Andreas Whittam Smith: What's the point of policies that can't be delivered?

The last minister to declare the government machine unfit for purpose was Gladstone in 1853

We must get used to a new political reality. The machinery of government is breaking down. What is the point of either Gordon Brown or David Cameron devising policies that they would wish to promote in government if the machine cannot any longer deliver?

I shall not believe any party manifesto unless it first admits that nothing can be done until the government of the day relearns how to produce measures that actually achieve what it intends. I asked a friend the other day, who is involved in one of the new pension bodies, about the legislation under which he operates. It is so badly drafted, he replied, that it is difficult to establish what powers we possess.

I need only mention the Home Office to give graphic illustration of the present shambles. A major government department in which cohorts of gifted public servants have succeeded each other over the generations is declared "unfit for purpose". I could equally well cite the Treasury, which overpays and underpays tax credits to poor people on such a scale that more misery is created than good is done. Note what Sir John Bourn, the Auditor-General, had to say about this in a Sunday newspaper yesterday: "The thing about tax credits, and I find this just incredible, is the failure of the imagination and sociological incompetence."

Take the National Health Service, which simultaneously soaks up record amounts of public money while declaring a string of health trusts as close to bankruptcy. Take the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs where the new Secretary of State, David Miliband, recently apologised for the department's failure to make subsidy payments to farmers on time: "I know that this year's problems have caused real distress, and I repeat the apology to farmers."

Take the successive reforms of the Child Support Agency that have achieved exactly nothing. It was a mess when New Labour arrived in power in 1997; it is still just as incompetent.

What we have to recognise is that this is a systemic failure. A lot of people have started to think about the problem, and the publication last week of "Capability Reviews" for government departments by the Cabinet Secretary and head of the Home Civil Service, Sir Gus O'Donnell, is a contribution to the debate. He says politely that, "We need to improve some aspects of current performance, and soon."

The destruction of the machinery of government without replacing it with anything better has been under way since Mrs Thatcher came to power in 1979. She was a conviction politician; as a result she found the traditional civil service methods of identifying the problem, amassing evidence, and weighing up the options far too cumbersome. Nor did she want individual ministers commenting on each other's business, even though collective decision-making by the Cabinet with the Prime Minister as first among equals required such a process. Cabinet responsibility for government policy was thus undermined.

Mrs Thatcher, it must be said, made her methods work. Her one big disaster was the poll tax. Unfortunately she was succeeded by two prime ministers John Major and Tony Blair, who lacked her sense of purpose and attention to detail. Mr Blair also has the disadvantage of having consistently poor judgement as far as policy-making, as opposed to politics, is concerned. If he were in business, Mr Blair would be seen as the brilliant salesman or public relations expert whom the board would never consider promoting to managing director. Yet, being very short of self-knowledge, he insists on running everything from Downing Street. Even the Capability Reviews have been signed off by the "Prime Minister's Delivery Unit".

In his foreword to that document, Mr Blair writes that the department's responses form the basis of the civil service's side of the public service reform "bargain". Further on he says that elected leaders too have to fulfil their side of the "bargain".

Bargain? Is this merely a rhetorical flourish or some kind of politically correct discourse? If not, I should conclude that we have come to a sorry state if the machinery of government can only be got to work as a result of a bargain in between ministers and civil servants. When was this bargain negotiated? Who was at the talks? What are the terms of this agreement? As a matter of fact, I don't expect answers. I assume the notion is one of the fantasies filling the prime-ministerial mind.

The machinery of government that is now so singularly ineffective is 150 years old. The last minister before Mr Reid, the Home Secretary, to declare the government machine, or at least a part of it, unfit for purpose, was Gladstone in 1853, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. At the time, posts in the civil service were in the gift of ministers who used their power as a form of patronage.

In a famous report commissioned by Gladstone, which needs a successor today, Sir Charles Trevelyan and Sir Stafford Northcote urged the merits of open competition and suggested different methods of recruitment. Their conclusions were accepted, and an uncorrupt, efficient civil service was created that was the envy of the world. Now we need reforms as profound as those that Gladstone brought about. If Gordon Brown, who is Gladstonian in lots of ways, becomes Prime Minister, I urge him to put in place the necessary reforms before he does anything else.