And yet things can be done if you have the right momentum from both ministers and civil service. Back when I was at The Guardian, in 2006 I launched a campaign called "Free Our Data", which advocated making non-personal data held by government free for commercial or personal reuse. (The "non-personal" part is VERY important, obvs.) An example would be map data from Ordnance Survey, which is run as a little company inside government - a "trading fund".
We slogged along for years without much to show for it, until the Brown government in 2010, when Tom Watson became Cabinet Office minister, and was completely in tune with what we wanted to do. There were also some civil servants who thought it was a good idea.
Tom really pushed things through: OS objected strenuously, but he recruited other ministers to the cause and got momentum for this change to happen. Bear in mind that it would blow a hole in OS's budget, so would require Treasury to approve it (or at least not disapprove it). It did help too that Tim Berners-Lee told Gordon Brown at a dinner that this was a good idea and should go ahead.
There were studies and costings and examinations and so on, but in the end it was about pulling the trigger. And just before the 2010 election, the Brown government did, as part of a bigger opening up of data. It helped that the Tories were also looking at the idea, so there was a competitive element.
Some of that was about the timing: in 2010 the whole "internet everywhere" was taking off through mobile, which meant apps, which meant location and and also companies setting up to take advantage of the growing appetite for smartphones and apps.
But the remarkable thing is that it might have been a policy which had never been tried before, so your question of "why didn't this work the last time?" never arose. The one question that did stump me when I first talked about FOD in public was when Tom Steinberg of MySociety, who had civil service experience, said "How can I make the financial case for making this data free to Treasury?"
Only later - jeu d'escalier - did I think of the GPS system, where the US government funds the satellites that then provide navigation for cars and people; the former saves far more in time/ delays/etc than it costs. Finding those sorts of multipliers is tricky when you're first doing policy.
Thanks for indulging me. But I think there is a lesson: a good policy finds its time, and its champion, so perhaps it's worth trying again just because "this time it's right". FOD could never have worked before the internet, before widespread availability of mobiles.
The one part where we failed was getting postcodes included as part of the free data. Apparently that was down to Vince Cable at some point post-2010. Arse.
There's another post I need to do at some point on how to influence effectively - one part of getting ideas implemented - and this is a v good example.
Really good. One of the big obvious policy solutions to sewage in the rivers is retrofit sustainable drainage systems. Hasn't happened because it needs to be delivered jointly by local government and water companies. This government just seems to hate local government and be obsessed with starving them of funds. Setting local government free, funding it, and setting some regulations around this, would go a long way to starting to tackle this issue.
In California, policy solutions to this kind of problem are often passed through ballot initiatives that are brought forward by citizens groups. They have to collect enough signatures, and if they do so, they can force a ballot measure into an election.
There is a related problem when a new initiative (eg prevention in health) will only give you payback some time in the future. So for a time you have to pay for both the old costs of ill health and the costs of making improvements for the future.
Also, for individuals, it is hard to measure positive health outcomes as connected to preventive health care. Most people don't credit the preventive health care they have received with the fact that they didn't get cancer, diabetes, heart disease, or whatever.
This, and counting things to prove performance. The best way to grow new woodland is to let existing ones naturally regenerate. But it's harder to count what's grown, and "prove" you have planted trees. So it isn't funded, and hardly happens through government schemes.
Back to T Levels. I’ve been arguing against parity of esteem for 20 years. Qualifications should be understood by those who know and use them. In civil engineering there has been a great, long-standing relationship between Pearson/BTEC/Employers/FE/HE/professional bodies. They broadened access for basically students who are later developers/able to get to degree level but slower/ able to enter the career at a lower level and work their way up. We linked BTEC to our apprenticeships. T Levels fish in the same pond as A Levels. The most likely result of their effective enforcement and the removal of BTEC from the apprenticeship standards is that civil engineering will revert to the situation pre-2010 when it was an all graduate profession. Hey ho.
