John Redwood: Whatever the failings of the state, it is ministers who are ultimately responsible

Sir John Redwood is a former MP for Wokingham and a former Secretary of State for Wales. He will soon join the House of Lords.

Many ministers are intelligent and well-intentioned people. When Rishi Sunak said “Stop the boats” he meant it. When Yvette Cooper said “smash the gangs”, she probably meant it. Yet illegal migration came down only a bit under Sunak, and shot up again under Labour. It was not stopped or drastically reduced as people want. It is going to take more changes of our laws and instructions to courts to deliver. The system seems to thwart the policy.

Conservative and Labour governments in recent years have put huge extra money into the NHS. Ministers have asked for more consultations and treatments to get waiting lists down. Instead, there has been a big collapse in productivity. Labour’s reduction in waiting lists is mainly an exercise in removing the dead, ending double-counting and dropping those who have recovered from the lists. Conservative ministers wanted the lists made accurate, but it did not happen. (The lists should always have been more accurate.)

Both Conservative and Labour have tipped ever more subsidy into the railways and have taken more government control over how they are run. As a reward, the fully-nationalised HS2 has run ever later behind schedule and presented taxpayers with ever bigger bills. Both governments agreed that the performance was so bad, and the costs so huge, the railway would no longer reach the North, its planned destination and main original purpose.

So why does nothing work? Sometimes it is politicians who let appearances triumph over reality. Labour ministers who say they want less  illegal migration may want more legal migration and are looking at ways of switching people from illegal to legal. More normally, however, it is a worrying failure of public sector management. Ministers set targets and issue instructions. They vote through more money. But things do not work.

There may in some cases be ministers who expect too much and contribute too little. Regardless, they are ultimately responsible and have to take the blame. For example, Labour thought it could set a target of building 1.5 m homes and tried to get more planning permissions agreed; it did not understand its tax and economic policy meant people could not afford the homes so the builders cannot build them all.

Quite often, however, the fault lies in failure by senior executives and officials in the public sector. Targets and general policies are agreed, but they do not follow through, or do not design the detail in ways that can work.

Part of the answer can be ministers who do more of the detail and take more daily interest in the implementation and management of policy. Ministers can intervene in many ways, and demand good regular reports on outcomes.

It would help if they stayed longer in a job, and would improve chances of success if they had agreed with the prime minister (or their secretary of state) what their main tasks and objectives are, so they can concentrate on the differences they wish to make. The Conservative deployment of Nick Gibb as an schools minister to raise literacy standards shows how powerful this approach can be. He led the schools to use synthetic phonics to teach reading – and England’s reading standards rose well.

Part of the answer is to improve bonus and performance monitoring schemes for top officials. Some of the biggest disasters like HS2 and the Post Office have occurred where public sector CEOs are paid £500,000 or more, well over civil service norms. The CEOs also were often paid bonuses, yet their organisations were losing large sums, over-running budgets, and creating many problems. By all means pay some senior managers big money – but only if they beat budgets, deliver on time or sooner, show an ability to get better value for money, and drive higher productivity and quality. Pay no bonus if things are going wrong, or remove them promptly from the job if poor performance is likely to be endemic.

I have been drawing up a toolkit of methods used by good managers to align staff and service users interests, to demonstrate efficiency  and quality are two sides of the same coin, to reduce the cash demands needed for the provision of good services. The public sector often keeps too much stock, part occupies too many buildings, has too many staff in roles  that do not assist its main tasks, and uses too many expensive  consultancies  and agency staff for  things it could get its own employees to do in house.

As I take up the privilege of becoming a peer in the House of Lords, I look forward to more opportunities to develop this debate on how ministers and managers in the public sector can work together better to achieve so much more for the service users. We also need to save taxpayers more of the costs of waste and failure, which are part of the  cause of high taxes and excessive borrowing. If the UK public sector could recoup lost productivity since 2019 the largest part of the current deficit would disappear. If it could manage just a one per cent% annual productivity gain; but even that saves £13bn a year.