Ever since Theresa May set out her vision to govern for everyone and not just the privileged few last July, those in the charity sector who work to reduce poverty and inequality have waited patiently. Campbell Robb, the chief executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, was one of many charity leaders who hoped for progress. He wanted to see a revamp of the government’s much-criticised “troubled families” programme, a £1bn scheme set up by David Cameron in 2011 and billed as the Tories’ flagship social policy initiative.
But when the Department for Communities and Local Government issued its first annual report on the programme , the charity sector was hugely disappointed. Robb described the document that emerged as “thin” and a “testament to the vacuum” that exists where we need to see “big political and social change”. It was barely noted in the media, which focused instead on a range of austerity-driven changes to the tax and benefit system, announced originally by George Osborne, which came into effect at the beginning of the new tax year. The changes hit the poorest hardest, while helping millions of the better off. The view increasingly held by thinktanks, and across the public sector, is that May’s government – even if well intentioned in wanting to reduce inequality and enhance opportunity for all – is too distracted and too constrained by the state of the public finances to do so.
“There is a danger that Brexit could suck the oxygen out of attempts to implement a sweeping programme of social and economic reform that is badly needed at home,” Robb said.
Even within parts of the Tory party, MPs and others worry that Brexit is now the only show in Whitehall, one so all-consuming, so draining of civil service and ministerial energies that everything else – the May agenda included – is on the back burner.
“David Cameron came into office with a new social vision of Conservatism and promptly sacrificed it on the altar of austerity,” says Phillip Blond, director of the ResPublica thinktank. “It is vital Theresa May does not let her one-nation Conservatism experience a similar sacrifice at the behest of Brexit. The trouble with Brexit is that those who voted against the EU as a proxy for globalisation and its general destruction of working-class security, risk finding May’s ‘global Britain’ to be far, far worse for them.”
Ryan Shorthouse, director of the liberal conservative thinktank Bright Blue, says he always suspected Brexit would syphon the energy out of Whitehall and voted against it partly for that reason: “A persuasive argument for voting Remain, I thought, was the lengthy and disproportionate focus that would be required of politicians and policy-makers to undertake the process of Brexit, which is indeed what we are now experiencing. There are other important and pressing issues that urgently require deeper thinking and discussion: the affordability and quality of social care, the upskilling of those on the lowest incomes, the financial sustainability of the NHS, and decarbonising our economy.” The green agenda, once central to May’s predecessor, hardly registers these days.
When the financial crisis broke in 2008, Nick Pearce, now professor of public policy at the University of Bath, was in charge of the No 10 policy unit under Gordon Brown. “It was the biggest economic shock the UK had faced since the second world war,” he says. But it did not preoccupy every government department as Brexit does. “It was largely dealt with by the prime minister, his advisers, the chancellor and Treasury officials, and the Bank of England. It was not like Brexit. Most of Whitehall now has Brexit at the top of the in-tray.”
It has already been decided that the next Queen’s Speech will be dominated by Brexit-related bills. Ministers have been told to limit their bids for domestic legislation so the way is clear for parliament to focus on the “great repeal bill”, which will incorporate the mass of EU law into UK law, and on other Brexit-related bills including one on immigration. A recent report by the National Audit Office says the civil service has already created more than 1,000 extra roles in the two new Brexit departments – for International Trade and for Exiting the EU.
And that is just the start, as the search for trade experts – outsourced over the last four decades to Brussels – intensifies. Many civil servants have shifted from domestic roles to Brexit posts in a huge, destabilising, but necessary, reconfiguration of Whitehall. Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, has described the task of managing his Brexit troops in Whitehall as “the biggest, most complex challenge facing the civil service in our peacetime history”. The NAO says new skills have to be learnt and found – a process which inevitably means less use of expertise gathered over decades by senior mandarins.
The poorest third of households are faring even worse than they did after the 2008 crash
Its report says: “Departments which have had large amounts of EU-derived funding and legislation, for example, will need legal, economic and sector experts to deal with the implications of leaving the European Union, and will have to do so using their remaining staff while also seeking to achieve pre-existing priorities.” Lord Kerslake, a former head of the civil service, says it is entirely right that the focus is on delivering a successful Brexit, but he fears problems will develop down the line in unrelated but vitally important areas as eyes are taken off the ball. “Nobody has quite got the measure of this because of the dominance of Brexit,” Kerslake says.
“Of course there is a need to equip government for Brexit but there is also a need to carry on with the rest of the business of government. There is a risk for the government in this: that things that would have surfaced through being debated and being challenged in normal times will now not surface early, and not until they become crises.”
Hiç yorum yok:
Yorum Gönder