Introduction: The paradoxes of expectations

The construction of central government and governance in their current forms has been a long time in the development. One recognisable tendency of where we are now – perhaps reinforced by national media needs for quick turn round on particular stories – has been, as another ex-very senior Treasury official put it, ‘the PM (or other highly visible minister) gets the blame for everything’. Most importantly, people expect him or her to do something about a problem identified.

This official and others have documented to me examples of this across government, including flooding, why trains were not running on time (the 10.00 am from Leeds was mentioned – to London of course), and sewage outage by privatised water companies. In all these cases, problems were occurring not because of lack of official action, but as a result of a particular aspect of the gradual formation or deformation of central government in its current form. These all involved organisations that had been set up as arm’s-length organisations, commented on earlier, or that were under contract to the government department concerned, as delivery becomes more and more outsourced. Very little is directly managed as such within the appropriate department.

As a consequence, it was not actually possible for ministers to do very much in each of these cases, or at least promptly or directly. One reason is of course that often there were deeper and larger matters underlying apparently minor problems, often longer term: growth or changes in demand, a longstanding need for re-investment, or indeed contracts that cannot be modified except by mutual agreement or without making a further payment or not at all. There may even be structural problems with the service in question, which may not have been noticed or even conceived within narrowly defined contractual arrangements based on a narrow range of indicators.

The weakening of national officialdom

So-called ‘contract culture’ is one aspect of New Public Management (NPM) (Exworthy and Halford, 1999) mentioned in the last chapter, supposedly imported from the private sector (Hambleton, 2020). The aspect of NPM relevant here is the nature of some performance contracts that set yearly (or longer) objectives, often involving targets, for which staff and organisations are ‘held to account’.