The WHITEHALL Effect

How Whitehall became the enemy of great public services and what we can do about it
The WHITEHALL Effect
Author: John Seddon
Paperback ~ 216 pages
Size: 15.2 x 23 cm
ISBN: 978-1-909470-47-7
Price £20 (app. €25 / US$30)

Tags: Public services, Whitehall, Vanguard Method, Public Sector, John Seddon

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John Seddon is back. This time with an uncompromising account of Whitehall’s effect on our public services. It’s a damning read and may cause some serious fireworks. 


In The WHITEHALL Effect, John Seddon explains how successive governments have failed to deliver what our public services need and exposes the devastation that three decades of political fads, fashions and bad theory have caused. With specific examples and new evidence, he chronicles how the Whitehall ideas machine has failed on a monumental scale – and the impact that this has had on public sector workers and those of us who use public sector services.

The WHITEHALL Effect provides fresh insights into some of the most challenging issues of our time (because of their impact on health, education, policing and all public services) and reveals the unprecedented opportunity we now have to create the public services we all deserve. 

Required Reading...

“We need a new paradigm that puts the citizen/customer first, drives value into the lives of recipients and costs less… This is the challenge behind what needs to be our 21st-century vision for services-to-the-public. 


The Whitehall Effect sets out the way we might deliver better services. It should be required  reading for anyone who delivers a service to the public.”

Lord Victor Adebowale in the Foreword.

Read all press reviews of The Whitehall Effect
In the book
  • Why don’t public services work very well? One key reason is that  they have been 'industrialised'. Part 1 explains why call centres, back offices, shared services, outsourcing and IT-led change almost always lead to service failure. It explains, in particular, why 'economies of scale' are a myth.

  • Part 2 proposes a better (and tried-and-tested) alternative to the alienating and unresponsive experience of industrialised public services. Good services are attuned and sensitive to peoples’ needs. Where the 'industrialised' approach tries to drive down costs but invariably drives them up, the better approach – managing value – drives costs down significantly. 

  • Part 3 challenges conventional thinking and received wisdom about public services. Targets, inspection and regulation have to be part of the solution, don't they? Seddon explains why they're actually part of the problem and shows that the most effective lever of change and improvement is to stop 'managing' the people (public sector staff and managers) and start managing the system they work in. 

  • Part 4 discusses some of the current fads in public-sector reform:  ‘choice’,  ‘managing demand’, ‘nudge’ and ‘lean’.  Politicians pursue them  because they are plausible and fit their narrative, the story they like to tell about reform. But these fads only make public services worse or, at best, detract from the opportunity at hand.

  • The opportunity John Seddon describes is breathtaking. We can undo the costly debacle of public sector 'reform', but only if we first change Whitehall. In Part 5 he describes how Whitehall is systemically incapable of listening to and acting on evidence and finally turn to how Whitehall needs to change if we are to turn away from the mistakes of the last 35 years and realise the profound opportunity.

Readership

In The Whitehall Effect John Seddon explains why all this has happened and how we can fix the problem. Making this a handbook for:
  • politicians, their advisers and civil servants who want to do better
  • public service leaders and managers
  • voters who want to hold their MPs to account
  • anyone interested in public sector reform.
John Seddon is visiting professor at the University of Hull Business School and MD of Vanguard Consulting. In constant demand as a speaker, adviser and consultant, he is a long-term critic of the UK’s public-sector ‘reform programme’, arguing that the reforms  have just made performance worse. He's right.   More on John Seddon

Watch this space

Philip Johnston in The Telegraph (4/11/2014):
"The Whitehall Effect exposes a bureaucracy that is institutionally resistant to new ways of doing things, perpetuating a system that is both profligate and inefficient... Read the full article

Jim Mather (former Scottish Govt. Minister)
"John Seddon ... is also very helpful in establishing that any service or any policy intervention ought to have three components:- 
  1. The purpose – as defined by the legitimate and reasonable service user(s)
  2. The measure(s) that can convince those users that the “purpose” is being met.
  3. The method(s) that can be developed and used to deliver the measures and meet the purpose.
... he is adamant that these three components work best when the policy-maker defines the purpose exclusively in terms that users would support and then stops. Leaving the people-who-do-the-work to decide on the measures and develop the methods that progressively produce better results. 

... This book is a curiosity builder and a map that allows us to avoid pitfalls and plan a better more collaborative and inclusive way forward – it gets my enthusiastic endorsement. Read the full review

Barry Sheerman MP (Lab., Huddersfield) 
"The Whitehall Effect is a lively and stimulating read that warrants the attention of every civil servant, politician and citizen who takes an interest in how our country is run." Read the full review

Simon Caulkin (former Observer columnist) 
"One by one, Seddon picks off all the current public-service nostrums: as well as choice, personal budgets, commissioning, managing demand (aka rationing), risk management and lean have nothing to do with the purpose of a service in the only way that matters, as a citizen would define it. They are just activity. Some chapters (for example on procurement, aptly subtitled ‘how to ensure you don’t get what you want’) make you want to cry, laugh and smash up the furniture at the same time...

Under the radar, many similar initiatives in the UK public sector are producing the same kind of results, which Seddon has documented in a number of previous books and articles. This, though, is the most important and authoritative. In the run-up to the election, it has a direct message for every voter and politician as well as service leader: this is a set of ideas whose time has surely come." Read the full article

Read all press reviews of The Whitehall Effect