The new coalition government almost immediately began to show us a completely different way to govern.

For years now the choice between the different political parties has been eroded until the decision about which one to vote for comes down to what kind of tie a man likes to wear or the cut of their suit. There does not appear to have been any significant difference between the different parties for some time and the result of the last election seemed to confirm that we were just getting a different set of ties who would continue to behave in exactly the same way as the last government behaved, because that was the only way that there was to govern.

And then we had the coalition, which almost immediately began to show us a completely different way to govern.

We have long talked about the destructive effect of target setting in any business or administration and one of the first things we heard was that the police forces have been told to ignore their old performance targets and instead, get on with policing the nation.

We now hear that targets in the National Health Service are also being dismantled and expect very shortly to hear that teachers have been told to stop filling in forms and get on with educating our children. How bonkers is that system? We have to close our schools to allow teachers to fill in the paperwork to prove how well they are educating our children.

The regional development boards which have cost the taxpayer millions and never had any effect except to use that money to prove that they too were being effective, are also being dismantled.

We came across a document called The LGA (Local Government) Briefing – Summary of Coalition Agreement. We were stunned at the elegance and simplicity of their approach which seems to be, if it is not adding value then stop spending money on it.

The target savings for the public service budget are 40%. The opposition parties were very quick to lay into the coalition deriding their declared ambition as impossible and therefore foolhardy to even attempt, and yet what we are seeing in the change in the way that they are going about the business of government makes it look as if they will succeed massively and no party will be able to govern effectively again unless they behave in the same way.

We have left behind the directive style of government, where those in power decide what they think is best for the electorate then spend our money trying to force us to accept what they think we should have or how they think that we should behave. In business this is the management style that has proved so destructive and an increasingly expensive waste of resources.

Today we seem to have a government that is behaving in a significantly different way. First they listen to what the electorate want, then they try to give it to us. That sounds expensive until you realise that a lot of the expense incurred by the previous government was in forcing through legislation that we neither needed nor wanted.

Unfortunately there are still many managers who believe that this old style of management is the only way to manage. For them we hope that the example of this new inclusive, supportive, devolved government will allow them to see how destructive their own behaviour really is.

Nick Clegg, as deputy PM, has set up a website to find out what the public believe to be useless pieces of legislation, the usual suspects are the smoking ban, the hunting ban and the various other attempts of the last administration to tell the public how to live their lives.

Apart from the person who wanted the law of gravity repealed because it discriminated against fat people, this approach is brilliant.
We tried to get on the Deputy PM’s site but after the story was on the news it was inundated. Give it a try, it sounds as if they are trying to listen.

There is a man called John Seddon, an author and acerbic critic of the way that the public purse was being managed. This month he wrote from a loftier perspective than we:

“I listened to Andrew Stunnel, a minister for communities and local government (CLG) in the new coalition, speaking at a conference two weeks ago. He made it absolutely clear: there will be no specifications coming down from the centre. I asked him, for clarification, that this really would mean getting rid of those roles, he said yes. I read Eric Pickles’ article in the Local Government Chronicle, he is the minister in charge at CLG; he said the same. Last week I met Greg Clark, another minister at CLG and he too was unequivocal.

“The regime is over. No longer will children in Whitehall dream up their dumb ideas on how to design, manage and measure public services; no longer will they tell local public service managers what to do and send the Audit Commission in to bully people in to compliance. The message from the ministers is crystal clear: they want leaders of local public services to get on with it. Responsibility has been put in the right place. We should rejoice.”

Thank you John, Indeed we should!