Government "enshittification": The insidious drag of bureaucratic growth and the principle of zero harm

We're governed by institutions designed to prevent failure rather than achieve success. They've forgotten their purposes. They focus on merely protecting their procedures and a principle of zero harm.

With less than two weeks to go, Westminster is rife with talk of which taxes the Chancellor will increase in her “Nightmare before Christmas” Budget. However, there are many more fundamental problems with the Government and the state that won’t be addressed in the Budget and that, without fixing, will mean our managed decline as a country continues. In this piece, Peter Tichbon looks at Government “enshittification”, how bureaucratic growth and zero harm principles are stopping our return to prosperity.

I came across a wonderful term recently, which amused and delighted me, and is an apt term to describe a lot of things in my business career: “Enshittification”. A wonderfully descriptive word which will barely need a definition when it almost inevitably makes its way into the Oxford English Dictionary.

Using Amazon as an example, Cory Doctorow’s concept of enshittification describes how online platforms start to degrade when they begin to prioritise themselves over their users. Once a convenient marketplace connecting vendors and consumers, Amazon moved to privileging its own products and charging sellers ever higher fees in order to grow its share and profits. Now he claims Amazon is a blur of ads, fake reviews, and paid placements, and that as a result the user experience has become, well, a bit shit.

It’s source for my work in leading business transformations - businesses losing customer concentricity until they are no longer set out to provide what their consumers want at a price they want to pay is a key source of business failures. Today, one could argue the same problem now defines government (and government by quango): when the system has begun to optimise for itself rather than for citizens it is supposed to serve, everything will continually get ever worse.

At its best, government is meant to serve and protect: to build infrastructure, protect the vulnerable from harm, support those who are unable to help themselves, deliver healthcare, and help create opportunity. But at its worst, it behaves like a meddlesome, bloated and massively expensive miasma of bureaucracy: obsessed with measures, processes, internal justification and the principle of zero harm, becoming a drag on productivity and the economy, having lost sight of why it exists in the first place.

We are living through the enshittification of the state.

From purpose to process

Doctorow’s observation is painfully simple:

• A system starts by serving its users.

• It then shifts focus to internal stakeholders.

• Finally, it optimises entirely for itself.

In government and quangocracies, the examples are myriad. Everyone supports protecting habitats and species: who wouldn’t want to save an endangered animal or habitat? Or save an area from overdevelopment, an employee from exploitation or injury and consumers from being taken advantage of?

But over time, the remit has expanded, the rulebook thickened, and the process has begun to overtake purpose. Major developments now face mountains of regulation and having to provide tens of thousands of pages of documentation, while projects are delayed or abandoned, not because of proven environmental harm, but because regulators can’t risk being wrong. Businesses are being ground down by the sheer weight of cost and regulation, their survival threatened unless they can pass on the costs to you, the consumer, who pays the price in inflation. An organisation built to protect the environment ends up protecting its own procedures on a principle of zero harm, and in the meantime plays an ever more substantial role both in the shortage of supply and cost of housing development in the UK.

Those are examples of enshittification in bureaucratic form. Where commonsense is overtaken by absolutism, and ever more layers of regulation costs go up, and economic growth is stifled.

When regulation smothers productivity

Having spent much of my career leading (and rescuing) businesses in the food and FMCG sector, I’ve seen this creeping enshittification up close.

Over the past decade, the cumulative weight of regulation, taxation and reporting has grown relentlessly and contributes to taking many businesses to and beyond the brink. Whilst we see ever more headlines blaming the latest new regulation or tax for some high-profile business failures, they are not only the fault of this government’s policies, but the cumulative effect of layering costs over decades, with the latest being merely the straw which broke the camel’s back.

Each individual measure is often well-intentioned - a tweak for health, safety, sustainability, transparency and workers’ rights, or yet another tax to help pay for a bloated public sector which has now reached 42% of GDP, but together they’ve become a suffocating blanket.

To give just some examples we’ve had:

• Packaging and recycling levies and endless green audits, where the cost of compliance often outweighs any environmental gain. Every extra form means more admin, more people, more cost.

• Mandatory disclosures: calorie labels, allergen updates, gender pay reports, modern slavery statements- each worthy, but collectively consuming management time and resources.

• HFSS (High Fat, Salt and Sugar) rules, forcing constant reformulation, re-assessment and IT changes. The government’s own impact assessment shows transition costs for retailers running into tens of millions, costs that inevitably land on consumers.