Very good piece. The spending dynamics point is probably the most powerful and influential driver of public policy in this country relative to the level of understanding among those engaged in developing it.
I'd also note the skills needed to: (i) develop ideas for better outcomes; (ii) understand why we have the outcomes we have; (iii) identify the barriers to those better outcomes; (iv) know how those barriers could be passed; (v) persuade and communicate the above to lots of people with different attitudes and interests: and (vi) manage a team to implement change, aligning interests and resolving conflicts (often across organisations) as you go are varied and rarely if ever found to a great degree in one person. And some are rarer and less glamorous than others.
It's not uncommon to read a report by a young sharp policy brain that comes to a concluded recommendation and then shrugs that this will require a level of political will that's been lacking for decades. "Not my problem, guv." But it is very much the problem for anyone who wants to take your idea forward! We should try to normalise thinking about what delivery compromises or wider political conditions would need to be true for policy ideas to be practicable.
I'd be interested to hear your diagnosis of why policies to increase the energy efficiency of homes has repeatedly failed. "The cheapest energy is that we don't need to use".
Would say it's all three actually.... requires public money at a significant level, requires overcoming practical barriers like labour force skills shortage and materials shortages that for the reasons in your misdiagnosis category often aren't addressed properly, and it requires public consent from groups politicians are afraid of (landlords)... There's also the delay between making the tough choices needed to implement the policy and reaping the electoral dividends from it in terms of lower energy bills, comfier homes, and improved energy security... Needs to be a year 1 priority for a govt to have hope of seeing benefits in time for following general election!
One way to break the inertia of policies not being tabled due to "fear of the electorate" is to allow the electorate to table specific policies. This is done in California. (See California ballot initiatives: https://oag.ca.gov/initiatives).
It has some negative side effects, such as ending up with two or more ballot propositions being in conflict, but over time, these are usually resolved. It can happen that special interest groups push ballot measures forward, but overall, I've seen grassroots citizens groups advocate and then pass effective policy solutions that the government would not have tried to discuss or pass.
It was most interesting reading this after coming across the O'Shaughnessy Report into Commercial Clinical Trials. This is a smaller issue of course than public health or educational qualifications, but your article helped articulate my unease when reading it. I thought the analysis by O'Shaughnessy is very good on the whole and it suggests a whole raft of actions and objectives to resolve the problems. And the Government have responded immediately with a fanfare of intentions and a lot of money to fund them. But (and I do work in this area) I just struggle how all this will translate into the actual change in processes, behaviours and infrastructure that will change the trajectory and shift the dial upwards. I *think* this is the same sort of thing you are talking about, or part of it at least.
The Council Tax example is really interesting. Out-of-date property and housing tax systems are a problem not only in the UK, but in almost any country you could care to name. As you’ve identified, the root cause is always the same - property prices have gone up, and updating the rules would mean people paying more taxes, which they don’t like.
What I’ve found, though, is that politicians from other countries can be more brazen about laying out this argument. In Italy, for instance, there’s been a big debate for the last few years about updating the land registry. The main counter argument has literally just been that people would pay more tax, and that it’s ipso facto a bad thing.
It’d be interesting then to see the extent to which these are general barriers to the most obvious policies that every western country faces, UK-specific ones, or ones that are present everywhere but to varying degrees. Every country has weird, Byzantine spending rules, for example, but this seems like less of a problem in France than in Germany or the UK.
I don't know enough about other countries to do this but I agree it would be valuable. A sort of comparative policy barriers index. Our Treasury is unusally powerful for various historic reasons so I think that differentiates us a bit.
I've occasionally commented on this Substack about the need for Systems Theory, but this post is an absolutely excellent example: the process of a policy going from an idea to reality is clearly a complex process, and the way it works turns out not to be the way you think it should! By careful observation Sam shines light on some of the complicating factors, but these insights still don't make the system easy to deal with, even if they give some ideas for tactics to improve your chances.
It's the exact opposite of "We hear how the NHS is short of beds. Why don’t managers put more in?" thinking, and we need more of it.
