Potholes everywhere, shoplifters rampant – today’s Britain looks as broken as it feels | Simon Jenkins

4 days ago 5

Every day in Britain the police are failing to arrest about 670 shoplifters. Down the road, your median wait in A&E is three hours. Meanwhile the number of care home beds has fallen by 18% in a decade, and the recent budget will cut them further. Prisons are bursting. Schools are turning away autistic children. Meanwhile, the Treasury is promising to spend £1.6bn filling in 7m potholes on England’s roads – presumably with gold.

Something is badly wrong with Britain’s public sector. In the US in the 1990s, “broken windows theory” was used to explain New York’s sharply rising crime rate and a fall in the public’s sense of security. The trouble was said to lie in the city’s visible environment. Walls were covered in graffiti, trains were dirty, beggars harassed passersby. New York’s police chief, Bill Bratton, ordered the city to get to work. So called low level crime was given more attention by police. Graffiti was cleaned, litter cleared, youths made to behave and beggars moved on. The effect was extraordinary: felonies such as assault and burglary fell by more than 40%.

Windows theory had its sceptics, with many claiming there were more complex explanations behind the city’s falling crime rate, but it is still relevant to today’s Britain. News footage shows people calmly walking out of shops with stolen goods. The road outside my house has been dug up for the best part of two months, with little sign of activity. Neighbours tell of phone snatches and muggings. E-bikes terrify pedestrians and pile up on pavements.

A year ago my own unblemished driving career ended when I lost my driving licence for six months because of a series of ill-signed 20mph limits on roads in London and Wales. The result was a sequence of police exchanges and court hearings that beggared belief. The time-wasting and bureaucracy were Kafkaesque. I should have tried shoplifting.

Public administration matters. Each of the failings listed above has followed a chaotic eight years in British government. Six prime ministers have played musical chairs with ministerial posts, while imposing targets and decisions on every public service from health, education and police to farming, housing and planning.

No country in Europe has so centralised the performance of these services. The centre squanders money on vanity infrastructure and voter tax breaks, while local councils are no longer free agents but mere agencies for Whitehall. But as agents they have been starved of cash, to the point where dozens face bankruptcy. Street-level local services other than statutory social care are being shredded.

Almost unbelievably, Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, has chosen this moment to reform England’s local government without a moment’s consultation. In Orwellian style, she wants to disempower centres of local identity, such as towns, in favour of new regions. Regions are always mere outposts of Whitehall, their purpose to aid the central direction of planning.

That this is the sure route to madness is typified in the new order given to London’s Kensington and Chelsea. It has been told that it “needs” 5,107 new homes, up from 1,381 last year. These algorithmic figures imposed from above are utterly meaningless. The balance of taxing and spending, targeting and performing between the centre and the local in Britain has collapsed. If the pothole outside your home stays unfilled, don’t blame the council, blame the minister.