As a result, management teams now spend almost as much time reporting compliance as creating value. Then innovation slows, margins shrink, and smaller food manufacturers quietly drop product lines (or just close up shop- or indeed never start) because the regulatory overhead makes them unviable.

Then layer on minimum-wage hikes and higher employer NI, which the retail trade body aptly called “a tax on jobs”, to the rising admin and reporting costs, and the result is clear: a “tax” on the consumer. Productivity falls, prices rise, the economy stalls, and everyone is poorer.

For all the rhetoric about competitiveness and growth, Britain’s food sector is being taxed and regulated into stasis - a classic case of bureaucratic good intentions mutating into economic drag.

That, for me, is enshittification made visible: the slow shift from purpose to paperwork.

The planning gridlock - enshittified by process

Meanwhile, the housing crisis worsens. As one X user bluntly put it: “The problem is we’re not building enough houses”. To keep with the theme- no sh*t, Sherlock.*

This government promised 1.5 million new homes this Parliament. Laudable and ambitious, but ultimately doomed. Not for lack of intent, but because no government has yet tackled the bureaucratic morass throttling development.

The Home Builders Federation reports average planning fees and obligations of around £2 million per site for small developments, with decision times stretching beyond a year. The burden of that bureaucracy lands squarely on consumers, with both the cost, delays and restrictions in supply in the face of growing demand driving up prices.

The UK now has an estimated shortfall of 6.5 million houses (Centre for Policy Studies), and whilst demand grows by 300,000 per year, we currently build roughly 150,000 ,barely half of what’s needed. At that rate, the government will be 300,000 homes short of its own target by next year - despite promises of cutting red tape, there is little sign of genuine deregulation as yet. This is why house prices are high - not greed, but unmet demand with limited supply. If we can’t fix it, prices will continue to go only one way.

I’ve seen this personally.

At one food ingredients business I led in Essex, we proposed redeveloping a disused quayside building into 45 apartments with commercial space, a design welcomed by both the local community and council. Yet the use of the myriad of laws and judicial review by those determined to block the development stalled it indefinitely. Thirteen years later, the cleared site still sits empty despite local support.

It’s the same with infrastructure.

The Lower Thames Crossing, conceived in 1989 and scoped in 2009, only received development consent in March 2025. Its planning application ran to 359,000 pages and £450 million in paperwork costs out of a total of more than £1.2 billion in planning, land, consultation and related costs before a shovel hit the ground.

Meanwhile, congestion at Dartford continues to cost the economy £200 million a year in lost productivity. After 16 years, that’s over £3 billion in costs to the economy, before construction has even begun. One of literally hundreds of examples.

This is the enshittification of planning: process over purpose, consultation over construction, risk-aversion over results. In the Zero Harm bureaucracy, no one gets sacked for saying no, and they come up with ever more reasons to delay saying yes.

The £100 million bat tunnel - when risk aversion becomes ridicule

And if it’s not delay, it’s the increasing cost of “mitigations”. A recent, expensive and most visible symbol of this Zero Harm drift is the HS2 “bat tunnel” in Oxfordshire, a structure built to shield bats from a rail line they may never cross at a cost of around £119 million, roughly 20 % over budget. Goodness knows what mitigations exist in the plans for the Lower Thames Crossing and at what cost.

The justification was to ensure no bat was harmed; one could argue regardless of probability or cost. One source claimed that it will be at the cost of £300k per bat currently living in the nearby wood: for perspective, that money could fund 2,600 nurses for a year (based on £45,000 average employment cost).

It’s not just a story about waste. It’s about the loss of proportionality and the credo of Zero Harm - how governmental and quasi-governmental organisations designed to reduce harm or be helpful to citizens begin to focus on controlling lower and lower risks with smaller and smaller potential impacts at ever higher cost, or letting the “help” grow out of control, ending up burying citizens in regulation which maximises cost and delay. We need balance.

The NHS and the hidden growth of bureaucracy

Even the NHS- an institution built on compassion, which surely exists to keep the consumer (patient) at the forefront of its service, shows the same pattern.

NHS England employs ~1.37 million people (NHS Digital), and around 39,800 are formal managers (King’s Fund). That’s roughly 3% of the workforce, a ratio often cited to claim the NHS is under-managed.

