How management logic beat reality

It was one of those weeks where you thought: but where is the connection with political ideals, ideologies, world views?

Politicians of almost all denominations have been arguing for years for a ‘return’ of a strong government. This suggests that the government was weak for years, and it is true that at the end of the last century the state set up many executive bodies (financially) on their own two feet. From housing associations to ProRail.

Management thinking that has been called ‘separation of policy and implementation’. After this, political debates were mainly about measures, rarely about people, because people were individual cases and politics no longer dealt with individual cases. They were for ‘the performance’.

It explains why the Allowances affair and the case of the out-of-home children remained invisible to many politicians for so long.

Only: these scandals might fit the image of a retiring politics – but not that of a retiring person government. Government executives did not retreat at all: they became stronger, more assertive, sometimes more aggressive.

And enough indications that we still do not know everything: the Council for the Judiciary this week published eleven ‘stomach pain files’ that show dangerous similarities with the Allowances affair.

By two of them I looked back at policy history, and it gave me a better understanding of the relationship between retiring politicians and advancing management thinking.

A well-known mistake about The Hague is that discussions have a beginning and an end. It doesn’t work like that: as soon as a long-standing discussion has ended with decision-making, the discussion almost always starts again – usually with new politicians.

You also come across this in the case of care fines, one of the issues that the Council of the Judiciary presented as a ‘stomach pain file’.

What is the case: about ten years ago, politicians decided that people who do not pay their health insurance premiums will be dealt with more harshly. The implementation was done by the Central Administration Office (CAK), an anonymous bureaucratic giant that annually implements care schemes worth about 25 billion euros. At this CAK they were late last year content about the result: defaulters fell “by 31.5 percent in five years”.

But the Council for the Judiciary fears the worst. Defaulters receive ‘a fine premium’, which only increases their ‘problems’. On top of that, “sky-high litigation and attachment costs” are added, and lawsuits about this are “frequently settled in absentia”, leading judges to suspect that they “don’t see many distressing situations”.

How is this possible? After the introduction of private health insurance in 2006, the then VVD minister Hans Hoogervorst (Zorg) promised that defaulters would never lose their policy; the government would match. His successor Ab Klink (CDA) became a bit stricter: from 2009 he started deducting the premium owed from the wages or benefits of defaulters. In retrospect, this was the same period in which the Allowances affair began.

In 2011, Klink’s successor Edith Schippers (VVD) continued. She asked Berenschot for advice, which turned the defaulters (like later benefit parents) into a management problem. The consultancy proposed a ‘business case’ for which it became profitable for health insurers to prevent people from becoming defaulters. In 2013, Schippers also wanted a fine for defaulters on top of the unpaid healthcare premium.

In parliamentary debates about this, in 2014 and 2015, the SP (spokespersons Henk van Gerven and Renske Leijten) was the main opponent. The PVV complained through then MP Reinette Klever – now a commentator at Ongehoord Nederland – that defaulters created a gap of 1 billion euros “which the people who do pay a decent premium pay for”.

The Chamber supported Schippers, who also defended the fine for non-payment in 2017. “Someone who is in debt must have an incentive to cooperate,” she said, so that the dynamics of the Allowances affair also remained intact in this file: saddle people in debt with higher debts.

In retrospect, it was the last separate debate on this: management logic had definitely won over reality.

But it is not only low-income people who suffer from rash government intervention.

The Council for the Judiciary also pointed this week to entrepreneurs affected by corona. They often first used up their own funds, after which they had to close their business “to avoid bankruptcy.” But because they then owed a “transition payment” to employees they wanted to fire – and no longer had that money – the government put them in a position where there is “no way out”, according to the Council for the Judiciary.

The transition payment, originating from the social agreement of 2013, started with the best intentions: the measure replaced the (higher) severance payment for employers and gave employees extra money for retraining, said then minister Lodewijk Asscher (Social Affairs, PvdA).

Nevertheless, (then) MPs such as Pieter Heerma (CDA) and Carola Schouten (CU) already saw in 2015 that the scheme could lead to an impasse for a company in trouble. In 2019, the then MP Gijs van Dijk (PvdA) asked whether Asscher’s successor Wouter Koolmees (D66) had “searched for a solution for those small SME with four people, if there was a problem in the employment relationship with employees”.

During corona, MKB Nederland constantly put this on the agenda. “If you cannot stop because of that fee, as an entrepreneur you tighten the loop around your own neck,” said chairman Jacco Vonhof. But in November 2020 Koolmees wrote that he did not see a solution. That was it – until the Council for the Judiciary sounded the alarm this week.

And what struck me again when I reread the documents about this: this too was policy based on a management approach, which gives the scheme itself a higher importance than the individual who is unintentionally disadvantaged by the scheme.

That has not always been the case. Coincidentally, I recently looked at the drafting of the Dutch abortion law, after the reopening of the abortion debate in the US. A heated debate between 1970 and 1980 in which the four most influential movements at the time – CDA, PvdA, VVD, D66 – were ideologically opposed to each other about women’s rights.

It started with the PvdA wanting to legalize abortion. After that, VVD, D66 and PvdA tried in vain together. The CDA resisted fervently through its new leader Dries van Agt, after which legalization was finally achieved in 1980 under Van Agt’s first cabinet – a collaboration between CDA and VVD.

A compromise with disadvantages for all parties. But the fact is that this legislation pacified the abortion discussion for forty years afterwards, in which the most influential ideological opponent of yesteryear, the CDA, eventually ended up in the pro camp.

The social burden of abortion at the time was of course much greater than that of severance pay or default fines now, but that is not the only difference.

The difference is also that the abortion debate was nevertheless conducted with all ideological sharpness by middle parties – who then also took turns ruling with each other. The same middle parties that now mainly debate in management language.

And that is not just a difference: that is the difference between politics that understand their own function, and politics that have lost their function somewhere along the way.