{"id":7519,"date":"2020-06-22T07:24:54","date_gmt":"2020-06-22T07:24:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/?p=7519"},"modified":"2020-06-22T07:48:28","modified_gmt":"2020-06-22T07:48:28","slug":"get-a-grip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/?p=7519","title":{"rendered":"Get a Grip"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\u2018Grip\u2019 was a word widely bandied about in the Civil Service\nabout twenty years ago. It was a Good Thing, and the more you had of it the\nbetter. The Government even formed a special unit to expand its sum total of\ngripness, called the Prime Minister\u2019s Delivery Unit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You didn\u2019t want to get on the wrong side of them. When I casually\nexpressed doubt about a deadline they were suggesting to me, I got a dusty\nanswer, for this was not in fact a suggestion, but an order. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I jest, but what this unit was able to do was ensure that\npolicy was translated into action at local level. This was the top down bit,\nbut it was only able to work because there were receptors on the ground: the\nseven Government Offices for the Regions. Here representatives for most of the\ngovernment departments worked together, using their local knowledge to liaise\nwith councils, health authorities, police forces, etc. Stuff got done. Crime\nfell. Family support saved the NHS millions of pounds. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But come 2010 and the Coalition, the Government Offices were swept away \u2013 in a particularly offensive fashion by marauding hedgehog Eric Pickles, who denounced them as \u2018\u2026 <\/em>agents of Whitehall to intervene and interfere in localities\u2019, when they were two-way conduits that provided much useful feedback on how policies were working on the ground.  (They weren’t even a leftie plot, having been created by John Major.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grip disappeared as a mantra, to be replaced by the exhortations to \u2018do more with less\u2019 as austerity began to bite. Central government seemed to be washing its hands of local government while at the same time piling more responsibilities onto it: hospitals to look out for illegal immigrants, schools to be more proactive in child protection, police to develop a better response to those with mental health problems. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

No wonder the Government can\u2019t get a grip on Covid now: it has absolutely no traction at the local level. To be scrupulously fair, Rishi Sunak has been able to decree furlough schemes and and use central government capacity to administer payment, and we\u2019ve done the emergency send-in-the-army-and-put-up-a-building thing that we\u2019re quite good at, but beyond that\u2026So many of the failures of Covid management are down to the Government\u2019s refusal to engage at the local level, and their lack of capacity to do so even if they wanted to:<\/p>\n\n\n\n