It's a fascinating post, and I think I find it a little less depressing than others do: I would expect such a complicated system to have these messes, but understanding the problems is the start of getting some control over them.
It’s not as though Parliament is short of time either. Very little seems to have been going on in the Commons since Easter, with numerous bank holidays and a break for the coronation. MPs don’t seem to do anything in the chamber on Monday mornings (travelling down), and it seems very quiet after Thursday lunchtime. They haven’t sat on several Fridays this spring. And yet all the parts of a controversial immigration bill were rammed through in a couple of days. Our Parliament is a theatre rather than a legislature. I’m afraid the Speaker doesn’t help here, being part of this performative nonsense.
Root cause? I come back to our voting system, creating two unstable, uneasy tribes, where one is always trying to put the other ‘on the spot’, rather than developing policy consensually
I really don’t think it’s the voting system. If you look at countries with PR systems and traditionally more consensual political cultures elsewhere, you find similar problems.
The examples I would point to are the Netherlands and Sweden. Both have been the embodiment of the kind of consensual political model you’ve talked about. But in both countries, it has become increasingly difficult to address longstanding policy problems. Even when you can find a way forward, it can take so much time that by the time you find a solution, the problem itself has changed, as has been the case with pension reform in the Netherlands.
Forming governments in both countries has also become increasingly difficult, and you find more and more polarisation. The Swedish Liberal party, to take one example, is currently getting hammered in the polls because it’s in a coalition that’s being supported by the far-right Sweden Democrats. In the Netherlands, D66 and the CDA are finding it very hard to stay in a coalition with each other without losing voters to their left and right respectively.
An excellent summary of some of the reasons why so many clearly needed changes never happen. I think you are right to say that we don't need new ideas - we need leaders with the courage to do at least some of the things that need doing. This probably requires a leader of great skill who can do what is unpopular or difficult at first without disastrously losing support. In my view the public is looking for radical solutions to the unhappiness and discontent so many feel - the Brexit vote reflected that - but selling and delivering that change would still be demanding. Come on Keir - you are only going to get one shot so go for it!
A really good post rich in thought-provoking insights. Great comments too. I would offer one complementary thought. In making & debating policy we don’t give enough thought to delivery. Your section on targets takes us in that direction. But there are questions about who/what is the delivery mechanism; what about the culture and approach of the deliverers; is the organisational design right; what does success look like; which are worth considering at an earlier stage in the policy development processes. Issues if you will around organisational design in a macro sense. Perhaps a link could be drawn here with James Plunkett’s emerging thinking about government as a platform: or perhaps designer and custodian of a series of platforms.
I think one thing I'd to this is the question of prioritisation - there's lots of things for government to do, and some things just aren't urgent or important enough to focus on. This is a particular problem in the UK when so much is centralised to the central government and so much then centralised within it to the Treasury and Downing Street. There's only so much thinking space and emotional energy to go round, which is why good policies don't get pushed. I think the examinations fiasco in 2020 is a classic example of this - it was a car crash coming a mile down but the government was structured in such a way that decisions only got made if a select few people were involved. It would have been absurd for Downing Street or the Treasury to be worrying about examinations at the height of a public health and economic emergency, but they should have been able to delegate it to somebody. But they couldn't so the whole system drifted towards disaster (that it happened in both England and Scotland I think shows that centralisation rather than Gavin Williamson's particular flaws was the key issue here)
This is why a more decentralised system should allow for more good policy to be implemented - be that more regional government or reforming the cabinet so individual ministers can develop policy. A metro system for Leeds is never going to be the most important thing for the Treasury to work through - indeed it shouldn't be because the gains for the UK as a whole are so small. But it would be a big deal for Yorkshire regional government.
And yet things can be done if you have the right momentum from both ministers and civil service. Back when I was at The Guardian, in 2006 I launched a campaign called "Free Our Data", which advocated making non-personal data held by government free for commercial or personal reuse. (The "non-personal" part is VERY important, obvs.) An example would be map data from Ordnance Survey, which is run as a little company inside government - a "trading fund".
