Policy Disasters: Explaining the UK's Record
| Author | Patrick Dunleavy |
| DOI | 10.1177/095207679501000205 |
| Published date | 01 June 1995 |
| Date | 01 June 1995 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Policy Disasters: Explaining the UK’s Record
Patrick Dunleavy
London School of Economics and Political Science
The theme of this paper is that Britain now stands out amongst comparable
European countries, and perhaps amongst liberal democracies as a whole, as a
state unusually prone to make large-scale, avoidable policy mistakes. The most
generally used label for this category of error is ’policy disasters’, generally
construed to mean significant and substantially costly failures of commission or
ommision by government. In her book The March of Folly the American
historian Barbara Tuchmann added an important extra element to the concept of
’policy fiascos’, namely that the mistakes made are eminently forseeable - but
decision-makers systematically choose to ignore an abundance of critical or
warning voices in order to persevere with their chosen policy. Effectively
Tuchmann’s revision incorporates a strong dash of what Janis describes as
’groupthink’. Here an elite group of highly motivated decision-makers -
insulated from challenge, disposing of great political and administrative power,
and intellectually convinced of their own abilities, determination and direction -
progressively cut themselves off from information tending to undermine group
morale, pushing through decisions until the policy apparatus they have erected
either comes to dominate its environment, or collapses in wreckage around their
ears.
Identifying policy disasters is notoriously difficult. It can only be done with
hindsight, and even then it is rare for consensus to be achieved. The planning
guru Peter Hall included both the Bay Area Rapid Transit scheme and the
Sydney Opera House in his book Great Planning Disasters, devoting a chapter
to each on the grounds that they suffered from very substantial cost escalation
and did not meet the projected policy aims under which they were initially
approved. In his view, the Sydney Opera House was an acceptable concert hall
but basically too small for staging operas. And BART was never self-funding as
its proponents claimed it would be. Yet now Hall’s judgements themselves seem
simply bizarre. By investing in its Opera House the city of Sydney purchased an
icon with global recognition which has favourably reshaped perceptions of the
city as a cultural centre - a literally priceless gain whose cumulative economic
benefits dwarf the initial cost over-runs and shortfalls. Similarly the BART
52
scheme has succeeded as well as could reasonably be expected for a mass transit
system operating within an acutely unfavourable environment. Hall’s errors are
not simply perverse or a product of his evident anti-statist biases. They suggest
that the identification of policy disasters is likely to be inherently contested, so I
shall make no claims to have objectively established Britsh examples but simply
set out a list most of whose elements I hope will command wide but not
universal agreement. The paper falls into two parts, the first arguing for British
exceptionalism, the second itemizing the main descriptive points of concern
about Britain’s decision-making approach.’ I
1. The Scale of Policy Disasters in Britain
Over the last two decades issues of government performance have come to be
discussed in an increasingly schizophrenic way. The strong rhetorical emphasis
of Conservative governments on cost-cutting, administrative efficiency and
public expenditure control has combined with the enthusiastic endorsement of
’new public management’ (NPM) strategies by ministers and the civil service, to
create a public impression of lean government. Fat has supposedly been ’pared to
the bone’, and where bureaucratic padding has been displaced by an adminis-
trative ’permanent revolution’, ushering in market-like disciplines of
competition. At the same time there have been large-scale and repeated policy
failures, and even more dubiously justified and apparently ineffacious adminis-
trative reorganizations, costing millions of pounds in taxpayers’ money. These
debits are somehow set on one side as not forming part of the overall ’efficiency’
of the government system. Civil service spokespersons routinely suggest that
government efficiency should be assessed net of any concerns about efficacy,
getting things done, or making sunstantively correct policy decisions.
