Are Gove and Cummings running Britain or blowing it up?

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.