Don’t bury the Brexit roar with bureaucracy

We need to replace our mania for pointless targets with a culture of trust and public service

It is said that the era of robots is coming. But looking at our Government, you would be forgiven for thinking it is already here. It’s not just Theresa “Maybot” but the increasingly dystopian state she presides over: a combination of creative famine and department cuts is imprisoning us in a world of pointless targets and meaningless numbers.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the brutalist block that houses the Department for Work and Pensions. Due to a “historic error”, it recently emerged that the DWP has underpaid sickness and disability benefits to 180,000 people and the Government may have to fork out more than £1 billion in back payments. This revelation came just days after the department delayed the roll-out of its botched Universal Credit system yet again, to 2023.

The blunders are ironic, given that the DWP subjected its staff to years of misery through its “Lean Vision” efficiency drive, launched in 2007. This entailed streamlining staff duties to the point where they have become deliberately narrow, fragmented and repetitive and at the same time removing scrutiny checks. The incomprehensibly huge errors committed by the DWP of late seem less surprising when you realise that the department has enforced a working culture that actively discourages employees from looking at the bigger picture.

Our benefits system is also a mess because successive governments have played it like a numbers game – an instrument for obfuscating the truth and manipulating human behaviour. Gordon Brown, for instance, artificially drove down “absolute poverty” by pumping the disadvantaged with tax credits, trapping a generation in a cycle of dependency. The Tories’ Universal Credit target to nudge a million people from low-paid, part-time work towards equally low-paid but full-time employment, by fiddling with their benefits, is predicated on the false assumption that the poor are selfinterested and predictable, instead of flawed, complex people. Technocrats, it seems, aren’t interested in anything that can’t be solved with a calculator.

In the cash-strapped, statisticsdriven mania of modern policing, meanwhile, numbers are being used to a different end. This month, West Yorkshire Police actually set themselves a target to investigate fewer crimes. The policing elite are even amassing medals by reducing the amount of policing that the police carry out. It was partly for reducing the incidence of stop and search in London that Sir Craig Mackey, the senior officer who locked himself in his car during the Westminster terror attack, was bestowed a knighthood.

No aspect of the state is safe from this lunacy. Teachers struggle under such a crush of pupil-assessment paperwork that we are haemorrhaging the most talented. NHS managers have reportedly faked patient movements between hospital departments on computer systems to meet waiting-list targets. Meanwhile, health chiefs plead for the 18-week routine operation target to be scrapped so they can prioritise cancer patients over hernias.

To rescue our nation from bureaucratic oblivion, we must ask ourselves how we got to this point. Somehow, the dream of injecting the state with the self-improving energy of the free market has collapsed into bloated managerialism and customer-feedback loops. Since the Eighties, when consumerism exploded, and the fear of world-scale destruction began to blare from our TVS, we have allowed the idea that people are untrustworthy, self-serving automata to seep into free-market theology.

Government departments consequently operate on the basis that public service and pride in one’s work are a myth, as humans are capable only of being dead wood or conniving careerists. Our politicians serve the cult of numbers, not the popular will. Is it any wonder that the most successful high-flyers to have emerged in recent times are Theresa May and her sidekick, Spreadsheet Phil?

So how do we change the position in which we find ourselves? The answer, surely, is to channel the self-belief that Brexit unleashed and recognise that the vote was partly a roar of rage against the machine. How ironic that Leave voters are dubbed anti-expert, when it is the metropolitan elite who suffocate our police, nurses and teachers with their control-freakery and narrow intellectual faculties.

So let’s scrap the various targets that cripple the state. The emphasis should instead be on civic duty, vocational independence and higher, commonsense goals – such as improving the entire journey of a patient in the health system, rather than just tracking an A&E waiting time; or freeing teachers to craft curriculums that teach pupils how to think, not regurgitate.

But to do this, we need to trust the people on the front line of public service to do their jobs. Pessimists may sneer at such proposals as a “leap of faith”. They do not grasp that the numbers-crazed metropolitan cynicism of today is just as unrooted in reality. FOLLOW Sherelle Jacobs on Twitter @Sherelle_e_j; READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion