"Being very efficient, Chamberlain had, as he said himself, "no capacity for looking on and seeing other people mismanaging things." Of his planning there is no better example than the programme that he made for the Cabinet in November 1924, for the reform of local government. It was a five-year plan to cover the whole field of health, housing, local taxation and rating, and to be carried out methodically by twenty-five Bills neatly spaced over each succeeding session of the five-year Parliament. No previous Minister of Health or President of the Local Government Board had ever contemplated so ambitious a task. Chamberlain not only convinced a doubtful Cabinet of its advantages, but passed the whole programme through Parliament in little more than four years. Without his remarkable grasp of detail, his achievement would have been impossible. From start to finish it involved an almost interminable series of administrative problems. The result was to display the remarkable talent for administration that had already made his reputation on the Birmingham City Council. The Ministry of Health and the Exchequer provided an unlimited opportunity for still further applying it. His critics sometimes thought that this grasp of detail made him undertake work that ought to have been left to his permanent staff. I am sure, however, that his reforms between 1924 and 1929 would never have been carried through if it had not been for his knowledge of detail and the use that he made of it."