Cast your mind back to the 80s or 90s or even early 2000 (if you are old enough to remember that far which sadly I am). Now imagine that a politician said the following thing, “Let’s privatise defence.” Granted, there was a cold war on a while back, but can you imagine the hostile reception that such an idea would have got? Handing over weapons and national security to greedy, profit hungry arms dealers, never!
Fast forward to today and defence companies are very much part of the scenery in defence. This is true for many countries and there are many logical reasons for this. Yet, the UK is willing to go one step further than anyone else and seems willing to contemplate the idea of privatising defence procurement itself. The buzzword is Government Owned, Contractor Operated. Here is what RUSI has to say about this:
What caught my eye (apart from the bloody good questions asked in the briefing paper) was the list of people contributing to this discussion. Not only is the former head of defence procurement and other ex-MOD people there, so are significant captains of defence industry. Quite remarkably, there is a not very subtle message being put out here from a group of people that shouldn’t necessarily agree on this issue, “Are you crazy?!” This is very much a shot across the bows for Bernard Gray, a political appointee who was made head of Defence Equipment and Support by David Cameron. He has always openly stated that defence procurement is a mess, it needs fixing and he sees the private sector as the means by which this can happen.
In the best traditions of Yes Minister I am going to say that he is both right… and wrong!
Let’s first give Mr Gray his due. Defence procurement is a political nightmare. Despite what the media says, this is not because the civil servants in defence procurement cannot do their jobs properly, but rather because the whole system prevents them from doing a good job. It is too easy for politics to derail even a well run defence project many of which face significant technical challenges simply due to the nature of the business. There are countless stories to demonstrate this. Mr Gray has done a good job of diagnosing the problems. His medicine, however, has not been subjected to trials of any kind by anyone else and if it goes wrong the resulting mess would be horrendous. I will not go into all the issues that can arise because the RUSI briefing paper raises these critical questions.
What I will say though is that Mr Gray has failed to answer the critical question of how do you take the politics out of defence procurement? The answer may well be that you cannot, but expecting a private company to be able to manage or even to stand up to political forces seems naïve. How would a failing company even be properly punished? The government will never be able to properly transfer the risks associated with defence or national security. Any risk transfer can only be temporary. The whole G4s security issue with the Olympics and my recent post about PFIs repeatedly emphasise this point. Like the past failures to manage NHS finances through the private sector or safely privatise the rail network, the results of such experiments are that people will die. Network Rail was dragged into court and fined, will the same happen to the GOCO when soldiers are killed due to faulty equipment? The banks are too big to fail, well so is defence.
This really is a risky experiment and Mr Gray is quite willing to say that we must run some risks if we are to gain the benefits. My question is whether the risks associated with going GOCO are worth the anticipated benefits? It may well be that some of the benefits can be delivered by a less riskier option. Sometimes being sure that you will get a ‘good enough’ solution is a much better strategy that striving for a brilliant solution that you have no certainty if it will work, especially when people’s lives are on the line. This philosophy is what often separates the public sector from the private. Some things are just too important to fail, while a proper market is all about success and failure in order to thrive. Mixing the two is always risky, a lesson the civil service has learnt, but one that politicians all too often forget or ignore.
This may sound like a boring way to approach problem, but I tend to find that good government is exactly that, boring.
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