There has been a flurry of books published recently, on the subject of ‘broken Britain’.
Some look at the big picture of why ‘nothing seems to work’, like ‘Great Britain?’ by Torsten Bell, and ‘Failed State’ by Sam Freedman (featured at a Liberal Reform fringe at Conference). Others address more specific problems, like ‘Bad Buying’ by Peter Smith or ‘Fixing Broken Britain’ by Alun Drake. There are some scandal-specific books too which draw broader conclusions, like ‘The Great Post Office Scandal’ by Nick Wallis, ‘Death in the Blood’ by Caroline Wheeler, and ‘The Rise & Fall of DfID’ by Mark Lowcock & Ranil Dissanayake.
It is not just specific sectors like health, economics , transport, housing/planning, and education where astonishing dysfunction has been exposed. There has also been much emphasis on institutional problems; the turbid executive function, extreme centralisation, opaque administration, systematised ‘corruption’, absent civil servant competences, catastrophic procurement practices, a permissive approach to monopoly … and much more.
Most concerning perhaps at a time of severe financial constraints is the breathtaking neglect of value-for-money in governmental spending which all these books highlight; where lobbying and ‘generating the big juicy contract’ seem to dominate administrative behaviour too often.
Will Parliament enthusiastically set about addressing the problems set out in these books? Judging by the policy clumsiness of the Labour government, and the cynical anti-immigrant obsessions of the Conservative Party and Reform, this seems depressingly unlikely.
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