It is a poor workman who blames his tools and thus it is also a poor Minister who lays the responsibility for his own failures at the door of his civil servants. And yet that is precisely what the former Minister for the Economy and Transport, Andrew Davies has done in this morning’s Western Mail.
Mr. Davies claims that previous plans to create a sector approach to business support had met with “total resistance” from some senior civil servants:
Mr. Davies said that while he had been Minister for the Economy and Transport he had set up the Ministerial Advisory Group (MAG), headed by Ford executive Richard Parry-Jones and other leading business figures, who were tasked with helping to bring their considerable private sector expertise to shape a new strategic direction for WAG’s business support.
“In 2007 MAG came up with a report which recommended that the Welsh Assembly Government focused on nine key sectors, including the creative industries,” said Mr Davies.
However, while as Finance Minister, Mr Davies said that he became increasingly frustration at seeing MAG’s findings effectively being kicked into the long grass.
“The strategy and programme as set out by MAG met with total resistance in terms of the implementation from some senior civil servants” added Mr Davies.
The former minister said that his increasing sense of frustration at the performance of some civil servants was one of the reasons why he has decided to stand down as an AM.
Nobody should underestimate the difficulty of combating institutional conservatism but we should also remember that Mr. Davies was a leading member of the Government that dismantled key economic quangos so as to reportedly gain more control over the implementation of policy. He demonstrated then that he was capable of removing perceived obstacles to his policies, does he really expect us to believe that he was subsequently incapable of working with the departmental structures he helped to create?
One of the problems of course is the culture that surrounded that reorganisation, which Mr. Davies helped to foster. As with the subsequent health changes the Labour Government insisted that there should be no redundancies and so created possibly hundreds of jobs to slot former quangocrats into.
They were responsible for an over-bloated bureaucracy at a time when other bodies funded by the Welsh Government were being encouraged to slim down. I would not be surprised if some of the staff brought into the civil service as part of that reorganisation are still on ‘gardening leave’.
What sort of example is that to others? The point is that Labour Ministers put themselves in the position of preaching to businesses without getting their own house in order first.
If Mr. Davies considers that he failed because he was let down by those who worked for him then maybe it is a good thing that he is stepping down from the Assembly. He has always been good at talking up his own performance but the truth is that he was a mediocre and partisan Minister whose accomplishments can be measured on the fingers of one hand.
The former Finance Minister leaves behind an over-staffed, unfocussed civil service, an Assembly budget that is stuffed full of fat and inefficiencies and constant echoes of his sanctimonious preaching about partnership at a time when his own government failed to get a grip on that agenda for its own directly-funded services.
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