Inquiries and Quangos are merely treating a symptom of ethical decline.

Very few used car buyers will be surprised by this morning’s OFT report saying 20% of all purchasers complain about hidden faults within a month. Yesterday’s revelation (by the Guardian of all papers) that 25% of NHS hospitals fail their hygiene tests didn’t in turn surprise The Slogger. I began writing about the subject two years ago, and the hospitals where it’s a problem are as much of one today as they were then. If the management culture is right (as it seems to be at Dorchester General, for example) then things will be clean. If the management decides that what they need to do is put up notices and keep an eye out for inspectors, then things will carry on as before – as they do at Bournemouth.

If enough people fiddle the figures and work the system, then quangos with sweeping powers to make unexpected, instant checks are the only answer. Last week Royal Mail was caught fiddling the delivery-quality system. Next week another police authority will put out a catalogue of lies about their performance in tackling hate crime.

The system is kept going because fiddled performance figures that make the Government look good are exactly what ambitious Ministers want to see. But it simply means that more and more quangos – with more and more powers – will be created. Not only does this infringe our freedom from snoopers, it is also hellish expensive.

The hopelessly acronymed ‘NICE’ (National Institute for Clinical Excellence) was even itself a fiddle: a cynical attempt by New Labour to give it a name suggesting quality control,when really it was a watchdog keeping an accountant’s eye on NHS expenditure. It too has been caught on several occasions arbitrarily rationing treatments and drugs – and in some cases handing out death sentences.

It’s a cultural circle of fibs: Ministers get caught in charge of poor standards. They need a result. They create a quango to get it. The quango reports negatively. The institutional management gets hauled over the coals. They tick a few boxes and hoodwink inspectors. The results get better. The media investigate and find that nothing has changed. The Minister orders an Inquiry. The Inquiry recommends a crack team headed by a Tsar. A new quango is born.

Now that behind the scenes every Minister (with the exception of Ed Balls) is being beaten up by the Treasury, the same sort of cycle will operate. Yesterday’s ONS figures showed that 20,000 more NHS administrators have been hired. There will be (one hopes) an outcry. The new recruits will then be reconfigured by management and become frontline. The media will discover they aren’t really. And another NICE will be created to keep a weather eye on future appointments and designations. Pop goes the weasel.

The plot – to make all services and behaviours more honest and better value – gets lost largely because most people’s first mental response to interrogation in 2010 is ‘Which lie do I need to tell to get out of this hole?’ This is a cultural problem, pure and simple. Simple to define, but a very difficult and complex problem to solve.

There is a feeling afoot among some of my circle that getting rid of New Labour’s innate Mission to Mislead will solve this. It won’t. Only a generation exposed to holistic civic education will begin to do that. And only public servants taught that the goal is social improvement (not personal survival) will cement this brick into our wobbly cultural wall.