‘People power’… perhaps not
Civitas, 8 November 2010
Today David Cameron promised to end the era of ‘bureaucratic accountability’ and usher in the era of ‘democratic accountability’. From an era with a bureaucracy held to account by the government for meeting targets to an era where the bureaucracy is held to account by ‘the people’ who monitor its progress in moving towards ‘milestones’.
The move fits in with Cameron’s wider ‘Big Society’ project, a project that is beginning to take shape with the Government’s plans to devolve power to GPs in health care commissioning, parents in setting up schools and most recently in proposals to force the unemployed serve their communities in return for benefits. These policies have fleshed out a concept which before, and indeed after, the general election had been criticized for being woolly and vague. However the recent initiative, which involves the setting up of a ‘Transparency website’ could in itself reflect some of the inconsistencies in the Big Society project.
The rhetoric behind Cameron’s proposal is grandiose: “We are going to take power from government and hand it to people, families and communities” and “In one of the biggest blows for people power, we’re shining a bright light of transparency on everything government does”. If an individual wants to test out their new-found people power they can go to the website, look up the government department they are interested in, and see if they are doing what they promised.
I decided to do this for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and found out that so far the department is overdue in developing ‘guidance to impose ‘sunset clauses’ on new regulations so that they automatically expire unless positive action is taken by government to renew them’. So far, so transparent, but it is difficult to find out why this action is overdue or indeed when and how the situation will be rectified. After spending thirty minutes searching the Transparency and BIS websites I was still unable to find the information. No doubt I could contact someone at BIS and maybe they could answer my question but I am sceptical that even the most empowered citizen would do this, unless the issue was of primary importance to them. Perhaps more importantly the Transparency website may tell the public what policies are completed and which are overdue but the website does not extend power to people to decide the policies themselves.
This is where Cameron’s rhetoric clashes with reality. Government can be shrank, and undoubtedly in this country should be, but there are some areas where government will remain the only game in town. On substantive policy questions the involvement of the people will always be limited, and there are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, the majority of people do not have the time to devise their own solutions to political problems; government is a form of outsourcing that the populace engages in so that they can get on with other things. Second, people may not want to get involved in devising policy solutions or may lack the expertise to. The Labour MP Douglas Alexander may have been particularly prescient when he stated (concerning the general public): “they feel they have a pretty good accountability mechanism, it’s called a general election”. Third, the logistics of wider political involvement appears too unwieldy, or in essence ineffective. Referendum politics through public initiatives, as practised widely in California, sees voters deciding yes or no on questions of policy, the scope to propose policy measures is limited to those with the money and power to lead an initiative.
This is not to say that Cameron’s moves to improve transparency are not welcome. Government needs to be held to account by the public, although it is often the media and those paid to do so who do the job. However it is difficult to see how this exercise, for the majority of the population, will remain anything other than reactive. Government, along with interest groups, advisors and academics will continue to create policy that the electorate reacts to on Election Day. David Cameron has rightly championed many policies that will reduce the influence of central government on policy implementation (GP commissioning, more freedom for teachers with free schools) but in terms of policy creation it is hard to see how the same degree of power could be devolved. I’m sure that both David Cameron and the British public both realise this, so let’s stop kidding ourselves otherwise.