This morning the CBI boss John Cridland has moaned to the Financial Times that the government’s growth plans have fallen into something of an implementation black hole. Having announced major plans to get the economy back on track last November the plans are now, says Cridland, mired in bureaucracy and sitting gathering dust on ministers’ and civil servants’ desks.
While this is not a new problem, the time lag between announcement and action does seem to have worsened under the current government. Some observers put this down to cuts in departmental budgets, with fewer civil servants able to jump to it and get new initiatives moving. Others claim its down to a lack of joined-up thinking across government departments.
In particular, the growth plan is apparently suffering from the emasculation of business secretary Vince Cable, since BIS should be a key co-ordinating ministry in this area. Whatever the cause, the outcome is the same. Months have passed without, as Cridland puts it, us seeing “diggers on the ground”. Cridland’s own view is that members of the government appear to be “dazzled in the headlights”.
I wonder if the reality might be something simpler. This expectation of early action has been caused by a tendency to rush into making announcements for political expediency, rather than weighing up the practical considerations.
A senior banker told me last week that following George Osborne’s Mansion House speech the week before, at which several key new policies around stimulating lending to small businesses were announced, his firm received a flurry of phone calls from Treasury officials asking exactly what those policies might mean in practice and how they might be implemented. To re-cap, that’s officials working out the practical details of implementing policies after they have been announced.
If nothing else that sounds like a recipe for a series of sudden and unexplained policy U-turns. As the omnishambles budget unfolded, George Osborne told the Today programme that the only worse than listening was not listening.
I’d suggest that it would make more sense to do that listening – to professionals and industry experts in particular – before announcing key policies rather than after.
This article originally appeared in economia.
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