As the government racks up more and more policy disasters such as tuition fees, forestry sell-offs and reorganising the Health Service, the Coalition is in danger of being rated NGG - No Good at Governing. Increasingly people ask why there have been so many policy cock-ups and, more important, what can be done about it.
Ministers must take much of the blame. An analysis of their failings is straightforward. Few of them have been in government before and many have never actually run anything in their lives. Small wonder if they screw up when they start trying to mess with the universities or with the NHS - said to be the biggest state run organisation in the world bar the Indian railways and the Chinese army. Yet questions are also being asked about why the civil service has so signally failed to restrain inexperienced and not very competent ministers.
There are claims that the mandarins are less willing than in the past to challenge ministers. Research from the Institute for Government, based on interviews with civil servants and with former ministers - from the Labour era but no less valuable for that - suggests that civil servants are too keen to please and too reluctant to fulfil their traditional role of speaking truth unto power. To its credit, the IfG has come up with a number of suggestions for improving standards in what is after all Whitehall's core business - policy making.
It calls for policy directors to be appointed who would be answerable to MPs on select committees for the standards of policy-making in each department. In particular they would have to show that policy objectives were clear, that outsiders had been consulted and that tough questions had been asked internally. It all sounds eminently sensible - but would it be workable?
The prospect of being cross questioned by a select committee about policy formulation might well make it easier for officials to take a tough line with ministers. They could plead that they would be caught out by MPs if they gave their political masters an easy ride. Yet it is hard to see any government of any political colour agreeing to a system where the mandarins would be positively encouraged to hang ministers out to dry in public. Come to that, its hard to imagine any self-respecting mandarin going before MPs without a wonderfully sanitised version of his department's policy deliberations. Either that or they would fall back on the old but sound constitutional excuse that certain questions were a matter for ministers not them.
Where the IfG may be on stronger ground is with its call for greater "external engagement" in policy making. The only apparent reason for so much policy planning to be carried out behind closed doors is so ministers can present themselves to the public as political conjurors pulling miraculous policy rabbits out of the Whitehall hat. Yet after the current crop of policy foul-ups, it is clear to voters how illusory, how tawdry are their policy tricks. One way to avoid future policy pratfalls would be to open up the whole policy-making process so that both professionals and the public can be brought on board well before there's any attempt to put a Bill through parliament. If the politicians cannot secure a good degree of support then they must modify or drop their plans - particularly when they want to tamper with our great institutions like the NHS or the universities.
