Simon Carr: The Sketch

A simple question but an answer of glorious dullness

What's wrong with the public service? The Public Administration Select Committee has decided to ask the most interesting question in British politics. It's at the heart of Downing Street's anxieties about something they call "delivery". The Treasury sloshes money into public services and nothing gets better. Why not?

Luckily, the question has an easy answer, so the committee will be able to produce a devastating, incisive report before Christmas. Or will vertical take-off pigs be hovering porkily over the Speaker's chair? More likely.

So what is wrong with the public service? Let us consider the scale of the dysfunction. The health service accidentally kills 20,000 people a year. Citizens pay lifelong, compulsory insurance contributions to the government for a poverty-level pension. A fifth of all Britons leave school unable to read.

Why? The answer is literally staring the committee in the face (well, half-literally – they sit in a semi-circle). Public services are run by politicians and the first law of public administration is that everything a politician touches turns to .... (Insert a word of your choice.)

The affable Tony Wright, chairman of the committee, asked WH Smith's chairman, Martin Taylor, (Tony's clony more than crony – the mannerisms he shares with the Prime Minister are uncanny): "You seem to be saying that if only you could get politics out of the picture then everything would be okay?"

Mr Taylor had said almost exactly that: "There is more interest in preventing political trouble in the NHS than improving care", for instance.

That shocked a young Labour member. "This is a very serious accusation," he said, winded. "And if that is the outcome of our inquiry, it will mean that the public service is a pernicious influence."

Which is why, we might imagine, that conclusion will not be the outcome of their inquiry. Mr Taylor warmed to his theme, recalling a sign outside his Underground station. "Your New Tube," it said. "It's not new and it's not mine," he observed rather acidly. "They were advertising the fact they had public management and private finance. This seemed to be just the wrong way round. Public money is cheaper and private management is more competent."

Which is why "they" had arranged it in that particular way. Because they were run by politicians.

Annette Brooke (Lab) summarised Mr Taylor's plea for innovation. "You could just try everything," she said, "but that seems to me to be foolhardy." The Westminster system of representative government regularly produces people such as Ms Brooke. It's the price we pay for democracy. Some would say it is too high. I don't entirely agree but it's a close call.

Lord Haskins was also present. He felt the only way forward was to develop a completely different type of civil servant. Not so much a cross-breed but a mutant. The service needed a complete cultural change. Here's a tip; any time you hear calls for a complete cultural change, you know that there is nothing to be done. It's another rule.

It may be too early to rush to judgment and call it a committee of dullards with little dash, less flair, no useful experience of the world. But we know they are politicians and, therefore, their report is sure to be unreadable rubbish of the most glorious kind.

simoncarr75@hotmail.com