For too long, our politicians have been more interested in being popular and winning elections than in governing well and making real and lasting improvements to Britain and the lives of its citizens.
Modern government is hard. We live in a complex and diverse society with many long-term challenges. The people running the UK are expected to address those systemic problems while simultaneously dealing with a multitude of day-to-day events including urgent crises, many of which never make the news. All of this takes place in an intense and unforgiving media environment.
This combination of wrong priorities, insufficient bandwidth and hostile scrutiny has paralysed successive governments and sapped the confidence of the public. In short, Britain is approaching crisis point.
We are a group of senior people with experience in the civil service, business, politics, media, law, the military and the NHS. All of us have observed and analysed the workings of government. Our conviction is that there is nothing inevitable about the chronic shortcomings of the current system. Rather, it is the consequence of bad choices and an almost perverse unwillingness to plan properly.
The heart of the problem can be summed up by the maxim “failing to prepare is preparing to fail”. Not only are policies thinly sketched out and readily discarded but ministers themselves are often shockingly out of their depth. Our system incentivises media celebrity over serious training and competence. We draw talent from a tiny, self-selecting pool mediated by political parties that have a lot to answer for. Even when good people emerge, we don’t do nearly enough to prepare them for ministerial roles. In short, we leave the running of the country to amateurs. It can’t go on like this.
That is why we have founded Fix Britain, an organisation that will build a detailed blueprint for government.
The ambition of Fix Britain is to do the heavy lifting so that politicians will have detailed options instead of vague promises. In doing so, we are determined to set out an honest account of the trade-offs involved by producing detailed decision trees, costings, draft legislation and personnel charts, department by department. Our plans will be tested, not just for popularity, but for deliverability and affordability.
Ministerial teams need to be equipped with both subject knowledge and an understanding of the machinery of government. That is the only way they will be in a position to decide which policies can work, how long they will take, the legislation they’ll need, and which personnel and organisations can make it happen. Outside observers think this happens already. It doesn’t. Politicians assume that the civil service will be able to work it all out based on a few sketchy instructions. They can’t.
We will prioritise the key parts of the system that have become most dysfunctional. There is an emerging consensus about what needs to be fixed. All major parties are committed in principle to reducing low skilled migration and ending illegal migration, driving economic growth through increased investment and productivity, increasing apprenticeships, reducing energy costs, building infrastructure and housing faster and cheaper, fixing failures in public services and procurement through ambitious reform and technology.
We will target the factors that prevent functionality. For example, an exponential rise in judicial reviews and human rights claims hinders everything from deporting foreign criminals to approving new nuclear power stations. The HR culture and bureaucracy of Whitehall makes it hard to sack poor performers. Current legislative practice places a hard limit on how many bills can be put through Parliament in one term.
Fix Britain is avowedly non-party. We have started recruiting successful people with expertise from outside government: in commerce; in the tech sector; in the military. They will work in conjunction with those of us who have inside experience of the machinery of the civil service, Parliament and the interplay of domestic and international law. As we move forward, we believe that others with expertise to share will join us.
There is no monopoly on good ideas. As plans emerge from Fix Britain it will be open to politicians to take up or refine our output. We believe that rapid and sustained improvement is possible with the right plan. For us, success will be a situation where it becomes impossible for any party to stand for election without a detailed and credible plan to fix Britain and thus be ready to govern – and govern well.