The accountability trap

Labour's local election results are a very big deal — but they are also a symptom of something deeper.

A great deal has been written, and will be written, about Labour’s losses in last week’s local elections — and rightly so, it is a very big deal. But I think the result is also indicative of a broader issue facing many Western leaders, one that runs deeper than electoral fortunes: what am I, as a public leader — a minister, the head of an agency, a department, a team — actually responsible for? And what am I accountable for?

The question of attribution is, of course, one of the main reasons, as Henry Mintzberg has long argued, why we cannot have markets in everything. A low crime rate has to do with policing, but also with families, communities, jobs, growth, and a dozen other things. This is why we talk about public goods and commons in the first place — as ways of making sense of areas where attribution is unclear, and will never be clear.

When that attribution problem is translated into leadership, however, it morphs into something equally complex: an accountability challenge, and perhaps even an accountability trap. If many parts of the public sector contribute to an outcome, how can we manage individual organisations and teams without immediate link to that outcome?

The Weberian compact

As is often the case, Max Weber described this accountability challenge more than a century ago. Weber’s ingenuity was to find an answer to the accountability challenge by showing that public leadership is dual in nature. Politicians convince voters of a direction we should go in, using their charismatic powers of persuasion. Civil servants then execute that direction with expertise and discretion, and within the law. Two kinds of leaders, two kinds of accountability — bound together into a working whole.

This dual leadership, as Jean Hartley has described it, rests on two distinct regimes and respective mechanisms. The first is the public sphere as a place of contestation about direction, fought out mainly through the media and through political movements and their internal battles — that is, political parties. The second is the rationalised, tried-and-tested way of working that defines the civil service.

It worked reasonably well, until it didn’t.

Memes versus cost-benefit analysis

Two changes have, I think, largely broken the Weberian compact. The first is the rise of the internet alongside the simultaneous descent of twentieth-century political parties. The second is the rise and dominance of mainstream economics-based expertise inside the civil service.

The internet has created extraordinarily short feedback cycles, which means that the charismatic accountability regime now runs on memes and immediate emotion. Bureaucratic expertise, meanwhile, has come to rely on cost–benefit analysis of more or less everything. Meme cycles are extremely short-termist — we are talking days. CBA cycles are extremely long — usually years. We have, in effect, a clash of accountability regimes, and we are watching it play out in real time inside the current Labour government.

The political leadership struggles to gain traction with the public because it mainly thinks in terms of bureaucratic accountability — expertise, evidence, CBA. The civil service struggles to shift anything because there is no clear sense of political direction to shift towards. This is why it is relatively easy for Reform and the Greens to attract attention right now: both have some sense of direction, however thin or contested, that speaks to the emotional side of the electorate.

Where leaders still escape the trap

There are no easy solutions. I am not sure changing party leaders or PMs will do the trick. But we can see leaders overcoming the accountability trap in two areas of public life.

The first is cities. Mayors and city managers have to deal with day-to-day issues — from rubbish to traffic — which means that political and bureaucratic feedback loops are better aligned and considerably shorter. The second is digital teams. When they work well, digital teams are highly responsive to citizens, often at a granularity no traditional department can match. In both cases, what matters is closeness to the citizen.

There are, however, some persistently difficult policy areas that neither cities nor digital teams can deal with directly — areas that fall into what we might call an accountability black hole. Think of violence against women, which is persistently high, not only in the UK; it is in effect an epidemic, yet without anything like the attention, urgency, or task-force energy we mobilised for vaccines. Or ageing and loneliness. Or young people and mental health. These are hugely impactful issues that touch millions of lives, and yet they sit awkwardly between portfolios, between tiers of government, between charismatic and bureaucratic accountability — and so, year after year, they persist.

Leadership as teams; organisations as learning

The lesson, then, is much deeper than political strategy or communications. It is about the way we structure public leadership and public organisations — and it matters most precisely where the accountability black holes are.

For leadership, we should think more in terms of teams of leaders — ministers, heads of departments, heads of agencies — working together across the boundaries that issues like violence against women, loneliness, or youth mental health stubbornly cut across. We can then assess and develop capabilities not just at the level of individuals, but as the sum of their parts, as teams. No single minister will ever “own” the epidemic of violence against women in the way a transport secretary owns a railway line. But a team of leaders, held accountable together for movement on a shared problem, might.

For organisations, we should rebuild departments and ministries so that policy strategy and street-level delivery sit and act closely together. The black-hole problems are precisely the ones where the distance between a policy paper and a frontline worker is greatest — and where the feedback that should be travelling between them mostly doesn’t.

Both ideas point in the same direction: towards thinking about accountability in terms of learning — how quickly we can learn and iterate — and the co-creation of policy direction with the people and places affected. Neither memes nor CBA will get us there on their own. The cross-cutting issues that escape both cities and digital teams are not going to be solved by sharper political messaging or another cost–benefit review. They will only be addressed by accountability regimes that can hold collective responsibility for collective problems, and that treat learning — rather than attribution — as the measure of whether public leadership is working.

That, more than any particular election result, is the challenge for Labour and pretty much any other Western leader outside the populist right.