Our over-central State isn't doing so well

In the inevitable post-Covid inquiry, if it is conducted honestly, it will be found that we lost lives in part because of our over-centralised, ineffective, power-grasping State, obstructive and bureaucratised procurement practises and a refusal by Whitehall to localise, decentralise and delegate. We don’t have to look far for the villains.

Public Health England, the woke body whose greatest achievement to date has been to ban smoking in hospital grounds and whose main policy thrust was a campaign against alcohol and sugar, has comprehensively cocked-up Wuhan virus testing, as reported in the Telegraph. With a fantasy aspiration to create a single national testing centre, a fantasy that killed health workers, they have now instructed everyone to switch to commercial tests.

And although the press are giving the government a hard time over shortages of PPE, it really isn’t the Health Secretary’s job to buy nitrile gloves. Each local health trust, hospitals, the NHS, have their own vast procurement departments – I’ve seen a figure of over 100,000 buying staff quoted. OK, we should have better maintained a national emergency buffer stock of pandemic gear, but as soon as the virus became apparent in January, these buyers should have been placing orders. And it may emerge that our Statist jobsworths delayed buying PPE because of EU public procurement directives that require them to advertise across the EU for 30 days before issuing tender documents then another 30 days to allow tenderers to prepare bids, then a compulsory ‘standstill’ period, then give themselves another 30 days to evaluate the tenders … an EU-compliant purchase order can take four or five months between starting the procurement and getting the first delivery. If any dickhead anywhere in our vast health infrastructure has insisted on sticking to EU rules they should be shot.

Everywhere are stories of an innovative, agile and responsive private sector banging on the doors of the State to offer testing, help, assistance, contacts, contracts, gear and lifesaving expertise. And everywhere are stories of official doors being slammed in their faces, of bureaucrats ‘hiding behind websites’, of unanswered calls, of uncontactable procurement departments, of senior civil servants deaf to advice.

It is clear already that we have been grossly failed by an over-central State. Whitehall is not the model we need. We need deep change in the shape of our government.