Most people will regard the PSNI's unintended release of personnel data as somewhere between surprising and astounding. However, those of us who have worked in and studied the public sector here would regard the release as highly probable, tending towards inevitable.
Prior to the Good Friday Agreement our public sector was politically determined but independently administered. After 1998, key areas such as policing and education became party political in both policy and administration.
The Policing Board and the Education Authority board have in-built majorities of hand-picked political party representatives. Both have effectively failed.
Boards on other public bodies became largely para-political. They have a majority of the politically acceptable, rather than the politically aligned, along with some independent expertise. They are generally well-meaning people and most organisations muddle through (with the exception of the board of Invest NI, which just muddles).
Failing areas such as health are left to the apolitical and thus subject to political sniping. (SF told the Southern Health Trust to "get its act together". It offered no criticism of the Policing Board.)
On top of this hierarchy of political preference sits the public sector's main driver: ignorance (but we'll come to that later).
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Like Donald Trump, the main Stormont parties believe that not only should they determine government policy, they should stack the administration with party members to smother possible independent thought further down the line. Party representatives do not need to know or understand anything.
I have sat on a board with a party political appointee who genuinely did not know the difference between the agenda and the minutes. That person has now gone on to higher things.
That's incidental ignorance. Now we come to real ignorance.
At its simplest, a board should oversee an organisation and set its strategic direction. (There is more, but it would take too long to explain.). The role of management is to implement that strategy.
There are five main ways of running a board, plus a few more. They are called models (or theories) of governance. (I taught this for years in the context of government policy-making and I still advise on governance – in England.)
The Policing Board does not conform to any known governance model. It is designed for political control rather than administrative effectiveness. It claims to be "an independent public body made up of 10 political and 9 independent members." (For "independent" read "not independent".) It lists four responsibilities: PSNI oversight, community engagement, policing and community partnerships and police pensions.
So the Policing Board has both governance and management responsibilities (a recipe for disaster). It is a huge bureaucracy which costs over £6 million annually, has its own chief executive (probably the world's only governing body to have one) and, quite amazingly, draws up a strategy for itself, which it presumably monitors in its own self-interest. (It is not clear who drafts the PSNI's strategy, but if there were a law against poor strategic planning the Policing Board would all be arrested for approving it.)
So political appointees spend a quarter of their time monitoring the work of the PSNI. To do this they have a strategic plan for the Board, part of which includes overseeing the strategic plan for the PSNI. (If you're confused, imagine how they are).
Thus they spend three quarters of their time not governing. Has any current or previous member of the Policing Board ever queried this ridiculous situation? If not, they are collectively responsible for the PSNI's current crisis.
Poor governance fails to see poor management and it was poor management which allowed the accidental leak of confidential data. (The board's audit committee should have measured this as a significant risk and monitored its management. Did it?)
Appointing a majority of board members because of party affiliation, rather than experience or expertise, puts politics before people. The safety of 10,000 people is now at risk.
Don't blame the police for that. Blame the politicians.
