What accounts for our unaccountability problem?
Bad things keep happening in the United Kingdom but they don’t seem to be anybody’s fault. Why has nobody been prosecuted over the Grenfell Tower fire, or the Windrush scandal or the hundreds of thousands of excess deaths attributed to austerity? The concept of “accountability sinks” goes some way towards answering these questions.
What is an accountability sink?
Accountability sinks are policies, procedures, documents and institutions that absorb accountability and, in doing so, absolve people of responsibility for their decisions. They function like scapegoats but they’re cleaner, because no individual has to shoulder the blame. Well designed accountability sinks appear both objective and inscrutable.
The term was recently popularised by author Dan Davies but he’d be the first to admit that it’s an idea that keeps getting independently invented by different people. This makes sense: being held accountable is uncomfortable and humans tend to avoid discomfort if they can help it.
Shirking responsibility might be a universal impulse, but the conditions of modern neoliberal economies don’t exactly discourage it:
Privatisation has fragmented our institutions, making it easy to blame the other department.
Regulatory capture has defanged fact-finding and enforcement mechanisms.
Bosses have learned that they can create perverse incentive structures that encourage wrongdoing, then feigning shock when their employees respond predictably.
Technology distances decision makers from consequences.
Everyday accountability sinks
We all experience accountability sinks as we go about our lives. When an airport gate attendant breaks the news that you’ve been bumped from your flight in favour of someone with more air miles, the airline’s executives are using policy as an accountability sink. The attendant isn’t a scapegoat, everybody involved recognises that the decision isn’t theirs, but they are being used to absorb negative sentiment and responsibility that should really be directed at the executives who signed off the policy. Even if you were to somehow get ahold of these executives they would surely tell you the same thing as the attendant: it’s not my fault, it’s company policy.
Bad people react to this predicament by yelling at service workers. Good people walk away, quietly seething, and write blog posts about the unaccountable structures that characterise modern life.
Innocuous accountability sinks
It’s important to stress that accountability sinks are the result of human nature, and not all of them are necessarily harmful. The hiring process that allows your high-flying friend’s employer to politely decline your job application, without obliging your friend to have an awkward conversation, is a low-stakes accountability sink that leaves nobody worse off and avoids hurt feelings.
There are worse things in life however, than getting turned down for a job.
Harmful accountability sinks
The accountability sinks discussed thus far have ranged from innocuous to frustrating, but they can become actively dangerous when they insulate powerful decision makers from the wrath of the decided upon. The UK is absolutely rotten with accountability sinks like these, here are some recent examples:
The Trojan Horse affair
The Trojan Horse affair is a debunked conspiracy theory that posited a plot to introduce an “aggressive Islamist ethos” to schools in Birmingham, England. The theory was spawned by an anonymous letter sent to Birmingham City Council.
Michael Gove announced an inquiry based on this letter, which resulted in the sacking of Muslim teachers and the statutory rollout of the Prevent duty, which obliges public sector workers like teachers and doctors to inform on their co-workers, students and patients. The program has been found by human rights groups and the UN special rapporteur on racism to discriminate against Muslims, who are referred in hugely disproportionate numbers.
You can tell that Britain’s authorities were using the letter as an accountability sink because they stubbornly insisted that it was not worthy of investigation.
None of the inquiries, no authority, no investigator ever figured out who wrote the letter. None of them even tried, stating explicitly that it “wasn’t their job”.
Gove ignored repeated warnings from councillors and cops that the letter was bogus, a defamatory hoax, and pressed ahead with his divisive interventions anyway.
Birmingham City Council were found by a regulator to have broken freedom of information law numerous times in their efforts to withhold documents from journalists investigating who wrote the letter.
Nick Timothy, Theresa May's former chief of staff, reportedly pressured a Birmingham community centre to cancel an event where speakers were calling for an inquiry to correct the record regarding the Trojan Horse affair.
Reflecting on the affair journalist Hamza Syed mused:
I struggled to imagine what other group of people you could do this to in Britain and get away with it.