We slogged along for years without much to show for it, until the Brown government in 2010, when Tom Watson became Cabinet Office minister, and was completely in tune with what we wanted to do. There were also some civil servants who thought it was a good idea.
Tom really pushed things through: OS objected strenuously, but he recruited other ministers to the cause and got momentum for this change to happen. Bear in mind that it would blow a hole in OS's budget, so would require Treasury to approve it (or at least not disapprove it). It did help too that Tim Berners-Lee told Gordon Brown at a dinner that this was a good idea and should go ahead.
There were studies and costings and examinations and so on, but in the end it was about pulling the trigger. And just before the 2010 election, the Brown government did, as part of a bigger opening up of data. It helped that the Tories were also looking at the idea, so there was a competitive element.
Some of that was about the timing: in 2010 the whole "internet everywhere" was taking off through mobile, which meant apps, which meant location and and also companies setting up to take advantage of the growing appetite for smartphones and apps.
But the remarkable thing is that it might have been a policy which had never been tried before, so your question of "why didn't this work the last time?" never arose. The one question that did stump me when I first talked about FOD in public was when Tom Steinberg of MySociety, who had civil service experience, said "How can I make the financial case for making this data free to Treasury?"
Only later - jeu d'escalier - did I think of the GPS system, where the US government funds the satellites that then provide navigation for cars and people; the former saves far more in time/ delays/etc than it costs. Finding those sorts of multipliers is tricky when you're first doing policy.
Thanks for indulging me. But I think there is a lesson: a good policy finds its time, and its champion, so perhaps it's worth trying again just because "this time it's right". FOD could never have worked before the internet, before widespread availability of mobiles.
The one part where we failed was getting postcodes included as part of the free data. Apparently that was down to Vince Cable at some point post-2010. Arse.
There's another post I need to do at some point on how to influence effectively - one part of getting ideas implemented - and this is a v good example.
Really good. One of the big obvious policy solutions to sewage in the rivers is retrofit sustainable drainage systems. Hasn't happened because it needs to be delivered jointly by local government and water companies. This government just seems to hate local government and be obsessed with starving them of funds. Setting local government free, funding it, and setting some regulations around this, would go a long way to starting to tackle this issue.
In California, policy solutions to this kind of problem are often passed through ballot initiatives that are brought forward by citizens groups. They have to collect enough signatures, and if they do so, they can force a ballot measure into an election.
https://oag.ca.gov/initiatives
There is a related problem when a new initiative (eg prevention in health) will only give you payback some time in the future. So for a time you have to pay for both the old costs of ill health and the costs of making improvements for the future.
Also, for individuals, it is hard to measure positive health outcomes as connected to preventive health care. Most people don't credit the preventive health care they have received with the fact that they didn't get cancer, diabetes, heart disease, or whatever.
This, and counting things to prove performance. The best way to grow new woodland is to let existing ones naturally regenerate. But it's harder to count what's grown, and "prove" you have planted trees. So it isn't funded, and hardly happens through government schemes.
Back to T Levels. I’ve been arguing against parity of esteem for 20 years. Qualifications should be understood by those who know and use them. In civil engineering there has been a great, long-standing relationship between Pearson/BTEC/Employers/FE/HE/professional bodies. They broadened access for basically students who are later developers/able to get to degree level but slower/ able to enter the career at a lower level and work their way up. We linked BTEC to our apprenticeships. T Levels fish in the same pond as A Levels. The most likely result of their effective enforcement and the removal of BTEC from the apprenticeship standards is that civil engineering will revert to the situation pre-2010 when it was an all graduate profession. Hey ho.
Very good piece. The spending dynamics point is probably the most powerful and influential driver of public policy in this country relative to the level of understanding among those engaged in developing it.
