A power for good?

Three of today's news stories: social mobility is falling because of rising inequality in education;  the NHS is buying Aids drugs intended for Africa; and tens of thousands of nurses are leaving the NHS each year partly because of bad management.
The message? Government is incompetent, and perhaps a force for bad.
But Geoff Mulgan, former director of the Prime Minister's strategy unit thinks otherwise. In this article he says: "Government retains an enormous power for good."
So, which should we believe - him or the  evidence?
Maybe both. What Mr Mulgan seems to be saying is that government works best when it acts not like government but like companies faced with market pressures. He says:

Government's greatest successes have generally been in areas in which the knowledge base is strongest and where independent validators of knowledge, like the audit commission, are most powerful.

He contrasts the success of Bank of England independence with the failure of the intelligence agencies before the Iraqi war. One institution is subject to easy and close public scrutiny and feedback. the other isn't. Of course, successful companies are always subject to such scrutiny, because customers are always assessing their quality and prices.
Also, says Mulgan:

It is so important for governments to remain porous—open to the views and ideas of business and NGOs, public servants and the public—and why it is sometimes necessary for even the most powerful politicians to take time out to listen and learn.

This is what successful companies do. Terry Leahy, chief executive of Britain's most successful retailer has said:

I visit hundreds of stores a year, and I would say 40% of my time is spent in stores. I talk to staff a lot and I talk to customers a lot. I attend customer panels as a way of life. We've developed many ways of giving customers a voice in the business, from Clubcard database management to market research, focus groups, panels, surveys - and so it is with staff. I used to work in marketing - and developed a number of these tools - but for me the most powerful thing is still listening to customers. The life they lead, the problems they have, and their experience in your stores. All this information could just gather dust. But it doesn't, it's hard wired into the key decision-making committees of the company. The customer gives the leadership of the business the plain and simple truth about the business - it's the most honest feedback you ever get.

Mr Mulgan's message, then, seems to be that governments succeeed when they act as if they were companies faced with market pressures.
This raises the question: how should government be organized so as to maximize this analogy? Here, Mr Mulgan gets vague.
He tells us that: "one of the optical illusions of government is that those inside it think of themselves as the drivers of change." But he later tells us that: "All of the more radical recent reforms were driven forward by tightly-knit networks, rarely more than half a dozen people."
So, does top-down decision-making work or not? If we can't answer this question, we'll never reform government for the better.

Comments

[dearieme]

"the success of Bank of England independence with the failure of the intelligence agencies before the Iraqi war. One institution is subject to easy and close public scrutiny and feedback." Yes and one had a bloody difficult job to do and had its findings sexed-up by No.10, and the other has a job that has been remarkably simple so far: yet to be tested in adversity. The sine qua non of reforming goverment for the better is shrinking it; not sufficient but absolutely necessary.

[Paddy Carter]

it's all terribly confusing.

i can never tell my listening to the public from my pandering to public prejudices.

[Snafu]

The only time the Government's customers can give any feedback is at at a General Election. It's hardly dynamic.

[Jim]

"the NHS is buying Aids drugs intended for Africa"

You seem to be implying the NHS *knew* it was buying drugs intended for Africa, but there's no evidence of that. This seems to me a fairly clear-cut story of market failure and corporate killing, so simply pinning the blame on 'the Government' is pretty shoddy.

[Chris]

Sorry, Jim. I didn't intend to imply that. I merely meant this as an illustration of how the state's good intentions can go wrong. The evil is the private sector's; the incompetence - failure to police the drugs policy properly - is the state's.