Syed is right, accountability sinks work best when the public and the press already have a low opinion of the decided upon.
The Cass Review
Wes Streeting is currently curtailing access to transgender healthcare. The document he’s using as an accountability sink is called The Cass Review. Medical experts agree that the review is deeply flawed (more on that from me here) but Streeting is refusing to engage with these criticisms and ploughing ahead, safe in the knowledge that the document will absorb any fallout from his decision: he’s doing it on doctor’s orders after all. Like Muslims, trans people are the subject of a moral panic in Britain (34% of Brits now describe themselves as prejudiced against trans people, 21% against Muslims).
The markets
Lucy Powell recently claimed that, had the British government not cut winter fuel payments for pensioners in order to save £1.4bn, then there could have been a run on the pound. Keir Starmer made the same argument in defense of retaining the the two-child benefit cap. These argument are economically illiterate:
Britain’s two and a half trillion pound economy is clearly not £1.4bn away from collapse.
Scrapping the two-child limit is a vital & sound investment to reduce the long-term impact & cost of poverty. Studies suggest that it pays for itself by causing better outcomes for those children in later life.
Frankly, if you think that taking children out of poverty is a cost and not an investment in a happy and healthy society, then you’ve got your beliefs and your bookkeeping all backwards.
Evidence that their short termist policies don’t add up hasn’t stopped generations of unimaginative politicians habitually using the market as an accountability sink for the miserable consequences of their austerity policies. Some of them have been quite open about their frustration with the markets’ refusal to deliver the disasters that they wanted and needed to justify their appalling decisions.
None of this is to say that the markets don’t matter. They do, but pretending that they’re an opaque force inscrutable to everyone but you that’s telling you to do the thing that you wanted to do all along, is a cowardly and careless way to lead a country.
The Windrush scandal
This last example is slightly different in that accountability isn’t absorbed by a sink but dispersed, so that no individual can been held responsible. Perhaps we should call this practice “accountability scattering”?
The Windrush scandal, in which tens of thousands of Britons were mistreated, sacked, evicted and deported, has resulted in zero prosecutions. Amber Rudd resigned as home secretary but, given she soon returned to government and her main offence was holding the bag when the scandal happened to hit the news, I wouldn’t say she’s been held accountable for the scandal.
Whose fault was it then? The architects of the hostile environment? The bureaucrats who shredded the victim’s ID cards? The legislators who voted for the Data Protection Act that apparently necessitated that shredding? The governments that legislated to restrict the movement of citizens of the British empire? This is less of an accountability sink than an accountability dispersal system, where everyone can blame everyone else and nobody is ultimately responsible.
The purpose of all of this is to convince you that the decisions that people make are actually just the weather, the unchangeable way of things. The argument implicit in these structures of unaccountability is that there’s no point in trying to do anything differently. If you do try to change things then the beneficiaries of the accountability sinks will label you an unserious and dangerous fantasist. The good news though, is that if you apply enough pressure to accountability sinks, they collapse.
The algorithmic exam grading fiasco
Because of the need to cancel exams during the Covid-19 pandemic, the Department for Education opted to use an “algorithm” instead. The system penalised bright individuals for living in underprivileged areas. It was designed to be “fair on average”, but unfairness happens to individuals not averages, and this accountability sink was quickly destroyed by the fiercest campaigning group on earth: British middle class parents. Officials quickly reversed course.
The lesson here is easy to learn and difficult to implement. You can destroy accountability sinks and ultimately change decisions, but to do that you need a lot of (ideally well-connected) people to care enough.
Conclusion
Once you start noticing accountability sinks you see them everywhere:
KLM’s squirrel shredding,
Central bank rate setting,
NHBC, BRE,
Christmas mistletoe
Harry Truman, Donald Trump,
Public sector pay slump,
Amazon hiring, Systra firing
Disgraced politico
We didn’t start the fire is the lie coming from our society’s decisions makers. I encourage you to call if out when you see it and, the next time you encounter an accountability sink in the wild, let me know in the comments.