Delivery man

How To Run a Government So that Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don’t Go Crazy. By Michael Barber. Allen Lane; 336 pages; £16.99.

WHEN Sir Michael Barber, a monkish former teacher, emerged as head of the Delivery Unit that Tony Blair launched in 2001 to ensure that individual government departments implemented reforms, he appeared at a press briefing armed with a massive flip chart and a volley of statistics. This newfangled approach was roundly mocked as “deliverology”. But Sir Michael embraced the term, which describes a semi-science that takes the schemes and dreams of ministers and turns them into reality with as few disasters as possible.

Public-service reform had long relied on ministers mixing political passions and good intentions in the hope that the combination would magically coalesce into good results. That governments across the rich and developing worlds now seek help from experts on reforms shows how much more respectable deliverology has become. In 1995 Mark Moore’s classic, “Creating Public Value”, focused minds in the Clinton administration by laying out the conditions for improving America’s public institutions. Inspired by that book Sir Michael, now head of education practice for the Pearson Group (part-owner of The Economist), has set out to establish some dos and don’ts for reformers, based on his British experience and a later, peripatetic career advising foreign governments.

“How To Run a Government” follows Sir Michael’s earlier tome, “Instruction To Deliver”, and is more expansive and better written. He describes a meeting at Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence, in 2001, where he compiled a checklist of “how to turn strategy into delivery”, a phrase reminiscent of Bertolt Brecht’s definition of communism as “the easy thing that is difficult to do”. It consisted of what might seem plonkingly obvious questions: “Are you absolutely clear what the Government wants to achieve?”, “Are you absolutely clear what Government’s role is?” and “Are you confident that your preferred approach can be delivered?”.

The most intriguing examples of deliverology that follow show what happened to such endeavours when exposed to political crossfire. “Those who don’t want a given target will argue that it will have perverse or unintended consequences,” Sir Michael says, “most of which will never occur.” Yet some unintended results do cause trouble, and the naivety of the true believer sometimes peeps through Sir Michael’s prose. He cites a bitter row in the early 2000s over hospital waiting times, and blames staff who held back from admitting patients because the target criterion was only judged once people were through the hospital doors. “One wonders at the professional ethics of the staff involved in such an abuse,” he says. Wonder one might: but a group of people being asked to deliver a target they resist are very likely to find ways to disrupt it.

Overall, though, the author emerges as a wilier operator now than in his graph-and-PowerPoint days, and his advice can be refreshingly ruthless. Campaigns to win over doubters are of limited use, he thinks. Getting results is more likely to defeat opponents than making nice with them. Data on progress are the best defence—ideally data outside a government’s control.

An instructional tone is alleviated by wry insights and a fondness for Russian literature; suitable solace for frustrated change-seekers. Politicians, Sir Michael reflects, oscillate between the conviction that they alone have the answer to complex problems and a resignation reminiscent of one of the characters from Boris Pasternak’s novel, “Doctor Zhivago”, who was in such a hurry to establish “the failure of the efforts he made”.

The lesson is that doggedness and consistency are more use to the deliverologist than popularity. Sir Michael’s 57 rules for success range from the commonsensical—“Review the capacity of your system to deliver agreed goals”—to the controversial—“Successful markets and effective government go together”, which has as many exceptions as proofs around the world. Yet this account of a potentially dry subject has an uplifting brio to it. The combination of big data, a more sophisticated understanding of how to shape and scale reforms, and judicious use of markets make it “perfectly possible to run a government so that citizens benefit”, Sir Michael reckons. As for the title’s hope that “taxpayers don’t go crazy”, people should not hold their breath. A more achievable aim is that public-service reforms fare well enough for them to find something else to go crazy about instead.