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Tories would put people before targets, says Letwin

Finance | Tania Mason | 26 Feb 2008

A Conservative government would change the culture of Whitehall to enable ministers and civil servants to put the needs of vulnerable people ahead of departmental priorities, Oliver Letwin said last week.

But new Big Lottery Fund chief executive Peter Wanless responded that changing the risk-averse culture of government would be very difficult.

Letwin (pictured), who chairs the Conservatives’ policy review, told the NCVO annual conference that his party agreed with the government that the state and the private sector didn’t have all the answers, and that some things “could be done much better or more cheaply by the third sector”.

But where the Conservatives differed from Labour, he said, was in use of the third sector to deliver contracts on behalf of the government “to meet pre-determined targets”. 

The delivery of such contracts is heavily inspected and audited and, as government goals shift, new contracts are let for new things, he said. “This encourages people in the third sector to scheme-hop, to modulate their own patterns of activity in order to conform with the conditions of the grant.”

Letwin said the Conservatives “don’t see things that way – though that is not to say there is no room for third sector organisations to participate in delivering government goals”.

The joy of civil society, he said, is that it responds to human need in the way it considers best. By encouraging voluntary organisations to reshape themselves to fit government priorities and targets, he said, “you risk losing some of what is best about civil society”.

The problem with trying to meet departmental priorities is that “people don’t come in packages determined by government department programmes”. Under the current regime, when a person requires various kinds of support – such as help with drug and alcohol addiction, help to find a home, and training to find employment – they are shuffled from one programme to another.

A Conservative government, according to Letwin, would try to shape the response around the person’s needs.

He admitted the party did not harbour any “naive hope” that it could change things overnight, because the structure of the parliamentary system offers “no rewards for ministers taking risks that go wrong – in fact there are great penalties”.  Changing this culture is a “very serious challenge”, he conceded.

“We know we need to change that culture and to enable our officials to take those risks and not be penalised for them. It will require a major shift in the culture of Whitehall but it is one we are determined to achieve. We are going to need a change in the way we operate government itself.

“If we can achieve this even to some degree, the extent to which we can unlock the potential of civil society is enormous.”

But Peter Wanless, the new BIG chief executive and a former civil servant at the head of the Families Unit, told Charity News Alert he understood where Letwin was coming from, but changing the risk-averse culture of government was very ambitious.

He said that if it emerged that the lottery distributor had, for example, inadvertently given money to a project linked to Al Qaeda as part of a programme to fund social cohesion, then Letwin “wouldn’t give us any leeway”.

Wanless said the issue was more about getting a workable framework of questions and targets that could be measured by the Public Accounts Committee, rather than giving civil servants free reign to take risks.

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