It is tiresome for civil servants and Ministers grappling with the tough realities of government to have a chorus of the retired telling them how much better things were handled in the past. It is incumbent on those of us who can sit back and not have to make any decisions to exercise restraint. But sometimes a story about the way we are governed nowadays hits the media and you just have to say: what? Did they really do that? Can they just walk away unscathed?
The latest is the news yesterday that the DWP has had to admit that in a leaflet about benefits which apparently contained real quotes from real claimants they had actually made up the quotes and invented fictitious claimants. Well done to Welfare Weekly (http://www.welfareweekly.com/) for extracting this admission via a Freedom of Information request. Here’s the Guardian’s account: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/aug/18/dwp-admits-making-up-positive-quotes-from-benefits-claimants-for-leaflet.
While most of government has been paying at least lip-service to the idea of evidence-based policy-making the DWP has for the past few years run into trouble more than once for playing fast-and-loose with evidence. They now seem to have reached the ultimate opposite and made the standard Whitehall joke come true: they really have gone in for policy-based evidence-making.
Almost needless to say, no one accepts responsibility for this egregious piece of work. Ministers as usual say that they knew nothing about it. The Director of Communications denies any knowledge of it. The Permanent Secretary’s head is well below the parapet, as is normal at that level. To add to the bogus claimants we also have the unidentifiable authors.
There is a serious point here about integrity in government. Senior officials are supposed to defend and preserve the integrity of government communications. It’s in the public interest that government communications are to be trusted. If ordered to do something by Ministers and it’s not an illegal order civil servants have to obey but this isn’t that kind of situation. It would be reassuring if the Permanent Secretary at DWP, the Executive Director of Government Communications in the Prime Minister’s Office or even the magnificently titled Director General of Propriety and Ethics in the Cabinet Office had something to say on this, but don’t hold your breath.
Just recently, Lord Sumption, Supreme Court Justice, said this to an interviewer:
“He referred to the steadfast gatekeeping of civil servants, who underpin the system. … “There’s no code that tells you what to do,” says Sumption. “This is the way that public service works, it’s the way that it has always worked. There’s a sense of carrying on and a tradition.” He cautioned, “It’s a fragile political culture. If we ever lost it, we would find it very difficult to recreate.”
True enough and maybe we are closer to the brink than he thinks.