From Rolls Royce to Skoda: ... Britain's failed "regulatory state"
An excellent (though frightening which makes uncomfortable reading) article in The Telegraph - 26 January 2021(it is behind paywall so will copy-paste some paragraphs below)From Rolls Royce to Skoda: How the pandemic has exposed Britain’s failed ‘regulatory state’As the UK death toll passes 100,000, we examine how our hollowed-out state not only broke down but failed to plan to stop a pandemic....Britain inherited from World War II a “command and control” state; a state that could govern. Whitehall was well-practised in strategic planning, good at the rapid and efficient mobilisation of resources and people, and it regularly took authoritative, direct action to meet society’s needs......Today, after 40 years of reform, the “command and control” state has been replaced by a “regulatory state”. Decision-making has shifted from parliament to an archipelago of some 400 “arms-length” quangos, employing more than 278,000 people and costing £205 billion per year. Moreover, the state’s assets – its capacity to execute policy on its own accord – have been outsourced or rationalised......The outsourcing of responsibility and decision-making is clear with respect to the NHS. After successive reforms under governments of all stripes, the Department for Health and Social Care no longer has operational control. Responsibility has been outsourced to dozens of quangos and local commissioners, operating within a fragmented internal market, with scant strategic oversight.....Britain’s pandemic preparations followed the same approach. The government’s latest strategy, issued in 2011, created no additional capacity to deal with an outbreak: no extra laboratories, no spare hospital beds, no new manufacturing centres to supply medical equipment, no new stockpiles of PPE. In true regulatory state style, it merely established bureaucratic guidelines that outsourced all the real work to local government, healthcare providers and others, gathered in “local resilience fora”.....While public health laboratories were first centralised and downsized under New Labour, the Conservative-LibDem government devolved public health responsibilities to local government, whose funding was then cut by £700 million from 2015 to 2019.….The official report from the [Cygnus] exercise carried out in 2016 concluded that Britain’s “plans, policies and capability” were “not sufficient to cope” with “a severe pandemic”. However, the report was stamped “official – sensitive” and put on a shelf to rot. It was only officially published in October 2020, following pressure from the Telegraph and other newspapers.…….The 2011 pandemic strategy stipulated it would “not be possible to halt the spread of a new pandemic… and it would be a waste of public health resources and capacity to attempt to do so”. Instead, the strategy prioritised “business as usual”, anticipating healthcare rationing and 210,000 to 315,000 excess deaths over a fifteen-week period. This plan, hatched by technocrats without democratic debate, could not survive contact with public opinion. No wonder the Cygnus report was buried.…..Meanwhile, the outsourced NHS procurement system failed miserably, as private firms relying on “just-in-time” delivery faced surging demands and collapsing global supply chains. Even the pandemic PPE stockpile had been outsourced to a private company. Their warehouses lacked key equipment like gowns, and 45 per cent of their supplies had expired on the shelf. Resultant shortages were linked to over 8,000 cases and 126 deaths among health and social care workers.…..McKinsey & Co (American worldwide management consulting firm) were brought in to define the “vision, purpose and narrative” of a new NHS Test and Trace service, which was then staffed by over 2,300 consultants – outnumbering the civil servants at the Treasury and Department for Trade.……Deloitte, architects of the disastrous outsourcing of NHS procurement, were tasked with establishing new supply chains. As the National Audit Office found, the firm largely pushed aside domestic offers of help, instead spending hundreds of millions of pounds on overseas procurement. By July 2020, Britain had spent £12.5 billion on items that would have cost £2.5 billion in 2019, and may now be saddled with five years of surplus supplies.…..The more disturbing conclusion is that the British state is so lacking in basic vision and leadership, its bureaucratic institutions are so divorced from meaningful delivery capacities that it cannot even provide security to its own citizens.....
Ivonne Holliday ● 2114d6 Comments ● 2114d