But the truth is buried in hybrid roles: clinicians now spend enormous amounts of time on compliance, data entry, governance reviews, and audit documentation. In fact, researchers estimate up to 30 % of NHS staff have managerial responsibilities in practice (NIH/National Library of Medicine). The NHS Confederation denies it is “over-managed”, but the lived reality for clinicians is clear: more forms, more meetings, less care. More compliance and internal focus, fewer resources spent on the end user, the patient. And we wonder why the NHS gets ever more expensive and eats up ever more resources, but waiting lists, proportionally to the cost, get no shorter. Look no further than enshittification.

What the public actually wants

Here’s where responses to the Adam Smith Institute’s Emma Schubart’s recent thread on X are so revealing. It asked: “What level of government interference do people actually want in their lives?”

Those responses - and the traction the thread gained - show how far political elites are divorced from public sentiment. People don’t want chaos or libertarian fantasy, but they absolutely do not want micromanagement either- nor do they want every Twitter (X) storm to turn into yet another hideously expensive government initiative.

It generated some marvellous feedback:

• Over-management fatigue: “We’re governed as if people can’t be trusted with their own decisions”. UK citizens told the ASI they were tired of being treated as incapable or irresponsible. The state’s default stance has shifted from enabling to policing.

• Proportionality gap: “Every problem now triggers a taskforce, a strategy, and a czar”, which takes 5 years and costs £50m. The public felt the state now scales response by political optics being seen to do something, not real risk. A symptom of institutional enshittification - more civil servants, more expense for ever more minor challenges (often whilst ignoring the big ones…).

• Micromanagement everywhere: “It’s not the big stuff that grinds you down. It’s the small constant frictions- permits, forms, and approvals.” This line, echoed in hundreds of replies, captures the everyday weight of bureaucracy.

• Desire for trust and autonomy: “Just let normal things work without a licence, a form, and a warning label.”

Their poll captured a deep fatigue with the government’s constant expansion into spaces where citizens believe it doesn’t belong: lifestyle, small business, home improvement, and even language. As one user replied: “We don’t need a minister for everything. We just need things that already exist to work”.

That is the clearest definition of anti-enshittification: people want government to do less, but to do it well.

To do fewer things better, and meddle less in our lives.

The enshittification doom loop

When institutions, public or private, lose sight of purpose, they drift into self-absorption and self-preservation. They drift, doing a lot and delivering little, recklessly expending resources. However, where a business is ultimately punished by loss of customers, loss of profit and eventually failure, the government has a captive supply of income via taxes. Profligacy, over-reach and loss of customer-centricity have no impact on the viability of the organisation; it just commands more and more taxpayer money to pay for it.

The tragedy is that every layer of rule and regulation starts as a good idea. But over time, the purpose mutates into its own defence. We are now governed by systems designed to prevent failure rather than achieve success. And the result is stagnation- housing shortages, stalled infrastructure, NHS waiting lists, record taxes, and a collapsing sense that improvement is even possible.

This is enshittification on a national scale: rules without results. Ever-growing public expenditure with less and less return. An economy stifled by bureaucracy.

“The UK now spends over 42% of GDP through the state- the highest peacetime level in modern history- yet outcomes continue to decline.” (Source: ONS public sector expenditure data, 2024.)

All while public sector productivity continues to fall. We need to break out.

De-enshittifying the state

If enshittification is what happens when institutions forget their purpose, then de-enshittification means rediscovering it.

That means:

• Putting purpose before process. Require every public body to justify its existence in plain language. With departmental zero based budgets every electoral cycle.

• Refocusing on outcomes over outputs (and optics!). Reward tangible improvements, not volume of activity.

• Identify and remove unnecessary regulations. Agree there are more than enough regulations already, and if we need a new one, we first identify one we are going to drop. One in, one out.

• Deliver a return to personal accountability. Stop the state from having responsibility for protecting citizens from every harm. Stop being the nanny state - if someone does something foolish and ill-considered and harms themselves, sometimes we should concede that’s the price we pay for relative freedom, not cause for yet another rule.

• Courage. Progress requires risk when doing nothing is easy. But in our current state, stagnation is the greater danger.

We don’t need to abolish government.

We need to make government useful again. Small. Value for money. Something which provides a few guardrails, but expects citizens to also be responsible for themselves.

Because the opposite of enshittification isn’t perfection.

It’s freedom - the freedom to build, work, live, and improve without asking permission from a system that has forgotten who it’s meant to serve. Us.

Peter Tichbon is a highly experienced CEO, MD, interim business leader and speaker with more than 20 years’ senior and board-level experience across Blue Chip, SME, and Private Equity environments. He specialises in business transformation, post-acquisition integration, and operational turnaround, bringing a wealth of practical insights into the realities of leading under pressure.