GOVERNMENT
Decline and fall
DAVID HOWELL
What is to be done with the Board of Trade? For something must be done before long. It surely cannot go on the way it is, a con- tradictory hotchpotch of responsibilities, a goulash of administrative, regulatory and management functions overlapping each other and those of other departments, a maddening department (in my experience) with which to deal. It will have to go. Oh yes, it will definitely have to go.
Which is, one must accept, saying a good deal. The Board of Trade, like the Kingdom of Poland, is very old and has been parti- tioned many times. Yet it survives and prospers, housed in its substantial offices in Victoria Street and in forty other buildings, or parts thereof, around the town, and in branches throughout the provinces. Limbs are lopped off by upstart departments like Mintech but new ones sprout in their place.
Burke got it suppressed as being 'of no use at all' but Pitt started it up again. Everyone who is anyone has been President of it (in- cluding, would the authors of the excellent BOT handbook please note, Stanley Baldwin, who has now been rehabilitated and can safely be added to their list of well-known past Presidents). An institution like that can- not just be snuffed out overnight.
One must accept, too, how misleading it can be to talk in terms of a department as a single entity, like 'the Treasury' or 'the Board of Trade'. In the Bar are many mansions, as in the Treasury—of course. Yet the observable fact remains that the SOT has its own unmistakable style, its own attitudes, its own doctrines—all of which wriggle their way like woodworm into everything the department touches. Despite all, it remains the spiritual home of non- discrimination, non-intervention, non-man- agement and non-public discussion, all of which would be quite admirable if it had nothing to do. But circumstances, years of legislation and, no doubt, a good deal of interdepartmental grabbing have made that very far from being the case.
The results are not happy. Take, for instance, civil aviation, which came to rest with the BOT in 1966. By this twist of fate it is now the SOT which has both to spon- sor the operation of commercial aircraft and protect the Queen's subjects against the appalling racket they make by day and night—a dilemma noted by Peter Hordern in the Commons a few weeks ago. There is, of course, no possible way of handing out equal, non-discriminatory treatment on a matter like this. It is a head-on conflict of interests for which the Bar's approach to life could hardly be less well suited. The outcome is truly dismaying. Squeezed be- tween angry home owners and determined airline operators the ROT machine gropes instinctively for the formula which will fav- our none and quieten all. In the recent case of Gatwick night flights in 1970 the formula struck upon. and sub- sequently exposed as a nonsense by Adam • Fergusson in the Times, was as ingenious as it was silly. It was simply to assure the noise protesters that there would be a voluntary limitation on night flights and then to meet the equally vehement protests of the opera- tors by redefining 'night' as a conveniently short number of hours so as not to trouble them. To such devices is the proud Bar reduced.
In all these doings, as no doubt in others, the ROT seems to find it painfully hard to break with its tradition of keeping everyone in the dark, thus avoiding all charges of favoured treatment. This is the tradition, of course, which had its finest hour over the Stansted decision. But in lesser matters, in- formation is equally hard to come by. A year ago a BOT decision to reorganise the Heathrow beacon system sent an additional and searing stream of air traffic across yet another part of my constituency. Not a background document, not a press release. not an explanatory note came my way until I yelled for it. Open government has not yet reached Victoria Street.
Not that there should be any surprise about this. For all its forty information officers, the ROT is still the ROT. If it was decided to put the third London airport in the middle of Guildford I doubt whether I would get a line as the local MP—because that would be favoured treatment. For a hundred years the ROT has been picking its scrupulously non-discriminatory way through events and it clearly doesn't intend to be diverted now.
Now this philosophy has two sides to it. Either no one gets anything or every- one gets everything. The non-discriminatory becomes the indiscriminate. Such seems to be the danger on, for example, the export side of the department. There is, most would agree, a vastly important role for government officials to play in export busi- ness, particularly at the heavy capital goods end where the state is often the customer and where subtle diplomatic pressures, semi- political bargains and quick switches of trade policy are, for better or worse, the weapons of the international trade war.
But the ROT, whilst latterly recognising this with its Overseas Projects Group, has gone much further. It has decided to sell exports. To this end, diplomats in embassies and consulates round the world have been pressed into the business of finding custom- ers for exports, of initiating new business. Never mind if the exporters can't use the opportunities, never mind if businessmen would really prefer information and assist- ance of a more diplomatic type which they can't get for themselves, never mind the damage to the diplomatic service. Export opportunities are what the policy stipulates and export opportunities are what the busi- nessmen are going to get, regardless of how many are taken up.
Am I being unfair? Perhaps a little. But wherever the poor Bar turns the same mad- ness seems to creep in. The whole invest- ment grants operation, handed recently no doubt with sighs of relief, to Mintech. but nurtured by the ROT, has now just about exploded into a shambles of indiscriminate handouts. The monopolies and mergers re- sponsibility, having gone comnletely sour under the curdling influence of the HOT, is now being hustled off—though its chances of better luck with the Department of Emnloyment and Productivity are slight.
Consumer protection, along with other protection and safeguarding functions (viz. environment, aircraft noise, air and marine safety), should surely be taken on by separ- ate agencies with full legal backing, so that each cause can be openly and vigorously promoted without being submerged in the byzantine fairness of the Bor. Shipping and aviation should surely go to Transport; the sponsoring function for service industries (will we ever again escape this mad dis- tinction between manufacturturing and ser- vices?) belongs in the Ministry of Industry, which Mintech has now become. Commer- cial relations, tariff policy, export diplo- macy, all belong to a Minister of Foreign Trade in the Ministry of Industry. Other export promotion activities and services be- long, if anywhere, in a hived-off, profit- driven agency. Policing of business prac- tices could be done under the aegis of the government's law officers.
By my calculation that leaves the Patent Office and the Films Branch. Good homes could doubtless be found for both. The Board of Trade could then put up its shut- ters, shorn of all worldly cares, and be left free to go to that bureaucrats' Valhalla where politicians take a vow of silence, there is no public opinion and administra- tive purity reigns. Then we'd all be happy.
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