Why pen-pushers can’t run prisons Managerial rot has set in

Shortly after the end of the First World War, the English explorer Gertrude Bell was appointed an Oriental Secretary in Baghdad. The British administrators there were busy dismantling the Ottoman Empire; Bell, an expert in Middle Eastern cultures and languages, worked as a diplomat and hostess, playing a key behind-the-scenes role in British imperial governance.

An independently wealthy heiress with a taste for adventure, she had already spent a lifetime travelling the world. But in Baghdad, she came gradually to fear that the age of risk and initiative she loved was coming to an end. In its place a more constrained world was emerging: one of procedures and paperwork and “proper channels”. By 1926, she wrote sadly to her father in England: “Politics are dropping out and giving place to big administrative questions in which I’m not concerned and at which I’m no good.”

Bell was, I suspect, responding to early signs of what the cultural critic James Burnham would, in 1941, call “the managerial revolution”. Burnham predicted that capitalism would indeed be defeated — but not by the working class. Rather, the victors would be a “managerial class” that derived its power from manipulating information, procedures, and bureaucracy.

A century on from Bell’s letter, the situation in her country of origin is very different. Britain no longer bestrides the globe, or remakes the Middle East in its image; now, at best, our politicians beg crumbs of credit from America’s foreign policy table. But despite our loss of stature, the managerial class that displaced those earlier adventurers is still in the driving seat — albeit of a machine that now, by all evidence, is badly in need of servicing.

Case in point: last Friday, the “Epping Sex Attacker” Hadush Kebatu was released from prison by mistake, instead of being deported. Accidental prison releases are, according to official records, generally on the rise; the number more than doubled in the last year, from 115 in the period 2023-4 to 260 in the period 2024-5. But this was the most high-profile such error imaginable: Kebatu, an asylum seeker, was already the focus of intense public anger following his arrest for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old local girl in Epping, where he was housed in a hotel at taxpayer expense.

His initial arrest for the assault triggered a wave of protests nationwide against British government asylum policy, and his case has remained high-profile even following his conviction. In the wake of all this, Kebatu himself had evidently had enough of Britain, and reportedly expressed a wish to be deported during his sentence. But instead, in a farcical turn of events, he was released. When he returned to the prison to query this, staff only directed him toward the station.

Some of Britain’s more tinfoil-hatted malcontents have taken to muttering online about how this is a malign conspiracy. But far more likely, and frankly more unnerving, is the possibility that there is no dastardly plot, and the administrators in question simply didn’t care enough about doing their jobs well to avert even so high-profile a cock-up.

Still worse is the fact that we got here mostly via good intentions. Bureaucracy is by no means a uniquely British pathology; but British managerialism specialises in making the best the enemy of the good. This is in evidence well beyond prisons; for example, I serve as governor at a local primary school, where I boggle constantly at the volume of ornate procedure required even for the most mundane activity.

Taken individually, each procedure makes sense. The school itself is blessed with excellent staff, who somehow manage to do it all while teaching as well. But it often strikes me that the same volume and complexity of paperwork would, in an institution with less competent or motivated personnel, produce not a well-run and happy school but near-infinite scope for time-wasting, incompetence, and backstabbing.

For once it proliferates beyond a certain point, bureaucracy sets even competent and motivated staff up to fail. It becomes effectively impossible to do things by the book, because the book is a multi-volume encyclopedia and there just isn’t time. And when that happens, diligent staff burn out and leave: this is now common in teaching, and staff retention is likewise a problem in prisons.

As this happens, work ethic and institutional memory drain away too. Before long, all you have left are the frustrated, indifferent, and otherwise unemployable. That’s when you start to see multiplying rates of malpractice, fraud, waste, and indeed prisoners let out by mistake. The most likely explanation for Kebatu’s accidental release is not a government plot, but this kind of unhappy work culture.

Kebatu himself has since been re-arrested in London, and Justice Secretary David Lammy has vowed that he will be deported this week. So (no doubt to his relief) Kebatu will soon be returned to the relative administrative sanity of Ethiopia. We, on the other hand, are stuck here in Britain, with a public sector now so over-engineered that its capacity to deliver anything at all grows more doubtful by the day. How, then, should the Government set about addressing this predicament? Lammy’s response is telling: he has issued prison governors with a three-page “mandatory” checklist that must now be followed before anyone can be released from prison.

