Zachary Spiro is a policy fellow at Onward, and a consultant at Flint Global. He writes in a personal capacity.
What do the following three things all have in common: UK R&D spending, granting Andy Street oversight of the West Midland’s police, and environmental assessments for housebuilding? The answer, depressingly, is that all three require growing piles of paperwork to execute – often costing vast sums of money, and sometimes despite policymakers actively trying to streamline these processes.
To be clear, this isn’t an argument about the merits of the policies themselves, but rather that the success or failure of an elected government to prosecute its policy shouldn’t rest on its ability to navigate a maze of forms.
Take government spending. The nightmare of paperwork to get Whitehall sign-off for R&D spend was recently the subject of a review by Lord Willetts, the former Science Minister (and ConservativeHome columnist). The process for getting spending approved is known as the ‘business case’, where different elements of the proposed spending (including its economic and financial implications) are considered. Once all of these are done, the overall proposal is assessed and, if the project is lucky, approved.
Official guidance gives that business cases are supposed to be no longer than 40 pages. But, according to Willetts, “DSIT business cases averaged 249 pages… though they can go up to 400 pages”. This is a startling fact: departmental paperwork is taking up to ten times as many resources as anticipated, implying that whole teams of civil servants are needed to do work that was intended to be manageable by just a few. This is also a recent phenomenon – the review adds that business cases “appear to be more extensive and bureaucratic than even five years ago”.
This enormous amount of paperwork – approximately the length of each of the Lord of the Rings books – adds to the time needed for Whitehall to take decisions. One civil servant interviewed by the review “estimated the time from an original idea… to execution of a programme at over two and a half years”.
Another way of thinking about this is if officials had come up with a good idea in mid-2017, it is very possible that a change of Prime Minister, the 2019 General Election, and the Covid pandemic would have happened before the plan was approved.
This failure to grapple with paperwork is not limited to departmental spending. In mid-March, the High Court blocked the transfer of the powers of the Police and Crime Commissioner to Andy Street, Mayor of the West Midlands, despite the Home Secretary issuing a specific order to do so. This was not because of policy error, but because the court decided that the Home Office had not drafted its consultation document properly.
In the Levelling Up White Paper, the Government had decided Police and Crime Commissioners powers were best wielded by elected mayors. It then passed the Levelling Up Act 2023, making those transfers easier to enact. After the 2023 Act, the only hurdles to handing Street policing powers were whether he wanted them (which he did) and a requirement to hold a consultation – which the Government duly conducted, before deciding to proceed. However, the existing Police and Crime Commissioner, understandably nonplussed that his role was being eliminated, appealed the Government’s decision.
The appeal depended on the specific language in the Local Democracy Act 2009, of which section 113(1)(a) gives that “The Secretary of State may make an order [transferring powers] only if the Secretary of State considers that to do so is likely to improve the economic, social and environmental well-being… in the area”. But in the High Court’s words: “the information provided in… this consultation [wasn’t] sufficient for the purposes of the consultation”, with key economic arguments “left entirely unexplained”.
Significant portions of the ruling are textual criticism of the Government’s consultation document, and stylistically most resemble a teacher marking an essay. One paragraph is dismissed as it “falls well short”, while another “adds nothing”. The scratch of the red pen is almost audible as the judge bemoans that another section “misses the point”.
It is worth taking a step back. In October last year, Parliament passed the Levelling Up Act, which had the express purpose of making easier the transfer of policing powers of this kind. But on the first attempt to do so, barely months after the Act had become law, elected ministers found themselves blocked by courts because the official consultation document was deemed to be inadequate.
This document would have been written by officials: no ministers would have been involved. And – for whatever reason – government officials were in practice unable to draft a consultation document that passed legal muster. The court’s proposed remedy was clear: the document must have more explanation, more information, and, inevitably, far more pages.
The volume of paperwork required for infrastructure can sometimes impose mind-boggling direct costs on the taxpayer. The planning documents for the Lower Thames Crossing run to more than 359,000 pages: almost five times as long as the proposed road itself. The production of this colossal application has cost taxpayers hundreds of millions pounds alone, before a single section of actual road has even been built.
The scourge of Environmental Impact Assessments will be familiar to pro-development activists and planning consultants. But despite attempts at reform in 2017, a government review found that the maximum length for infrastructure impact assessments had actually increased from 96 pages to 267 between 2017 and 2023.
This doesn’t just affect roads, but housebuilding too. 2020 research found that “an average environmental statement for a 500-home development cost £150,000 – £200,000; took 8 – 18 months to complete; and ran to 4,350 pages”. In the words of officials, this outcome was “contrary to the intentions of the regulations” that had been passed only a few years earlier.
In every policy area, whether R&D, policing, or planning, a tidal wave of bureaucracy is swallowing up money, policy initiatives, and government time. Most dangerously, this state of affairs is utterly corrosive to democracy. People rightly expect that elected politicians will be able to deliver on their promises. If ministers and officials are unable to improve the country because of an obstacle course of paperwork getting in their way, voters will understandably lose faith that our system of government can accomplish anything.
Tackling the root causes of this explosion in paperwork will likely require sustained effort and attention, both of which are running short in the current Parliament. But hopefully, a future Government will pick it up, and harried-looking civil servants won’t be forced to write The Return of the King every time they propose some new spending.
The post Zachary Spiro: A tidal wave of bureaucracy is swallowing up money, policies, and government time appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: Zachary Spiro
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