The extent to which Britain is an odd country in modem Europe in adopting
this approach and in accepting policy disasters can be easily brought home by
comparing our performance with a country like the Netherlands. Here the
mainstream conception of public administration amongst practitioners and
academics alike makes no dichotomous distinction between efficiency and policy
effectiveness. And it is more or less unheard of for major policies to be introduced
and then fail conspicuously, having to be withdrawn at great cost. On a recent
summer school I pressed Dutch colleagues from all the leading centres of the
discipline to come up with examples of native policy disasters. They thought very
long and painfully before producing just two instances. The first involved an
attempted privatization of the job of producing new identity cards incorporating a
photograph: the firm selected eventually failed to meet the standards required and
the job had to be reintemalized, costing the government around £15 million. The
second example involved an attempt to implement the Schengen agreement on
passport-less travel at Schipol airport. Passengers from Schengen countries were
given magnetic cards allowing them to exit the airport via computerized slot
machines without showing their passports. However, the scheme was not widely
understood by passengers. Many people on flights from Schengen countries went
through the conventional passport controls anyway, throwing away their magnetic
53
cards in corridors on the ’air’ side of the barriers - thereby jeopardizing the whole
security of the airport, since then anyone could pick up the cards and exit without
surveillance. The scheme and its accompanying IT and equipment had to be
abandoned, at a cost of several million pounds. Now these are clear-cut policy
mistakes, of which the second at least looks forseeable, and the first a very
common
form of problem. But they are not policy disasters for the simple reason
that their scale is too modest. When I pressed my Dutch colleagues for something
more costly or wrong-headed they confessed defeat.
By contrast, in Britain the sad truth seems to be that policy mistakes on a
very grand scale are now accepted as inevitable, almost routine, a natural
corrollary of our system of governing. To make this case, I briefly itemize eight
examples. The first five are closely associated with new public management
(NPM) practices; the last three concern key parts of the core ’mission’ of central
government (Table 1).
’
Table 1: Policy disasters in British central government
The poll tax is currently by far the best documented of recent British policy
disasters. An excellent account by Butler, Adonis and Travers draws a
compelling picture of the multi-stage process by which ministers and civil
servants imposed a completely unimplementable policy on local government,
ignoring a wealth of objective advice to the contrary2. What is less commonly
appreciated is the tremendous cost of implementing the tax for two years and
then scrapping it. Using conservative figures the directly wasted costs were £ 1.5
billion - equivalent to burning the money in Hyde Park, in Tony Travers’
immortal phrase. In addition, £20 billion was spent during the life of the tax in
increasing rate support grant settlements to try and make the tax work, and a
further £6 billion on increasing VAT to cut back locally borne expenditures
during the abolition of the tax. ’Put another way, the basic rate of income tax
could have been about 4p in the £ lower in 1994-5 than it actually was (or VAT
some 4 per centage points lower) if the community charge had never been
introduced and abandoned&dquo;. Further hard to quantify costs will accrue for many
years as urban local authorities painfully rebuild their badly damaged capacity to
collect taxes.
54
Social security changes 1985-88, stemming from the 1985 social security
review, introduced a policy regime in which people were encouraged to opt out
of the state earnings related pension scheme (SERPS) and instead invest in
personal pension plans runs by private insurance companies, with direct
assistance from government. The original impetus for the scheme was an
apparent mis-estimate of the future costs of SERPS. Its implementation in a
climate of patently inadequate regulation of the insurance companies, and with
strong political messages from ministers encouraging people to withdraw from
the government scheme, was disastrous. Thousands of ordinary people lacked the
information or expertise to adequately counter the weight of corporate
advertizing and systematic mis-advice from the salespersons of even the most
respectable companies. These hapless consumers were persuaded to inappropri-
ately leave the state scheme and invest in pension plans which it is now
recognized can never deliver equivalent benefits. The insurance industry has
recently set aside several billions of pounds to compensate those losers who were
most obviously given misleading advice. But many more marginal cases and less
active customers are likely to struggle on with inappropriate plans and incur
long-term costs.
The Child Support Agency was set up in 1993 to pursue divorced parents not
contributing to the...
To continue reading
Request your trial