Slapdash Britain - why can't we do anything properly any more?

It’s an ordinary summer’s day. Over breakfast you glance hurriedly at the paper: the usual stuff about a missing civil service laptop and some social worker scandal in the north of England. Coming home after work, your train stuck for hours in the middle of nowhere, you kill time by reading a story about the latest spat between civil servants and special advisers. And that night, tossing fitfully in your sleep, you dream that you’re stuck in the corridor of some failing hospital, blood pouring from a gaping wound. The doctor is too busy to see you, but you can see him all right: through a glass window, literally buried under a mound of paperwork. In the background, a sepulchral voice intones again and again: 'Not fit for purpose. Not fit for purpose …’

Over the last few months, making a new Radio Four documentary series about the crisis in British government, I have had more than my fair share of nightmares about being trapped in the corridors of power. When I began work on the series, Gordon Brown’s government was in its dying agonies; when I finished, the new coalition ministers were just shaking hands with their new drivers. But after talking to civil servants, special advisers, local government executives and academic experts, I realised that the overexcited political reporters were missing the real story. For whoever calls the shots in the minister’s office, there is now a pervasive sense that government simply no longer works as it once did. To put it bluntly, it has become shockingly slapdash. 'It’s not good enough,’ the veteran political scientist Anthony King told me. 'There are too many mistakes.’ And perhaps surprisingly, the former civil servants I met almost universally agreed.

The depressing thing about all this is that British administration was once regarded as the best in the world. Half a century ago, when Clement Attlee’s Labour government went to the country for a new mandate, they could point to a record of achievement in five years that dwarfs anything New Labour accomplished in thirteen, from the foundation of the National Health Service to the construction of hundreds of thousands of new homes, schools and hospitals. Whatever you might think of Attlee’s policies, there could be no denying that the system was awe-inspiringly effective; after all, only five years before, it had helped to guide Britain to victory over the Nazis. The man in Whitehall, it seemed, really did know best.

But in the last few weeks, talking to retired mandarins such as the ex-Cabinet secretary Lord Butler and the former Home Office chief Sir David Omand, I was struck by the consensus that something has gone wrong in the corridors of Whitehall. 'There was a time when governments were thorough enough to get it right,’ laments Sir Christopher Foster, an economist and former special adviser who now chairs the apolitical Better Government Initiative. 'Now there are too many laws, too many changes, and too many things simply don’t work.’

It was a different world, agrees Lord Butler, who first joined the Treasury in 1961, 'Things were not so frenetic. Parliament was held in great respect. We felt that we had to produce policies that stood up to public scrutiny.’ It was not quite a golden age, he assured me. But there was no mistaking his wistful tone.

For some observers, what has gone wrong with British government is the infiltration of a culture of targets, objectives and management-speak that sounds depressingly similar to the kind of nonsense I had to endure during my mercifully brief career as a university lecturer. In his valedictory dispatch as our ambassador in Rome three years ago, Sir Ivor Roberts memorably lambasted the culture of 'bullshit bingo’ that had crept into the hallowed halls of the Foreign Office. Listening to him reel off some examples in his Oxford sitting room – 'synergies’, 'benchmarking’, 'best practice’, 'empowering, 'roll-outs’ – I wondered whether to laugh or cry.

And yet even targets and management-speak have their defenders. The former Granada boss Sir Gerry Robinson, who went into a Rotherham hospital for the BBC in 2007 to see if he could 'fix the NHS’, told me that nothing had done more to reduce waiting lists than properly chosen targets. The key thing, he argues, is to set the right ones – something that so far, Whitehall chiefs have conspicuously failed to do.

But there is clearly a deeper problem, too. Almost everybody I spoke to, from permanent secretaries to local government executives, agreed that ever since the obsessive centralisation of the Thatcher years, successive governments have tried to do too much. 'Everything has become much more frenetic,’ sighs Lord Butler. 'Government has been conducted largely by soundbites, and as a result policies tumble over each other. It’s not properly scrutinised by Parliament and standards have declined.’

Certainly there are far too many new laws: it beggars belief that in 13 years, Labour created a staggering 3,000 new criminal offences. Indeed, in many ways the best thing the new coalition government could do is probably the last thing it will do – nothing. 'Everybody talks about change,’ grumbles Anthony Mayer, who ran the Greater London Authority under both Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson. 'The last thing we want is change. Why don’t you leave us alone?’

Sadly, though, the likelihood of the government leaving people alone to get on with their jobs seem about as remote as North Korea winning the World Cup. Whether you put it down to the arrogance of power, the nanny-state mentality or the incessant pressure from the media, politicians can hardly wait to make their mark on our national life – which usually means that somewhere down the food chain, somebody has a dozen more forms to fill in.

But perhaps it is too easy to heap all the blame onto the politicians. Whenever something goes wrong, from gun crime to urban foxes, we always want to know what they are going to do about it. Who can say how we would react if they answered simply: 'Nothing’?

The words that echoed in my head during the final days of recording, though, were from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.’ For the truth is that we have got the system – overloaded, dysfunctional, obsessed with jargon and public relations – that we deserve. For thirty years we have meekly acquiesced in the most centralised, authoritarian state in the Western world, in which we expect government to do everything for us.

As David Clark, the chief executive of the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives, wryly reminded me, when snow falls in Boston, Massachusetts, you clear the pavement in front of your house or pay a $250 fine. But when it falls in Boston, Lincolnshire, you write an angry letter to the local paper complaining that the council has not cleared it yet.

We all like it when politicians talk about reinvigorating local government. But perhaps we should be careful what we wish for. For if, amid the inevitable budget cuts, the coalition really does honour its promise and hands back power to the people, we won’t have Whitehall to blame when things go wrong. The only people we’ll have to blame will be … ourselves.

The first episode of Dominic Sandbrook’s Slapdash Britain will be broadcast on Monday at 8pm on BBC Radio Four.