The Greensill scandal

The growing scandal in the UK over corporate lobbing of government – which has implicated the former Prime Minister David Cameron as well as a former civil servant – is a reminder of the uses of bureaucracy and the dangers of its abandonment. Max Weber’s ideal-type bureaucracy is most closely associated with the State civil service, and many of its tenets can be seen in the traditional model of the British Civil Service which emerged from the 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan report (although in more complex ways than some of the received myths – see Greenaway, 2004 for details).

One feature of the Weberian ideal-type which nowadays seems rather quaint is that of the lifetime employment of bureaucrats, which links to the way that in the British system the civil service is a permanent one, existing independently of the government of the day. A virtue of such an approach is that it reduces the incidence of the ‘revolving door’ whereby someone might move between civil service and private sector employment. Of course, lifetime employment was never compulsory, so such moves have always occurred, but they were not the norm and, being rare, could more easily be regulated.

This revolving door (not just for civil servants but for government ministers) is at the heart of the present scandal, but it is much more widespread than that. The particular problem it presents is that the awarding of government contracts, or other favours such as, for example, laxer regulation or favourable planning decisions, is potentially corrupted.

Actually, one aspect of this particular scandal is not even a revolving door but a case in which, it appears, a senior civil servant was working simultaneously as an advisor to a now bankrupt finance company, Greensill Capital, of which he then became a Director after leaving the civil service. This seems to have happened not through oversight or concealment, but with official approval. It was not that the rules were flouted, but that they were followed.

It remains unclear how many similar instances of this there may be, but the more routine ‘revolving door’ cases have become far more common over recent decades because it has become an article of faith since at least the Thatcher governments that private sector expertise is needed to inject competence and dynamism into the supposedly archaic traditional civil service. This has even extended to the extensive use of management consultants not just to deliver policy but to contribute to the making of policy, and not just in the UK (Howlett & Migone, 2013).

At the same time, and for the same reason, the state has been reconfigured so as to be less the provider of public services and more the commissioner of those services from the private sector. This outsourcing, discussed extensively in my book, therefore offers particular opportunities for the award of government contracts, making the revolving door all the more problematic. Again, there are rules in place governing what former civil servants and government ministers may and may not do, but they are fairly lax. So it’s not necessarily a problem of rule-breaking but that the rules themselves are inadequate.

The issue here is not, or not necessarily, an overt corruption involving backhand payments in brown paper envelopes. It is more subtle, and more insidious, than that. It’s partly about conflicts of interest which, whether consciously or unconsciously, shape decisions. It is also about the way that personal networks and contacts – the ‘chumocracy’ – can be the basis for these decisions. So, all too easily, and again it may be both conscious and unconscious, nepotism and patronage creep in, and it flows both ways: ‘I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine’. This might be to do with individuals (for example, a civil servant anticipating future employment) or organizations (for example a consulting firm which is both advising government but also potentially benefitting from government decisions).

Whilst this isn’t new (and the origins of the Greensill scandal predate the current government) there are reasons to think that it may be more prevalent now. One is that the present Prime Minister has shown, in numerous ways, a cavalier disdain for established norms of conduct, and even for the law (for example in illegally suspending parliament in 2019). He is notoriously dishonest (Oborne, 2021) and exhibits a sense of privileged entitlement which seems to suggest that ‘rules are for the little people’. If, as the saying has it, ‘the fish rots from the head’ then an administration led by such a person may be expected to be tainted.

Related to that, this is a government that is especially resistant to dissent and scrutiny, as shown by its draconian approach to policing protests, hostility to the legal system (‘activist’ lawyers, judicial review) the civil service and 'woke' universities, excessive use of Executive powers (Henry VIII powers, Statutory Instruments), disdain for the ministerial code, resistance to accountability to both the media and parliament, and much more besides. This then becomes the context for an illegal lack of transparency in public procurement with associated accusations of cronyism, assisted by the crisis situation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic which has been used to justify suspending standard rules for such procurement.

What is objectionable about all this isn’t simply the question of whether individuals and companies are lining their pockets – and often already over-filled pockets, at that. It is that they do so at public expense After all, the rationale for bringing private expertise into the civil service, and for outsourcing public services, is supposed to be that this will make more efficient use of public, or taxpayers’, money. Cronyism doesn’t as a matter of logical necessity preclude this – perhaps contracts awarded to cronies are undertaken superbly well – but nor does it require it. It makes it impossible to tell whether ‘value for money’ has been achieved.

Another way of looking at this is the way that the neo-liberal ideology of competitive markets as the most efficient allocator of resources has morphed into a ‘market managerialism’ in which bogus markets are created, with resource allocation being decided managerially by, in this case, politicians and civil servants. It is almost the worst of all worlds in taking the worst features of command economies and combining them with the worst features of capitalist economies.

It might be argued that the very fact that there is currently a scandal means that we shouldn’t worry too much. It shows that there is an accountability in operation. The difficulty with that idea is that we really have no way of knowing whether what has been identified is all that there is to be found, or whether it conceals a hidden iceberg. The only real way to be sure is through a system of formal rules. That entails far more than the often-proposed solution of ‘transparency’ and ‘disclosure’. It is not enough that conflicts of interest be ‘declared’, what matters is that, when declared, they are removed, most obviously by removing an individual from decision making.

That is no easy matter. Much of what is at issue here is extremely difficult to police – late night conversations between friends, for example – and probity requires moral norms as well as procedural rules. Perhaps a different way of putting this is to say that it is not necessarily easy to say where and when ‘decisions’ are made: the meeting room and the written minutes may not tell the whole, or even most, of the story.

So Weberian bureaucracy isn’t by any means the whole answer here. For that matter, we shouldn’t assume that the traditional civil service was free of chumocracy when, no doubt, the ‘old boy network’ was alive and kicking. Similarly, ministers and former ministers of bygone times were not paragons of unalloyed virtue.

But this doesn’t mean that cronyism and more or less overt corruption are simply facts of life. They flourish to a greater or lesser extent according to the particular rules and norms of political administration obtaining in particular places at particular times. Avoiding such problems is always a work in progress, sometimes going in the right direction, sometimes the reverse.

In Britain, at the present time, there is a sense of going in the wrong direction. As Rafael Behr, the Guardian columnist, argues, it is not country “riddled with corruption”, but there is “the stench of decay”. That may have its proximate cause in the particular character of the present Prime Minister and government. But they have been enabled by inheriting a state that had already been hollowed out, and a civil service that had been undermined, by the ‘private good, public bad’ ideology. That gave them a freedom of action that might otherwise been constrained. By the same token, with different ideologies and institutions that freedom of action could be curtailed.

 

The fifth edition of A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Studying Organizations will be published by SAGE in November 2021.