Whitehall's lethal incompetence

I have no confidence at all that the tracing app being developed by Whitehall will work. If it’s up to the abysmal standards of error, malfunction, delay and inadequacy that has characterised the rest of the actions of the Department of Health, it will collapse half an hour after release, the first week”s central data will be hacked, warning SMS messages will be sent to everyone by mistake and the bluetooth errors will destroy thousands of phones.

It follows close on the heels of the PPE procurement disaster. A disastrous central procurement model that left NHS workers short of PPE whilst firms holding vast stocks of kit that met the standards struggled against official deafness to offer it for sale; they were ignored, officials placed themselves beyond contact and hid behind websites and an RAF transport aircraft spent a week flying in a few boxes of gowns from Turkey.

And let’s not even mention the testing fiasco, or the manifest failures of Public Health England that left us so poorly prepared against the most basic and fundamental of risks. All of it, every disgraceful failure, every shaming bungle, stems from Whitehall’s toxic grasp on central power at the cost of effectiveness. The command and control mindset that insists on trying to micromanage the entire nation’s health response from Richmond House has been lethal. 

The fall yesterday evening of Neil Ferguson can only improve the quality of the government’s response. Like the departed Scottish CMO Catherine Calderwood, Ferguson thought the rules were only for little people. I’m sure these incidents aren’t isolated; I’ll bet that senior civil servants across the country are happily breaching the rules to visit their yachts, second homes, lovers or to receive hookers and rent boys at their lockdown dossholes, smug in their inviolability just so long as the press doesn’t find them out. The hypocrisy is nauseating.

The one lesson we must take from both the Brexit fiasco and the Covid farce is that we must clear out this dross from Whitehall. We must localise and decentralise, we must trust regions, counties and lower tiers of government to be competent. We must increase democratic control, local scrutiny and accountability. If this nonsense has taught us anything, it’s that we normal people can act responsibly, even if Whitehall can’t.