This note lists the policy and delivery failures that suggest the need to reconsider the current relationship between Parliament, Ministers and civil servants.
But where to start? Well, a very good place would be Anthony King’s and Ivor Crewe’s The Blunders of our Governments whose subject is
“the numerous blunders that have been committed by British governments of all parties in recent decades. .. [British governments] screw up more often than most people seem to realise. .. Governments of all parties appear equally blunder-prone. .. in spite of government’s incessant blundering, the United Kingdom is in many ways a well-governed country. [The majority of] our political leaders … are genuinely concerned with both the British people’s welfare and the country’s long term future. .. Compared with the political elites of some countries .. most British politicians and civil servants are models of both rectitude and public-spiritedness. .. these very qualities make the frequency with which they commit blunders the more surprising and disappointing.”
The book goes on to analyse the causes of a wide range of blunders, including:
- the poll tax,
- personal pensions mis-selling,
- the Child Support Agency,
- the UK’s exit from the ERM,
- The Millennium Dome, and
- identity cards.
It divides the causes into two main groups – human errors and system failures – but does not specifically criticise civil servants. According to its index, ‘civil servants’ and ‘officials’ are mentioned on only five pages of a 400+ page book.
One theme seems to be a failure to learn from previous failures - or even reconsider policies when they are going badly wrong. The 2013 Universal Credit ‘policy reset’, for instance, concentrated on the IT/back office functions and should have taken much more notice of what front line staff and recipients were saying. The sad truth is that neither Ministers nor officials are incentivised to identify and resolve problems as policies are being rolled out, because they will then be associated with what will be characterised as a mistake or a failure. Similarly, they will later not acknowledge that a failure has happened, for fear of suffering political or career damage. This clearly inhibits learning.
Before I had read the book, I had prepared my own list of relatively recent failures of recent governments. But I too, despite my interest in the subject, found it impossible to identify the proportions of blame to be attributed to Ministers, on the one hand, and officials, on the other. This is of course the heart of the problem. No-one knows whether the blunders and failures were at least partially the result of poor advice from officials, or the result of Ministers not accepting good advice. It is surely unacceptable that this analysis cannot be carried out, and lessons learned from this analysis. But that is, we are told, the result of the system that we put in place nearly 100 years ago.
My list of mainly pre-Brexit blunders is now on this separate web page.
More Recent Blunders
I have prepared some summaries of and/or extracts from certain recent formal inquiry reports, focussing on the areas where civil servants were criticised:
- The 2003 Decision to Invade Iraq
- The 2017 Grenfell Tower Fire
- There is also a brief commentary below
- The 2021 Evacuation of Kabul
- There is also a brief commentary below
- The Infected Blood Scandal
- HS2
And here, below, are some further thoughts and analysis:-
The FCDO, the Evacuation from Kabul, and the Afghan Resettlement Schemes
The Foreign Affairs Select Committee reported (Missing in Action) on the 2021 evacuation of British personnel from Kabul. This extraordinary document in effect accused the Foreign Office Permanent Secretary and the National Security Adviser of lying to Parliament. Some extracts are here.
Some years later the NAO were not impressed by the Afghan Resettlement Schemes:
Departments worked together to respond to a complex and high-pressure situation, taking on responsibilities for different groups of people and for the various stages of the resettlement process. However, the response lacked overall clear governance, shared information and performance measurement, producing inefficiency which is likely to have increased costs and worsened outcomes for resettled people, compared with taking a more coordinated and planned approach earlier.
That report is here.
Grenfell Tower
Another glimpse into the activity of a modern civil service department took the form of evidence given to the Inquiry into the 2017 fire at Grenfell Tower. Officials admitted that they had been warned that the department's policies would likely lead to a large and deadly building fire, and that the warnings had not been heeded. I have summarised much of the evidence in a paper which concludes as follows:
This is not a picture of a civil service setting out to obstruct ministers' policies. It is at best a picture of excessive willingness to accept staff cuts and other HR policies which left the department, at all levels, incapable of doing its proper job. It is a picture (to quote Nick Hardwick) of 'people who ... can write a good minute which gets the minister out of trouble. Not those who can run things so they don't get into trouble in the first place'.
The Grenfell tragedy is important, therefore, not just because it killed 72 people. It is important because it highlights deficiencies within the highest levels of the civil service.
MHCLG is not an isolated example of a poorly performing department. Similar pressures are almost certainly found in most other departments. MHCLG civil servants responded to current pressures by degrading their working practices until they became unrecognisable to those who worked in government 20 or 30 years ago. It seems likely that their opposite numbers in other large departments are even now working in similar ways.
My summary of ministers' and civil servants' evidence to the Grenfell Inquiry is here.
Maternity Services, Prisons etc. etc.
My Understanding Regulation website contains detailed analyses of the institutional and other failings that led to the 2008 financial crisis, the Jimmy Saville and Rotherham child abuse scandals, the Mid-Staffs Hospital scandal etc. etc. Revisiting this web page in 2026, I was truck by the fact that appalling maternity services were still in the news* as were very serious concerns about the Prison Service. “Dying prisoner left by staff for six hours” was one headline.
Central government policy makers (ministers and officials) were responsible for ensuring the effectiveness of these services and regulatory regimes - and yet no individuals ever seemed to be blamed.
*See for instance the Ockenden Report into "the NHS's biggest ever maternity care scandal" and the Amos Review - an independent investigation into maternity and neonatal service in England.