The Missing Chapters

I have just finished a book that should be required reading for all Government Ministers: "The Blunders of our Government" by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe. They describe the differences between mistakes, errors of judgement and blunders and arrive at the following definition of the latter; "an episode in which a government adopts a specific course of action in order to achieve one or more objectives and, as a result largely or wholly of its own mistakes, either fails completely to achieve those objectives, or does achieve some or all of them but contrives at the same time to cause a significant amount of 'collateral damage' in the form of unintended and undesired consequences".  

They then go on to analyse an impressively frightening list of blunders of the last thirty years; the poll tax, personal pensions, the child support agency, the ERM, the Millenium Dome, individual learning accounts, tax credits, the asset recovery agency, payments to English farmers, IT procurement (particularly the NHS debacle), the London Underground PPP and ID cards. The second half of the book then describes the author's views of the reasons behind these blunders dividing them in to human factors such as cultural disconnection, group think and prejudice and then system failures. The following quote sums up this second group of factors "the weakness, despite appearances, of Number 10 [Downing Street], the speed at which ministers are moved from post to post, the pressure on ministers-and ministers own desire- to be constantly active, the lack of effective individual accountability in the system, parliament's near irrelevance and the absence in Whitehall of sufficient quantities of relevant and essential skills. But there is another feature of the British system- or rather a non-feature- that is worth noting. There is at the heart of the British system a deficit of deliberation."

I have to say that my experience of dealing with Governments over the last decade or so is totally in accord with the analysis and conclusions of the book. Here is just one illustration; in my nearly eleven years as an energy company CEO I dealt with nearly eleven Ministers of State for Energy (nearly as the last one was shared with the Business Department). In fact my only negative reaction to the whole book is that two chapters are missing; one on the two energy efficiency schemes, the Green Deal  ECO and one on the whole electricity market reform process. I am sure they will be in the second edition!