Andy Burnham's promise to "rewire" the economy has quietly become a promise to rewire later. Local government reorganisation, water industry overhaul, social care reform, and welfare restructuring have all been punted into the 2030s or left for the next government. The column's author, drawing on economist John Kay and management consultant John Seddon, argues the delay is unnecessary — not because the problems are simple, but because the solutions don't require the ownership debates Labour fears. The central thesis borrows from Kay's book Obliquity: organisations that pursue their stated purpose directly — customer satisfaction, best product — outperform those that optimise for proxy metrics like shareholder value or regulatory compliance. Boeing chased quarterly profits and lost its engineering culture. ICI chased stock price and was broken up. The same dynamic, the argument goes, is eating the public sector: protocols substitute for understanding, and tick-box compliance replaces actual service delivery. The NHS provides both the supporting evidence and the counterexample. GP and outpatient satisfaction is rising thanks to a new appointment booking system — a practical operational change, not a regulatory intervention. Meanwhile, maternity unit managers covered up rising mortality rates, a failure regulation was supposed to prevent but didn't. The column argues neither outcome can be attributed to the regulatory layer itself, which adds cost while managers learn to game or endure it. The tree-planting anecdote is the sharpest illustration. National Highways planted 850,000 saplings along the A14 in 2020; three-quarters died within three years. The Environment Agency now plans to fund half a million more trees through councils and mayors. The question isn't whether tree-planting is good — it's whether a system that counts saplings planted rather than trees alive can ever deliver. This is the tick-box pathology in miniature. John Seddon's Vanguard consulting adapted Toyota's systems method for UK public services. Portsmouth city council's housing repairs service won international awards using this approach. Seddon's position on regulation is nuanced: he doesn't want it abolished, but refocused on whether an organisation achieves its purpose rather than whether it followed the protocol. Purpose-based regulation, he argues, can apply sanctions immediately when an organisation undermines its mission — unlike current compliance regimes that perpetually "run behind events, shutting the stable door." The political implication is clear: Labour should stop letting the nationalisation-vs-privatisation debate consume oxygen and focus on operational systems that produce measurable outcomes. The evidence base exists. The consultants have done the work. Portsmouth already proved the model. But the instinct in Whitehall — from Jon Cunliffe to the House of Lords industry committee — remains more oversight, not better purpose. This is ultimately a column about institutional capture by process. The extractors aren't villains — they're protocols, compliance regimes, and proxy metrics that absorb resources meant for citizens. The argument is well-supported but limited: it offers no mechanism for how purpose-based regulation would resist the same bureaucratic drift that corrupted the compliance model it wants to replace.
