Psychological tyranny prescribed by the DWP - and a dose of operational catastrophe
- Steve New, Associate Professor in Operations Management, Said Business School, University of Oxford
Mo Stewart1 offers a strident analysis of welfare reform, and the Work Capability Assessment. Like many critics, she focuses on the ideological basis of the reforms, and usefully points to the political threads which led to what must be acknowledged as a tragic failure. These points have been made frequently and powerfully, but ineffectually; this horrible story continues ten years on. What makes the 'system' so deaf?
One part of an answer is that the ESA/WCA debacle was not just an ethical and ideological failure. The simple machinery of the system - evolved between the DWP and its contractor, Atos - could never have been anything but a disaster. The design of the process, for example, breached all good practice regarding information feedback, smooth flow of workload, user-consultation, prototyping, and the attempted separation of back- and front-office activity. The policy may have been terrible, but it was the operational execution that caused much of the misery. Indeed, even some well-intentioned changes to the system introduced after the Harrington reviews made the actual functioning of the system worse. We must engage with ideology and policy, but the difficulty is that public servants are not equipped to respond or even to hear this criticism: they will say their job is to execute the wishes of their political masters. Public anger can be deflected by the technocrats as 'politics' and not their concern. But we must also hold public servants and outsourcing companies to account on technocratic terms. We need a discourse in which we can highlight the failures caused by a lack of good process thinking. This need not distract from bigger arguments about policy, but it may ameliorate the worse consequences of poor implementation.
We must campaign for such contracts to yield more operational information into the public domain; for greater involvement of independent experts (on operations, not just policy) in the running of contracts, and increased resources for the National Audit Office. We must also be prepared sometimes to engage with the detail of systems we consider to be fundamentally wrong-headed.
Reference
1. Stewart M. Psychological tyranny pre