In Britain, police fail to apprehend roughly 670 shoplifters every day. Three hours is the median wait time in A&E down the road. In the meantime, the number of beds in care facilities has decreased by 18% in the last ten years, and the new budget will further reduce them.

The prisons are overflowing. Autistic children are being turned away from schools. In the meantime, the Treasury has pledged to use gold to fill in 7 million potholes on English roads, costing £1.6 billion.

There is a serious problem with the public sector in Britain. In the 1990s, New York's rapidly increasing crime rate and declining public sense of security were explained by the "broken windows theory" in the US. It was claimed that the visible environment of the city was the source of the issue. Trains were filthy, beggars harassed bystanders, and walls were covered in graffiti. Bill Bratton, the police chief of New York, gave the city the order to start working. Police focused more on so-called low-level crimes. Litter was removed, graffiti was cleaned up, young people were disciplined, and beggars left. The result was remarkable: a more than 40% decrease in felonies like assault and burglary.

Windows theory had its sceptics, with many claiming there were more complex explanations behind the city’s falling crime rate, but it is still relevant to today’s Britain. News footage shows people calmly walking out of shops with stolen goods. The road outside my house has been dug up for the best part of two months, with little sign of activity. Neighbours tell of phone snatches and muggings. E-bikes terrify pedestrians and pile up on pavements.

 A year ago my own unblemished driving career ended when I lost my driving licence for six months because of a series of ill-signed 20mph limits on roads in London and Wales. The result was a sequence of police exchanges and court hearings that beggared belief. The time-wasting and bureaucracy were Kafkaesque. I should have tried shoplifting.

Public administration matters. Each of the failings listed above has followed a chaotic eight years in British government. Six prime ministers have played musical chairs with ministerial posts, while imposing targets and decisions on every public service from health, education and police to farming, housing and planning.

No country in Europe has so centralised the performance of these services. The centre squanders money on vanity infrastructure and voter tax breaks, while local councils are no longer free agents but mere agencies for Whitehall. But as agents they have been starved of cash, to the point where dozens face bankruptcy. Street-level local services other than statutory social care are being shredded.

Almost unbelievably, Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, has chosen this moment to reform England’s local government without a moment’s consultation. In Orwellian style, she wants to disempower centres of local identity, such as towns, in favour of new regions. Regions are always mere outposts of Whitehall, their purpose to aid the central direction of planning.

That this is the sure route to madness is typified in the new order given to London’s Kensington and Chelsea. It has been told that it “needs” 5,107 new homes, up from 1,381 last year. These algorithmic figures imposed from above are utterly meaningless. The balance of taxing and spending, targeting and performing between the centre and the local in Britain has collapsed. If the pothole outside your home stays unfilled, don’t blame the council, blame the minister.