Jill Kirby, director of the Centre for Policy Studies, blames big government for huge waste, ineffective policy, weakening the private and voluntary sectors – and, ultimately, even the recession. Matt Ross meets her
Over the last year, it’s become common to hear senior officials – and some of our braver politicians – arguing that, given the state of the public finances, the next government may have to “do less”: cut services, prune delivery channels, scale back ambitions. For Jill Kirby (pictured above), though, these tentative suggestions are only a belated and partial recognition of a basic truth: “If government can keep out of a whole area of life, then it should,” she says. “The first question is: does government need to be involved in this activity? If so, can it organise the funding, then leave it to service users and [local providers] to get on and do it for themselves?”
Ever since the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) was established by free market economist Keith Joseph in 1974, it has argued for a smaller state. Like David Cameron’s Conservatives, until recently CPS director Jill Kirby focused most publicly on social issues; a former chair of the centre’s family and welfare policy group, she most frequently appears in the press as a champion of the traditional family. But the swelling public deficit has given new force to the CPS’s traditional arguments, while reactivating the Tories’ visceral hostility to big government. Many of Kirby’s views may make uncomfortable reading for the more comfortable civil servants, but they reflect a broad stream of Conservative thinking.
When the government intervenes, says Kirby, it “crowds out” the voluntary and private sectors: “If you want to build a strong society, encourage a flourishing third sector or encourage business to create wealth, then an expansionist government is inimical to many of these things. It’s more than just saying: ‘We can save money by reducing government.’ There is actually an argument that smaller government leads to a healthier, stronger society.”
In recent years, Kirby argues, the government has fallen into the trap of believing that it can create a complete solution to problems in society – but its efforts to do so have often made the situation worse. The field of child protection and children’s services is a classic example, she says: “The government set out to create a non-stigmatising, universal agenda for children. They made it very clear that every child should be involved,” she says. “One of the consequences has been a loss of focus on the most vulnerable children; the desire to have a complete government solution to a problem has backfired badly.”
In Kirby’s view, this belief that large-scale government action can successfully address deep-seated and complex problems has been fostered by private sector consultants and IT providers eager to tap into public budgets. “They’ve seen their opportunity,” she says; in her view, the government has been sold a set of technology-based dreams, and the result “has been hugely expensive and hugely wasteful, and has misfired. The lesson is: if you think you can build the perfect answer and the perfect database, we’ve learned from bitter experience that you can’t.”
Kirby is not opposed to all government IT projects: she accepts that simpler, transaction-based projects – like everyone else, she cites online road tax renewal – can work. “The question is: does it carry a fairly minimal set of information that’s essential to a certain process being conducted effectively, or is it about much more than that?” she says. “Too often, this government has bitten off much more than it can chew, because it’s got on the wrong side of that line.”
What’s more, she says, even when government has taken too big a bite, it can’t spit it out. “Too many have had to be rehashed, and the only reason they’ve carried on is the fear of the cancellation costs,” she says. “They’ve become a bit of a monster, and the original objective – even if you subscribe to it – has got lost along the way.” The result, Kirby complains, is that departments become slaves to over-complex, over-expensive IT systems that incur additional costs every time there’s a policy or specification change. “The IT specialists end up with this great hold over government,” she complains. “You’re captive to the techies, if you like.”
Asked whether she thinks government expansionism is driven by the politicians or the civil servants, Kirby is clear: “It’s about those politicians who appear to have a solution to every problem.” She does believe that the civil service has become more politicised – “more of a voice for government than a wise counsellor” – but the real problem is “politicians who feel the need to be seen to be doing something”. The only solution, she says, is for politicians to exercise “self-denial”, admitting that they “don’t have an answer to this; or this is not a matter for government; or we’re not going to offer new legislation because there’s already appropriate legislation that’s not being deployed”.
This idea, Kirby accepts, is not universally accepted among Tory politicians: many “still think it’s right for central government to take most of the decisions” – in part because they remember 1980s battles against rebellious city councils. But many of the shadow cabinet – particularly those most closely associated with policy chief Oliver Letwin’s ideas for a ‘post-bureaucratic age’ – “feel quite strongly that government is doing way too much and that they ought to try and be different”.
In this context, “being different” means handing power down to the local level: letting schools set their own objectives; giving citizens control over personal budgets; lifting the net of reporting systems, auditing and targets regimes that has slowly settled over delivery agencies. This isn’t without its risks, says Kirby: “I remember Oliver Letwin, a long time ago when he was in the shadow Home Office role, saying openly that we have to be prepared to let things fail,” she remembers. “Though they weren’t then perhaps as close to government as it feels now!”
Kirby knows that it will take political courage to accept that “some local groups, some local authorities work better than others”. It is, she says, “tough if you happen to live in an area where services aren’t so good – but central government has to accept a degree of variation in that regard.” Where services are failing particularly badly, she accepts, central government will have to intervene; but in general, local areas must be allowed to stand on their own two feet – or, indeed, to fall over. “Provided you can see evidence of general success, then a degree of failure will be slightly more acceptable”, she adds.
After all, says Kirby, central government is no model of perfection: look at the recent track record of government economists in predicting and managing the UK’s economy. “Maybe all that ink was spilt in vain, because some of the basics of monetary policy and control over that period went completely haywire,” she says. “The economists didn’t have the answer; the politicians were looking at the wrong things.” It sounds almost as if Kirby is blaming the government, rather than the banks, for the credit crunch – and, indeed, she is.
The government’s “fixation with certain targets and objectives ignored the bigger picture”, she says. “There was an assumption that regulation had cracked it – but the regulation was focused on the wrong place.” The diffusion of financial regulation between the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority, argues Kirby, was a “massive failure of government. You could argue that it wasn’t the markets that failed but the government, which thought it had the perfect solution to monetary policy by having an inflation target and leaving everything to the Bank of England – but took away from [the bank] a critical part of financial supervision.”
“I would argue that government was at the heart of this problem, not capitalism,” she continues. “There were no mechanisms in place to restrain irrational exuberance.” And yet Kirby is not arguing for tighter regulation; only a more intelligent system. The key problem, she says, was “hubris in government: the belief that you didn’t have to have ups and downs in the market, that you could be on a constantly rising trend”.
“This should be the end of the presumption that government has an answer,” she concludes; the recession “should consign this government to oblivion” at the election. Nonetheless, and with a discernible sense of exasperation, Jill Kirby admits that the battle is not yet won. “It seems that a large section of the public is still prepared to overlook that, or fearful of putting any other government in charge,” she says. “So who knows?"