings recounts a litany of errors by officials during his previous stint at the Department for Education: \u201cWith all of them, regardless of how incompetently they had been handled\u2014nobody was ever fired.\u201d\n\nHe writes that part of the reason he and his then-boss, Michael Gove, \u201cgot much more done than ANY insider thought was possible\u2014including [David] Cameron and the Perm Sec\u2014was because we bent or broke the rules.\u201d A devil-may-care approach could spread in a government eager to get things done. Mr Cummings thinks politicians are cowed by government legal advice, often by lawyers citing European directives. A recent report by Policy Exchange, a sympathetic think-tank, suggests making it easier for ministers to take advice from external lawyers.\n\nRearranging government departments \u201cis a very sizeable task in and of itself,\u201d with a mixed record of success, notes Catherine Haddon of the Institute for Government, a think-tank. Writing about how to transform the state is one thing; doing so is quite another. So old hands suspect gradual evolution is more likely than a big bang. To Mr Cummings, that may sound like the usual complacency: \u201cThere is a widespread befuddled defeatism that nothing much in Westminster can really change,\u201d he blogged. Now he has another chance to prove the establishment wrong.", "keywords": [], "meta_keywords": [""], "tags": [], "authors": ["The Economist"], "publish_date": "Thu Jan 2 00:00:00 2020", "summary": "", "article_html": "", "meta_description": "Why Downing Street thinks that to get anything done it must first fix the machinery of government", "meta_lang": "en", "meta_favicon": "/sites/default/files/econfinal_favicon.ico", "meta_data": {"description": "Why Downing Street thinks that to get anything done it must first fix the machinery of government", "pubdate": 20200102, "og": {"description": "Why Downing Street thinks that to get anything done it must first fix the machinery of government", "image": "https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20200104_BRD001.jpg", "type": "article", "url": "https://www.economist.com/britain/2020/01/02/dominic-cummingss-plan-to-reshape-the-state", "title": "Dominic Cummings\u2019s plan to reshape the state", "site_name": "The Economist"}, "article": {"content_tier": "metered", "publisher": "https://www.facebook.com/theeconomist"}, "twitter": {"card": "summary_large_image", "description": "Why Downing Street thinks that to get anything done it must first fix the machinery of government", "image": "https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20200104_BRD001.jpg", "site": "@TheEconomist"}, "al": {"ios": {"app_name": "The Economist", "app_store_id": 896628003, "url": "https://www.economist.com/britain/2020/01/02/dominic-cummingss-plan-to-reshape-the-state"}, "iphone": {"app_name": "The Economist", "app_store_id": 896628003, "url": "https://www.economist.com/britain/2020/01/02/dominic-cummingss-plan-to-reshape-the-state"}, "ipad": {"app_name": "The Economist", "app_store_id": 896628003, "url": "https://www.economist.com/britain/2020/01/02/dominic-cummingss-plan-to-reshape-the-state"}}, "The Economist": "app-id=896628003, app-argument=https://www.economist.com/britain/2020/01/02/dominic-cummingss-plan-to-reshape-the-state", "viewport": "width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=0", "revisit-after": "1 day", "fb": {"pages": "6013004059,1487031108050752", "app_id": 193926687345108}}, "canonical_link": "https://www.economist.com/britain/2020/01/02/dominic-cummingss-plan-to-reshape-the-state"} |
