Are gove and cummings running britain or blowing it up? | thearticle

Who’s really running the Government? Step forward Michael Gove, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office. We haven’t heard much from him since July’s Ditchley

speech, which set out the intellectual justification for the Star Trek mission control room that has now been constructed in 70 Whitehall.  Dysfunctional as this Government may seem, not

everything Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings do or want is wrong. The desire for a stronger Prime Ministerial centre, and a more effective, outcome-focused civil service, with officials

recognised and promoted for their experience in project management as much as policy development, has been an objective of parties of all persuasions, in central and devolved governments,

for decades. Nor is the demand for a British equivalent of the Pentagon’s DARPA think tank a partisan objective. It is easy to satirise the new working arrangements, as various newspapers

have done, but easier access to better, up-to-date data has long been a desideratum. Cummings has written extensively about this and the need for people who understand and can interpret

better data. He also notoriously deployed data and data scientists throughout the Brexit referendum campaign. Cummings wants this mission control in aid of a radical transformation of the

British state. Some years back, reviewing Sir Michael Barber’s book _How to run a government: So that citizens benefit and taxpayers don__’__t go crazy_, Cummings said that Barber, “a nice

man”, had produced a book which was “a recipe for forcing a few priorities through routinely incompetent bureaucracies”. But it would not do, he said, for addressing the economic and

technological forces that “are disrupting society faster than our institutions can adapt”. That required “replacing many Whitehall institutions with ones that can change as quickly as the

world around them changes”. He spent most of his time at the Department for Education under Michael Gove on “management”: not communications, but making things happen. I have a close

relative working in the data science field in a major financial institution, and I don’t doubt the value of real-time data in many situations, including in government, or that governments

need to learn from the best in class. And I think that systems thinking, and understanding of government as an integrated system, would be of considerable benefit to many who work there,

officials and ministers alike. But Cummings is not the first to make these points and will not be the last. One danger in all of this is technological solutionism, the situation of having

the tech, but failing to identify the case for its use. It’s no secret that some of the most successful technological advances in government delivered in recent years by the Government

Digital Service or others using their design principles, such as the DVLA, have started with user needs. These are founded on analysis of UX — user experience — in a form of constant

iteration and adaptation, along the lines of the Facebook slogan “Done is better than perfect”, rather than that other famous Facebook slogan “Move fast and break things”. Sometimes moving

fast in government allows you to break things and start anew. That was the experience of Gove and Cummings at the Department for Education. Fast legislation for free schools and early

decisions to expand academies achieved their objectives of transferring responsibility away from government to publicly funded but privately managed schools. We can leave aside their

subsequent need to retrofit an expensive new accountability system of regional schools commissioners and recognise that the audacity of their move was transformative for the system of

accountability and management in England, although the results — for students — have yet to be proven. Allegedly Gove and Cummings now want to replace much of elected English local

government with local mayors. It’s consistent with their previous form, but if you thought planning reform was hard for Conservative MPs to swallow, wait until the lobbying by their local

councillors starts. A more contemporary example might lead us to question further whether centralised state control backed by private sector delivery and imposed technological solutions is

better than the low-tech tried-and-tested approach of the decentralised state. Take Test and Trace. In England, additional capacity was provided through a privatised approach, with

contact-tracers left idle for weeks. The world-beating app turned out to be not even an Isle of Wight-beating app. By the beginning of August, the contact tracing system was finding half of

the close contacts of those diagnosed with Covid-19 at a cost of £900 per person traced. Much higher levels were achieved through the existing Public Health England system, which used local

public health protection teams. Things got so bad that some English local authorities have had to set up their own systems. In Wales, where the entire Test, Trace and Protect system is being

run through the public sector, very high levels of contacts are being tracked and traced, with Cardiff and the Vale reporting 98 per cent of contacts successfully made, 90 per cent within

24 hours. Cummings has drunk deep from the Silicon Valley elixir of permissionless innovation and permanent disruption. (He was photographed wearing a T-shirt from an Elon Musk start-up,

Open AI, on his arrival in Downing Street.) He has spoken of running Vote Leave like an internet start-up. A wise leader who understands both government and Silicon Valley, Barack Obama,

said towards the end of his presidency, “Government will never run the way Silicon Valley runs because, by definition, democracy is messy.” Obama spoke about Silicon Valley chief executives

coming into the Oval Office and giving him advice on leadership, conveying the sense of “we just have to blow up the system”, or create a parallel society and culture because government is

inherently wrecked.  No, it’s not inherently wrecked; it’s just that government has to care for veterans who come home, to take just one example. That’s not on your balance sheet, that’s on

our collective balance sheet, because we have a sacred duty to take care of those veterans. And that’s hard and it’s messy, and we’re building up legacy systems that we can’t just blow up.

Not every government decision needs real-time data. Not every decision needs a mission control. And government, by definition, is not a start-up, because government delivers services that

have been developed over time. Will these lessons be learned in Number 10? It seems more likely that Gove-Cummings will double down. Cummings has reportedly stated that the Government’s

Covid-19 performance had been “a sh*t-show”. As the Blame Game moves into extra time, the failings of the system so far will be used as rationale for further centralisation and probably more

contracts for private sector mates, even though the National Audit Office is looking on. Which brings us back to Michael Gove. The mission control room is based in the Cabinet Office which

Gove heads, reinforcing the sense that Gove is playing chief executive to Johnson as chairperson. The door between the Cabinet Office and No 10 may have been taken down, but

Whitehall-watchers are very sensitive to the geography of power. Proximity to the PM is usually key. Some officials and special advisers have opted to stay at Number 10, while others are

moving to Gove’s control centre. Gove essentially leads on Brexit, Covid and civil service reform. As pressure on Johnson mounts, can the Gove empire continue to grow? Or will he be reined

in by the Prime Minister, as he was by David Cameron in 2014? Number 10 can be a lonely place. The bunker mentality has kicked in early with an outwardly confident, inwardly self-doubting

Prime Minister blatantly unprepared for exposure to accountability in the Commons. Sometime soon he may lash out. Civil servants have called the looming challenges of Brexit and a potential

coronavirus second wave “Brovid”. If things go pear-shaped in the New Year, historians may call this period “Govid”. And Johnson, like his hero Churchill, will want to write the history.