This is the kind of news that experienced administrators greet with weary fatalism. Did anyone involved in drafting this checklist, I wonder, bother to ask someone involved in prison management to estimate how long these checks will take in practice, or whether existing prison staff have the time or resources to do them? I doubt it. And so the cycle will go on, and the next cock-up will sprout another checklist and spreadsheet and set of guidelines and so on, until Britain drowns in a mire of broken pivot tables.

This mindset is by no means confined to David Lammy. It’s endemic: last week, for example, Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves vowed to cut the “red tape” that, she said, is costing Britain £6 billion a year in lost growth. Her method? She promised to set targets for regulators to speed the cutting of red tape, including — wait for it — red tape-cutting league tables, to measure progress in red tape cutting.

Anyone who has sat through a public-sector meeting of any kind knows what proposals of this kind look like in practice: more spreadsheets, more “evidence”, more guidelines. Watching the sclerosis hardening, news cycle after news cycle, it’s hard not to feel a kind of angry helplessness. But this feeling is itself part of the problem, which is fundamentally not material but spiritual. Few in our governing class seem able to imagine any form of action; only more rules.

The brave new administrative world Bell saw on the horizon has since won so total a victory, in other words, that even our elected representatives have lost all capacity for individual agency. And we might turn to another Brit who lived through our slow decline into managerial mediocrity, Sir John Bagot Glubb, for a gloomy historical account of this predicament. Glubb, a soldier and author, worked alongside Bell for a few years in the early Twenties; much later, after the empire collapsed, he wrote the elegiac The Fate of Empires (1978). This essay compared the life-cycle of Britain’s empire with previous such entities, including the Roman and Ottoman systems, to suggest all follow roughly the same cycle.

Every empire, he argued, begins with an “Age of Pioneers” and cycles through predictable stages before imploding in an “Age of Decadence” characterised by generous state welfare, faltering public spirit, and general frivolity and nihilism. In the essay he doesn’t belabour the point, but it’s clear enough where on the timeline he considered Britain to be. What, then, can we expect to see next, in the decadent British world according to Glubb? Well, in his view, state welfare wasn’t a crowning civilisational achievement, as we tend to view it, so much as evidence of complacency. And as decline advances, Glubb argued, such infrastructure tends to crumble under its own weight, as “the economy collapses, the universities are closed and the hospitals fall into ruin”.

But is it inevitable that an over-large state must inevitably self-destruct in this way? Certainly our current governing class seems committed to effecting the systemic collapse of Britain’s administrative state by insisting on procedural over-engineering. But over in Argentina, Javier Milei has just been enthusiastically rewarded in the mid-terms after taking a ferocious chainsaw to his nation’s state bureaucracies and entitlements, in the name of national renewal. Further north, Donald Trump is currently taking a bulldozer literally to the White House, and also figuratively to American institutional norms, also in the name of renewal.

And in sharp contrast to the anaemic British managerial approach, both these leaders appear to be trying to solve the “red tape” problem by exiting the procedural paradigm altogether, in favour of one based on personal authority. Perhaps the most hotly contested such battlefield has been Trump’s programme of deporting undocumented migrants. His haters accuse him, generally accurately, of ignoring established procedure and just deporting people without redress. His supporters, meanwhile, point out (also accurately) that with an estimated 11 million undocumented migrants in the USA, giving each of these individuals his or her procedurally mandated day in court would cumulatively take so long that Trump, who promised mass deportations to his voters and has a maximum of three years left in office, is forced to choose between betraying his election promise and taking a bulldozer to the rules.

In other words: Trump faces a thicket of procedure not dissimilar to the one that confronts schools, prisons, and other public-sector organisations here in Britain — just on a still bigger scale. His solution, though, isn’t helpless surrender to entropy. Instead, he seems to be trying a controlled managerial demolition, legitimised by his personal charisma, such as it is.

Will it make America great again? There exists, it’s fair to say, a range of views on this. Nor is personal authority necessarily any guarantee of competence: those executing Trump’s political programme have already made their own cock-ups, enthusiastically documented by his haters. And yet it’s probably also fair to say that some in Britain are now watching bulldozers tear through White House walls, and ICE tear through unworkable immigration procedures, and wondering what we could do in Britain if only we tore up the rulebook.

Doing so would be unlikely to restore the world in which Gertrude Bell pursued her adventures. As Sir John Bagot Glubb gloomily pointed out, history doesn’t work like that. But it might at least make it possible to imagine some kind of future.

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