I'd also note the skills needed to: (i) develop ideas for better outcomes; (ii) understand why we have the outcomes we have; (iii) identify the barriers to those better outcomes; (iv) know how those barriers could be passed; (v) persuade and communicate the above to lots of people with different attitudes and interests: and (vi) manage a team to implement change, aligning interests and resolving conflicts (often across organisations) as you go are varied and rarely if ever found to a great degree in one person. And some are rarer and less glamorous than others.
It's not uncommon to read a report by a young sharp policy brain that comes to a concluded recommendation and then shrugs that this will require a level of political will that's been lacking for decades. "Not my problem, guv." But it is very much the problem for anyone who wants to take your idea forward! We should try to normalise thinking about what delivery compromises or wider political conditions would need to be true for policy ideas to be practicable.
I'd be interested to hear your diagnosis of why policies to increase the energy efficiency of homes has repeatedly failed. "The cheapest energy is that we don't need to use".
Probably comes into the "fear of the electorate" category. Cameron taking the green levy off bills killed home insulation.
Would say it's all three actually.... requires public money at a significant level, requires overcoming practical barriers like labour force skills shortage and materials shortages that for the reasons in your misdiagnosis category often aren't addressed properly, and it requires public consent from groups politicians are afraid of (landlords)... There's also the delay between making the tough choices needed to implement the policy and reaping the electoral dividends from it in terms of lower energy bills, comfier homes, and improved energy security... Needs to be a year 1 priority for a govt to have hope of seeing benefits in time for following general election!
Yes and also ideally delivered through local government which the government hates and will not fund.
Sorry to have to say that none of this is confined to Jolly Olde John Bull; the main difference being its even worse on this side of the ocean.
One way to break the inertia of policies not being tabled due to "fear of the electorate" is to allow the electorate to table specific policies. This is done in California. (See California ballot initiatives: https://oag.ca.gov/initiatives).
It has some negative side effects, such as ending up with two or more ballot propositions being in conflict, but over time, these are usually resolved. It can happen that special interest groups push ballot measures forward, but overall, I've seen grassroots citizens groups advocate and then pass effective policy solutions that the government would not have tried to discuss or pass.
It was most interesting reading this after coming across the O'Shaughnessy Report into Commercial Clinical Trials. This is a smaller issue of course than public health or educational qualifications, but your article helped articulate my unease when reading it. I thought the analysis by O'Shaughnessy is very good on the whole and it suggests a whole raft of actions and objectives to resolve the problems. And the Government have responded immediately with a fanfare of intentions and a lot of money to fund them. But (and I do work in this area) I just struggle how all this will translate into the actual change in processes, behaviours and infrastructure that will change the trajectory and shift the dial upwards. I *think* this is the same sort of thing you are talking about, or part of it at least.
The Council Tax example is really interesting. Out-of-date property and housing tax systems are a problem not only in the UK, but in almost any country you could care to name. As you’ve identified, the root cause is always the same - property prices have gone up, and updating the rules would mean people paying more taxes, which they don’t like.
What I’ve found, though, is that politicians from other countries can be more brazen about laying out this argument. In Italy, for instance, there’s been a big debate for the last few years about updating the land registry. The main counter argument has literally just been that people would pay more tax, and that it’s ipso facto a bad thing.
It’d be interesting then to see the extent to which these are general barriers to the most obvious policies that every western country faces, UK-specific ones, or ones that are present everywhere but to varying degrees. Every country has weird, Byzantine spending rules, for example, but this seems like less of a problem in France than in Germany or the UK.
I don't know enough about other countries to do this but I agree it would be valuable. A sort of comparative policy barriers index. Our Treasury is unusally powerful for various historic reasons so I think that differentiates us a bit.
VAT on construction and the penalty of refurbish not new build. Time to take action as promoted for many years.
I've occasionally commented on this Substack about the need for Systems Theory, but this post is an absolutely excellent example: the process of a policy going from an idea to reality is clearly a complex process, and the way it works turns out not to be the way you think it should! By careful observation Sam shines light on some of the complicating factors, but these insights still don't make the system easy to deal with, even if they give some ideas for tactics to improve your chances.
