Whitehall’s move to Canary Wharf should inspire us towards a smaller, smarter state
Moore's Law is an observable rule that has held broadly true since the mid-1960s. Named after the co-founder of Intel, it argues that every two years the number of transistors on a microchip will double at the same time that costs halve.
In the real world, this has meant phones, cameras, and computers that are now so small they can be worn on the wrist, and yet be more advanced than the tech used to get to the moon.
However, the nearly miraculous Moore’s Law has an unwelcome opposite in the form of Parkinson’s Law. C Northcote Parkinson’s more satirical “law” of around the same era persuasively argued that “work expands so as to fill the time available to its completion”.
Read more: Why civil servants are moving to Canary Wharf
Parkinson used this theory to demonstrate that “the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy”.
Indeed, at the end of the Second World War, rather than shrinking back to pre-war levels, the public sector remained at its engorged size. It took on more and more powers over people’s lives, burned through more and more money (not to mentioning borrowing more), regulated more, and at times even nationalised more.
At last, however, the civil service is being made smaller and smarter.
This week, 6,000 government workers moved from Westminster to Canary Wharf, bringing welcome savings of tens of millions of pounds for taxpayers from cheaper rental space, as well as raising billions for the Treasury from selling off unnecessary Whitehall property.
So far, 1,000 buildings have been sold off, and there are plans to shrink the remaining number by another three quarters (from 800 to 200) in the next decade or so.
Of course, successfully rolling back the frontiers of Whitehall inefficiency only to see it reintroduced at devolved levels is unacceptable.
For instance, unaccountable state slush funds like the London Enterprise Action Partnership, chaired by Sadiq Khan, divvy out cash on projects like a drunken sailor on shore leave, pouring taxpayers’ money into everything from beach parties to grape farms across the capital.
That is not the kind of smarter, smaller government that the Cabinet Office is trying to inspire with its partial relocation to Canary Wharf. So more needs to be done, at both a central and local government level.
Parkinson noted that “politicians and taxpayers have assumed that a rising total in the number of civil servants must reflect a growing volume of work to be done”.
But TaxPayers’ Alliance research has shown that by using technology that is already available, we could save £17bn a year by 2030, while getting better services from public sector workers performing more creative, fulfilling jobs. This would see 850,000 fewer civil servants handling services of more people.
Further funding reductions from central government would encourage leaner budgets and faster adoption of the exciting new technologies that the UK needs to embrace to thrive post-Brexit.
Parkinson did have another concept, that of “injelitance”, defined as “the disastrous rise to authority of individuals with an unusually high combination of incompetence and jealousy”. Unfortunately, we may require more than new technology to save us from that.
Read more: The civil service is ripe for disruption – and Brexit could be the catalyst