The EconomistApril 4th 2020 191T
he governmentis readying for calam-
ity. Boris Johnson has written to every
household warning that “things will get
worse before they get better.” The number
of deaths from covid-19 continues to rise,
with 2,357 recorded as The Economist went
to press. As the peak of the pandemic
looms ever closer, ministers pray the Na-
tional Health Service (nhs) will cope. On
April 1st, London’sexcelCentre (pictured)
reopened as a 4,000-bed hospital, the first
of four conference centres and a stadium
being repurposed. Ashleigh Boreham, a
colonel who has served in Afghanistan and
Iraq, oversaw the army’s involvement. “My
grandfather was at the Somme,” he said.
“I’m just at a different battle.”
Covid-19, just like war, is forcing inno-
vation on a scale and at a pace that no gov-
ernment would normally contemplate.
Across the public sector, what was previ-
ously unthinkable is happening. This over-
haul of decades or even centuries of proce-
dures and habits is being driven from the
centre. As one Treasury official notes, his
department has switched from being one
that “looks for reasons to say no, to one that
looks for ways to make things work”.
New relationships are being formed,
with lines between private and public sec-
tors blurred. As well as building new hospi-
tals, the nhs struck a deal at cost price with
private hospitals for beds, ventilators and
clinicians. It has enlisted Palantir, a firm
founded by Peter Thiel, an American ven-
ture capitalist, among others, to improve
its data analysis. It needs software that al-
lows it to predict when and where the case-
load will overwhelm the capacity of a hos-
pital. The government is working with a
consortium including Ford, Siemens and
the McLaren and Mercedes Formula 1 teams
to build new ventilators, which are due to
arrive next week.
The need for speed means normal rules
are being ripped up. Regulators have been
sidelined; league tables and targets forgot-
ten. Power has both been centralised (with
the state assuming vast new responsibil-
ities) and diffused (with officials left to get
on with solving problems). Outsourcers as
well as government departments have gottheir skates on: according to Rupert
Soames, chief executive of Serco, the com-
pany has cut the time it takes to hire a work-
er from a month to four to five days. The
firm, which runs call centres for various
bits of government, has moved 600 call
handlers, or more than a third of its total, to
home-working positions in the past few
weeks, a 20-fold increase. Before the crisis,
allowing call-handlers to work at home
was not on the agenda.
Plenty of these innovations are simply
about getting through the next couple of
months. The new field hospitals will hold
more than 10,000 additional patients. But
some of these changes may outlast the cur-
rent crisis. In the nhs, critics of video con-
sultations are being won over. Martin Mar-
shall, chair of the Royal College of General
Practitioners, estimates that nine in ten gp
appointments happened face-to-face be-
fore the crisis. Now, as gps seek to keep pa-
tients away from germ-filled surgeries, he
reckons that maybe as many as nine in ten
are happening remotely. Doctors are pleas-
antly surprised by the time freed up.
Reforms that had languished are sud-
denly being implemented. In 2016 the gov-
ernment launched what it claimed was the
most ambitious courts modernisation pro-
gramme in the world. More than 100 courts
were sold to finance a vast digitisation of
justice. But by the time pandemic struck,
little had changed. One pilot to test video
courts involved only 11 hearings. Only a few
sorts of cases, such as small claims, operat-Innovation
Move fast and try not to break things
Covid-19 is driving a remarkable pace of innovation in public services
Britain
20 Back to the 1950s
21 What’s gone wrong with testing
21 Policing a lockdown
22 Social distance in the army
22 How covid has helped the homeless
23 The steel industry’s woes
23 Reinventing call centresAlso in this section24 Bagehot: Does covid-19 vote Labour?