Radical Help: How We Can Remake the Relationships Between us and Revolutionise the Welfare State, Hilary Cottam, Virago, 2018

Beyond Command and Control, John Seddon et al, Vanguard, 2019

The NHS is seizing up. Patients have to work nearly as hard as GPs do just to get a doctor’s appointment, and hospitals can’t cope. Elder and adult social care are unworthy of the name. Last year 25,000 people in the UK slept rough for at least one night, which is all you need to know about accessible housing and the homeless. As for benefits, Universal Credit, supposedly the answer to a fragmented system and the flagship of recent reform, is a multi-dimensional nightmare, an exorbitantly costly, semi-computerised cross between Kafka and Orwell that treats the poor as morally defective and a creates misery and despair rather than a platform for establishing a good life. In short, the UK’s welfare state is nothing of the kind. Far from providing a safety net to cushion a fall, it enmeshes the needy in a grim battle to prove they are poor or disabled enough to qualify for aid devised to maintain them at subsistence level and no more. The once pioneering, even revolutionary, institutions imagIned by Sir William Beveridge nearly a century ago are still an example to the world, but now a pitiful one of how not to do it.

As these two timely and welcome recent books reveal in their different ways, the failure behind the crisis is not primarily one of money (although austerity has brought things to a head by not only making life more difficult for those already needing help, but also tipping more people into poverty – the signature of an illfare not a welfare state). It is that, partly because of the advances made under the Beveridge settlement, the institutional framework established the best part of a century ago is no longer fit for purpose. As social entrepreneur and activist Hilary Cottam points out, Beveridge’s design was for an industrial age. The remedy for the five scourges he identified – disease, idleness, ignorance, squalor and want – was to build hospitals, houses, schools and factories that would fix them. People would proceed in linear fashion between them until retirement, which no one imagined would last longer than a few years.

Instead there has been a massive failure of the imagination – an ideologically learned inability to see beyond what is to envision what might be. It is ideological because the institutional prison we’re in isn’t the buildings Beveridge constructed but the linear, factory-style processes we use to order what goes on inside and particularly between them. It’s management, stupid.

As Cottam spells out it, the welfare state ‘has become a management state: an elaborate and expensive system of managing needs and their accompanying risks. Those of us who need care, who can’t find work, who are sick or less able are moved around as if in a game of pass-the-parcel: assessed, referred and then assessed again. Everyone suffers in a system where 80 per cent of the resource available must be spent on gate-keeping: on managing the queue, on referring individuals from service to service, on recording every interaction to ensure that no one is responsible for those who inevitably fall through the gaps.’

For the patient or citizen, much of this busy supply-side activity is pointless. As a result, whether in health, education, employment or well-being, the neediest is in every area become ‘permafrost’ – stuck blocks of humanity that the current system can’t shift and have no agency to do so for themselves. They are spectators of rather than active participants in their own lives. The buildings – schools, Jobcentres, hospitals – go through their allotted motions, but they no longer connect with the social currents outside. Beveridge’s wants still exist, but in different forms. Ironically, the severest case of ignorance, identified by both Cottam and Seddon, is the state, bereft of ideas for real reform and reduced to cutting costs and demanding more effort.

Cottam sets her narrative – the story of experiments in organising to help people deal with family life, growing up, finding good work, keeping healthy and ageing well – in the framework of Beveridge and his original institutional innovations to emphasize the pioneering heritage the UK should be building on. Encouragingly, but not surprisingly, since both authors think in systems terms, the principles she arrives at largely echo those Seddon has described in previous books: the goal of welfare is the good life (as defined by those living it), the means is helping people to help themselves (building capabilities and possibility), using the joined-up resources of society as a whole, based on relationships rather than transactions. In other words, treating people as humans.

She recognises the importance of measures (‘We cannot transition [to a better system] if we are held to account by metrics rooted in cultures and transactions that we need to leave behind’), and again like Seddon emphasizes that not only do people-centred welfare models cost less to deliver, they relocate you in a different, positive sum game. The knock-on effects of restoring a troubled family to stability, for example, are invisible and cumulative, reducing future demand on police, courts, education and hospital resources as well as social services, while often also creating a new source of community support into the bargain. Engagement is a function of help that works.

Each of Cottam’s experiments ‘can be seen as a response to the failure of a government department to command change through top-down edict’, she says. How and why top-down edicts fail and what to do about it is, as its title suggests, the subject of Seddon’s book (disclosure: I am proud to have helped edit it), which thus neatly complements Cottam’s. Seddon, whom perhaps we should describe as a management activist, locates the sources of the overbearing ‘management state’ in theories of control devised in the industrial era, which are now a serious brake on productivity as well as human feeling. They cause managers to measure and manage the wrong things – unit costs, activity, transactions, people – which tell them nothing about how well they are meeting their proper purpose and turn them into willing prey for purveyors of fads and fashionable tools that falsely promise to make the machine turn faster. Almost all the vast superstructure of management bureaucracy – a $3tr burden on the US alone, according to Gary Hamel – is attributable to add-ons such as risk, performance, culture, budget, and reputation management, which are not just useless, but actively lead performance astray. As examples, Seddon singles out for special attention Agile (what’s the use of doing it faster if it shouldn’t be done at all?), IT (what’s the use of digitising it etc), and, perhaps more surprisingly to some, HR.

