Business leaders, I beseech you, join the government and steer the ship of state
Private sector business leaders embody the antithesis of what the Westminster machine has become, which is exactly why it needs them so desperately, writes Ameer Kotecha
Productivity in the public sector is five per cent lower than in 2019. In any big company or startup, that’s a crisis. But in government, it has become the accepted norm.
During my 11 years in the civil service, the root cause of this became clear. There is a culture that all too often sees only obstacles rather than solutions. Whitehall is a system that deals with poor performance by simply shuffling people into a new department or by giving them a different brief. You are more likely to die in any given Whitehall role than be sacked from it.
The result? A state that is slow, expensive and increasingly unable to fulfil its basic purposes: economic prosperity and functional public services.
Yet despite the government machine patently struggling, Whitehall’s immune system is designed to reject outsiders. Too often, high-achievers from the private sector enter government only to find their expertise neutralised by a culture that prioritises process over outcomes. If, that is, they get in at all: no mean feat given a recruitment model that esteems civil service jargon over experience in the real economy.
Business leaders, your government needs you!
I recently launched the Centre for Government Reform, along with Lord Agnew and Lord Nash – successful businessmen and former ministers – to change this. Our mission is to attract the leaders Britain needs to transform our country’s future. We will identify, train and prepare several hundred senior leaders over the next three years to transform the state. We are looking for proven high-achievers from all walks of life, equipping them with the specific tools needed to implement fundamental reform and ensuring their real-world expertise is utilised.
To the country’s business leaders, this is your call to action. You have built organisations at scale, delivering results under pressure with lean teams and clear accountability. You embody the antithesis of what the Westminster machine has become. Whitehall is unproductive, slow to adopt new technology and often focused on the wrong areas: it urgently needs to bring in new leaders from the private sector to relentlessly focus on efficiency, accountability and delivery.
Private sector expertise can turn the state around
The Centre’s graduates will be the next generation of Cabinet ministers, department permanent secretaries, directors-general, quango heads, non-executive directors and senior special advisers. The Centre will give these future leaders a firm grounding in the ways of Westminster: including legislation drafting, passage and implementation, and who does what so as to help strip waste and bureaucracy from an ever-growing state.
These are things that outsiders are often frustrated by but do not have the means to counter without working in the government machine itself. Our mission is to bridge the gap between business leaders’ understanding of how to run organisations and our current rubber levers of power. We will ensure that new leaders are equipped to navigate the Byzantine civil service so they can enact the change we so desperately need.
Decline is a choice, not an inevitability. The ship of state can yet be corrected with the right leaders. This is a call to those who have succeeded in the most competitive environments: step forward, bring your expertise to bear in government and help us to fix the state.
Ameer Kotecha is the CEO of the Centre for Government Reform and a former UK diplomat