It's the exact opposite of "We hear how the NHS is short of beds. Why don’t managers put more in?" thinking, and we need more of it.
It's a fascinating post, and I think I find it a little less depressing than others do: I would expect such a complicated system to have these messes, but understanding the problems is the start of getting some control over them.
It’s not as though Parliament is short of time either. Very little seems to have been going on in the Commons since Easter, with numerous bank holidays and a break for the coronation. MPs don’t seem to do anything in the chamber on Monday mornings (travelling down), and it seems very quiet after Thursday lunchtime. They haven’t sat on several Fridays this spring. And yet all the parts of a controversial immigration bill were rammed through in a couple of days. Our Parliament is a theatre rather than a legislature. I’m afraid the Speaker doesn’t help here, being part of this performative nonsense.
Root cause? I come back to our voting system, creating two unstable, uneasy tribes, where one is always trying to put the other ‘on the spot’, rather than developing policy consensually
I really don’t think it’s the voting system. If you look at countries with PR systems and traditionally more consensual political cultures elsewhere, you find similar problems.
The examples I would point to are the Netherlands and Sweden. Both have been the embodiment of the kind of consensual political model you’ve talked about. But in both countries, it has become increasingly difficult to address longstanding policy problems. Even when you can find a way forward, it can take so much time that by the time you find a solution, the problem itself has changed, as has been the case with pension reform in the Netherlands.
Forming governments in both countries has also become increasingly difficult, and you find more and more polarisation. The Swedish Liberal party, to take one example, is currently getting hammered in the polls because it’s in a coalition that’s being supported by the far-right Sweden Democrats. In the Netherlands, D66 and the CDA are finding it very hard to stay in a coalition with each other without losing voters to their left and right respectively.
An excellent summary of some of the reasons why so many clearly needed changes never happen. I think you are right to say that we don't need new ideas - we need leaders with the courage to do at least some of the things that need doing. This probably requires a leader of great skill who can do what is unpopular or difficult at first without disastrously losing support. In my view the public is looking for radical solutions to the unhappiness and discontent so many feel - the Brexit vote reflected that - but selling and delivering that change would still be demanding. Come on Keir - you are only going to get one shot so go for it!
A really good post rich in thought-provoking insights. Great comments too. I would offer one complementary thought. In making & debating policy we don’t give enough thought to delivery. Your section on targets takes us in that direction. But there are questions about who/what is the delivery mechanism; what about the culture and approach of the deliverers; is the organisational design right; what does success look like; which are worth considering at an earlier stage in the policy development processes. Issues if you will around organisational design in a macro sense. Perhaps a link could be drawn here with James Plunkett’s emerging thinking about government as a platform: or perhaps designer and custodian of a series of platforms.
I think one thing I'd to this is the question of prioritisation - there's lots of things for government to do, and some things just aren't urgent or important enough to focus on. This is a particular problem in the UK when so much is centralised to the central government and so much then centralised within it to the Treasury and Downing Street. There's only so much thinking space and emotional energy to go round, which is why good policies don't get pushed. I think the examinations fiasco in 2020 is a classic example of this - it was a car crash coming a mile down but the government was structured in such a way that decisions only got made if a select few people were involved. It would have been absurd for Downing Street or the Treasury to be worrying about examinations at the height of a public health and economic emergency, but they should have been able to delegate it to somebody. But they couldn't so the whole system drifted towards disaster (that it happened in both England and Scotland I think shows that centralisation rather than Gavin Williamson's particular flaws was the key issue here)
This is why a more decentralised system should allow for more good policy to be implemented - be that more regional government or reforming the cabinet so individual ministers can develop policy. A metro system for Leeds is never going to be the most important thing for the Treasury to work through - indeed it shouldn't be because the gains for the UK as a whole are so small. But it would be a big deal for Yorkshire regional government.