Mara Airoldi is in despair about the state of the UK’s public services. “This will be known as the lost generation, because nothing is happening except Brexit,” says the Oxford-based economist. Airoldi, who holds a master’s degree in decision science, is director of the UK’s Government Outcomes Lab – GO Lab for short – an independent research group funded by Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport with the ambitious aim of revolutionising public services.

In real life, that means local public services – councils, health bodies, social care providers, police, charities and so on – working together, making better spending decisions to cope with cuts. Airoldi’s team runs regular sessions for local public managers to improve skills in a number of areas, especially project management and decision-making. Trying to make public bodies work together is neither rocket science nor new. Practically everyone involved in UK public service for the past 40 years has pointed out that dividing up public money into different departments or silos is a very bad way to cope with issues like obesity or truancy.

Brexit: not just a political shambles, but a disaster for all public policy | Richard Vize Read more

But change requires backing from central government and recent history is littered with Whitehall’s failed attempts to create more joined-up approaches. While Sure Start and, more recently, projects to join up health and social care have had some success, many more have failed, from Tony Blair’s delivery unit in the early noughties – “targets-led and top-down –” to universal credit and the troubled families programme, which attempted to identify and support 120,000 families that were, in theory, costing the state most to support. A dubious enterprise from the start, it was a project that, according to its final evaluation in 2016, had no discernible impact on the families it was supposed to help.

And for all the warm words on prevention, the civil service, local government and the NHS still operate on a model of crisis management, which costs much more than it would to tackle the causes of problems. Now, Airoldi says, Brexit is making it almost impossible for central government to learn anything useful from innovative local projects by councils, the NHS, social care providers, prisons or other public services. “The main worry in my mind is the interruption from Brexit,” she comments. “We need additional social services, and we’ve been wasting years trying to design Brexit.”

Councils are being starved of cash, while the underlying factors that create social problems such as obesity, or reoffending, remain unaddressed. “It’s an almost 19th-century situation,” says Airoldi, akin to Victorian London battling disease while leaving the Thames a stinking open sewer. Trying to talk to central government about anything other than the UK’s exit from the EU is, she says, like talking to a mother getting her four children ready for school. “They need to be out of the door and it’s late. She doesn’t have the mental bandwidth to listen. Brexit is creating this distraction and even if you have very capable and brilliant civil servants they don’t have a listening ear.”

Even where local experiments have worked, the government has been so narrowly focused on cost that it hasn’t been able to see the true long-term value. In Peterborough, for instance, a five-year project to reduce reoffending rates has had many positive benefits and was described by the then-justice secretary, Chris Grayling, as “encouraging”. But the charities involved were not picked when the scheme was extended nationally – because they were too expensive. “The inability to measure quality is a massive barrier. Central government isn’t gathering, analysing, sharing or guiding learning to build methodically on what is known,” says Airoldi.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Blavatnik School of Government ￼￼in Oxford, where the Government Outcomes Lab is based Photograph: Iwan Baan

The high turnover of civil servants incentral government doesn’t help, costing £74m a year according to the Institute for Government, and Brexit is now sucking up a huge amount of civil service resources. The civil service chief executive, John Manzoni, told MPs in December that about 10,000 civil servants were working on preparations for Brexit, with 5,000 more in the pipeline. The prospect of a no-deal Brexit has led to a further 4,000 officials being seconded from at least five departments, including work and pensions, defence and justice, with existing work having to be parked. Jon Thompson, permanent secretary at HM Revenue and Customs, has already indicated that plans for paying tax digitally have had to take a backseat as a result of Brexit. Airoldi believes English devolution is a fantastic opportunity to increase collaboration and prevention in ways that have eluded previous governments. But regions such as Greater Manchester have a “very, very difficult task”, again because of central government, which won’t fully let go of the purse strings and which demands reports into its own, separate departments. “The intention is there [in Greater Manchester], the leadership is there, and they’re trying to be joined-up and original. But then they have to report, for instance, to the Department of Health on waiting times. They have been given freedom, but their hands are held behind their back.”

Ultimately, Airoldi fears for public services, already battered by austerity, in the aftermath of Brexit, particularly if the UK’s GDP takes the kind of hit many predict. “We need some answers,” she says. But who, in overstretched central government, is listening?

Curriculum vitae

Age: 44.

Lives: Oxford.

Family: Partner, two daughters.

Education: Bocconi University, Milan (BSc economics and political economy); London School of Economics (MSc decision science, PhD management science/operations research).

Career: 2017–present: director, Government Outcomes Lab, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford; 2015-2017: lecturer, economics and public policy, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford; 2011-2014: fellow, then senior fellow, public management, department of management, LSE; 2003-2014: research officer, management science, department of management, LSE; 2002- 2003: lecturer, decision making, Leeds University Business School; June-October 2001: director, Department for Tax and Environment, Municipality of Osio Sopra, Bergamo, Italy; 2000-2001: junior auditor, KPMG, Milan, Italy; 1999-2000: freelance journalist, Sesaab Editrice, Bergamo, Italy.

Interests: Running, cycling, reading, mentoring, eating well.