HR departments, notes Seddon, are the indirect result of managers’ misplaced obsession with improving performance by managing people. But it’s the system that governs performance (or 95 per cent of it, according to W. Edwards Deming), not individual effort. ‘HR departments grew up to treat the unwelcome symptoms of command and control management and have steadily expanded as the symptoms got worse… Thus, having designed jobs that demoralise and disengage we set PR people to work on measuring the extent of demoralisation and/or [developing] methods to motivate or create engagement,’ Seddon writes. Most of these, notably incentive and appraisal, damage rather than boost performance. Instead HR should be insisting that systems are designed to give people the good jobs that ensure good jobs are done – in which case, you barely need something called ‘HR’ any more.

It is clear from both these books that you can’t get to the properly personalised forms of support that will underpin good lives, a better society and more productive economy from within today’s transactional, Gradgrind management paradigm. The two are simply incompatible. A switch to a new paradigm requires a tipping point. The appalling management behaviour on show at the top of the Home Office and the DWP suggests that there is still some way to go in that respect. But both these books are heartening confirmation that There Is An Alternative that is far better for those in need of help, for those who provide it and for the community as a whole even before you count the social and economic savings that result. And conceptually, it is not complicated. Humanity invented management, Seddon points out; and we can do it again. ‘Counterintuitively… productivity 2.0 isn’t about, scale, huge IT investment or automation. It’s about human beings working together to solve the problems of other human beings.’ These two books bring that future just a little bit nearer.

A piece in the press about academic bullying caught my eye recently. This one was about Cambridge, but there was another about Oxford, and when I delved a bit, about universities generally. There seems to be a lot of it about, particularly, though not exclusively, of bullying by academics of administrative staff.

Now this struck me as odd. I know, and have known, a great many academics, and none of them is the bullying kind. Rather the reverse: although definite in their professional opinions, they are otherwise polite, well-brought up and if anything rather put upon themselves, being subjected to ever more bureaucratic measurement and performance management indignity. It’s hard to imagine them terrorising anyone. So what is going on?

We all know that real bullying exists – and what it looks like. On the one hand it’s Harvey Weinstein, Robert Maxwell and others of that ilk who instrumentalise power and use it brutally to get what they want, whether, money, sex or position, brooking no opposition. On the other, there is organised institutional harassment of the kind I wrote about a few weeks ago, as practised by France Telecom, and legally condemned as such, when it was doing its worst to ‘persuade’ 20,000 employees to move on in 007.

But although there are still unreconstructed individuals around, and some industries are less scrupulously managed than others – the film and music businesses, the City of London and retail come to mind, not to mention some newspapers – that kind of extreme behaviour is getting harder to get away with in the age of #MeToo and what we might call managerial correctness, the latter as it happens being particularly prevalent in universities.

Nor should bullying be confused with bad temper. We’ve all made stupid mistakes in our time and been ticked off, sometimes roundly, in return – with the result that one doesn’t make the same mistake again. Most newsrooms are not places that are easy to hide in. But people sometimes getting cross, or even raising their voices when urgent action is needed, is not the same as bullying.

What I suspect is happening in universities is more the indirect effect of bad management than direct oppression. As we know, bad management is depressingly common – more people leave their jobs to escape their immediate superior than for any other cause. A thinktank reported recently that fully one-third of UK jobs were of such low quality they were a danger to health. But poor interpersonal skills are only part of the story. More pervasively frustrating is the systemic growth of managerial bureaucracy.

New Public Management came late to the universities, but they have enthusiastically made up for lost time. British higher education is now subject to the full panoply of market disciplines: competition, audit, cost control, numerical targets and regulation (effectively government control under another name). In this quasi market, universities have the worst of both worlds, market discipline on the one hand but no effective autonomy on the other. For academics, this translates, to a degree unknown anywhere else in the world, into stringent performance management, continuous change initiatives and endlessly metastasizing forms of assessment – including mock assessment before the real one, assessment feedback afterwards, feedback on the feedback, and so on.

Now add in the huge expansion of management pay, and numbers, in a period when academic salaries marked time, and a raft of managerially correct attempts by HR functions to smooth over the friction points by sending faculty on mandatory courses on ‘coping with change’, introducing wellbeing and work-life balance programmes, or, still more futile, as at Cambridge, appointing fleets of work counsellors, conciliators and moderators – and it would be hard to imagine a richer compendium of counterproductive management practices, or a more toxic stew of misunderstanding and bad feeling as a result.

These symptoms are far from unique to tertiary education, of course. But universities present them in fairly extreme form, along with their unsurprising consequence – a pervasive resentment of management methods that as Peter Drucker once sighed, seem to have been designed to make it difficult for people to work: strenuous attempts to do the wrong thing righter, generating a profusion of bullshit jobs (perhaps as much as 60 per cent of the total) with ever more pretentious (and yet unmemorable) names, managing other people, the ‘clustering’ of professional services, numbers, targets, measures and other data – all parasitic on the real academic work of carrying out research and helping people to learn. No wonder the pot sometimes boils over into bad temper and raised voices. But while there is no excuse for systemically taking it out on junior staff, for senior managers to blame the mayhem caused by stupid management on others rather than themselves is insulting bad faith. The fault is theirs, and so is the remedy. It is to stop doing what Drucker labelled the summit of absurdity: appointing people to do more efficiently what shouldn’t be done at all.