Politicians failed Kids Company

The collapse of Kids Company shows a catastrophic failure of political leadership.

Throughout the charity's life it has been celebrated by government ministers. And rightly so. It has dealt successfully with some very hard-up children and families and it has been a strong advocate of those people. Founder Camila Batmanghelidjh has been central to this success, both in terms of gaining political support and as a powerful advocate. Colourful, passionate and—to use the cliche—larger than life, Batmanghelidjh has been the face, voice and driver of Kids Company.

But, there have been long running concerns expressed by bureaucrats about the charity. Time after time they have tried to defund it or to distance government from the organisation.

Without full disclosure we will not know why the Department for Education and the Cabinet Office were so sceptical about Kids' Company. What we do know is that politicians repeatedly over-ruled the civil service advice.

One can just imagine the scene. Civil servants muttering that the politicians didn't understand proper governance and were scared of bad headlines, politicians and advisers complaining to each other that civil servants didn't understand the media and how damaging bad headlines could be. A Mexican stand-off. And lost in the middle of it all were the actual kids. Because if there were  problems, they were not being addressed. All that was happening was the shunting of responsibility from one desk to another—literally paper-pushing.

Why do I blame the politicians? Because their instincts were right. A valuable service was being provided. Politicians were right to repeatedly over-rule civil servants. But something was also clearly wrong. It could just have been relationship management, or it could have been structural. Whatever it was it needed sorting. One mistake can be a misunderstanding between individuals—a stroppy accounting officer and a proud manager. Repeated problems suggest a structural issue. If politicians wanted to preserve the service then they had to take full responsibility, not just for protecting funding but for injecting the reforms needed to Kids' Company. Leadership is not just grabbing headlines or avoiding bad ones, it is also the long hard graft of making things work and last.

The tragedy is that this was all so predictable. Not, I mean, that Kids' Company would collapse or that politicians and civil servants would fail the charity so egregiously. Simply that this is a such a predictable point for an innovative organisation to come to. As Colin Talbot, Professor of Government at Manchester University, points out in an excellent blog there is a classic path for a start-up:

"Firstly, a rapidly expanding organization needs operating capital and reserves, especially when income is fluctuating and uncertain. Kids Company seems to have had neither.

The usual response of the leader to these problems is to muddle through... do anything to keep the show on the road. Sometimes it works, but mostly it doesn’t.

Second, it needs basic “support services”—proper finance, HR and other functions to make a larger organization function properly and with due propriety. This isn’t just “bureaucracy”—it is also necessary to make sure “the Project” has some Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that make sure it works when the Leader isn’t around to supervise everything—which inevitably they increasingly cannot be.

Often the Leader has little time for this sort of “bureaucratic nonsense." They just want to get on with “the Project.” Sometimes they are sensible enough to appoint someone to run all this stuff and actually listen to them. Again, all too often even if they do appoint someone they over-rule them when it suits them."

This is not new knowledge, except perhaps to government. For a bunch of people—politician and civil servant alike—who like to give the impression that they can guide a national economy with ease, it seems that they are unaware of basic principles of the management and growth of organisations.

Kids' Company may have slipped again and again even after being rescued but it has gone and many kids and families will be the poorer as a result. What is truly shocking is the thought that the political incompetence that destroyed Kids' Company will be repeated even more often.