How have White Papers changed in 30 years?

Reading the 1993 science & technology White Paper because why not

Because I’m that fun kind of guy, this week I was reading the 1993 White Paper Realising Our Potential, on science & technology.¹ I thought it was interesting to contrast some of the differences between it and modern strategy documents or white papers produced by the government; not in the sense of the implications for R&D policy, although that was why I originally read it. Instead this post is about how the document itself has changed. I haven’t looked at any other white papers from around the same time, so I’m assuming that this one is fairly representative.

The most immediately obvious difference is that the 1993 paper is visually very boring. It’s a plain typeset document, with numbered paragraphs. There are no pictures at all, and relatively few other embellishments. There are few obvious traces of a ‘communications’ strategy or imprint on it. There are few case studies, for example, and they are used primarily to inform rather than to celebrate. The language is overall more direct. There are few lines that might appear in a boastful conference speech, for example. 

This directness of tone extends to the content too. The paper takes on many alternative ideas or counterarguments and addresses why the government disagrees with this point of view. Today, this sort of openness to critique is rare. Government strategy documents rarely directly acknowledge disagreements. Even when presenting an argument that is clearly informed by alternatives, the conclusion will be presented as the natural conclusion of the facts, with no need to actively counter alternatives.

There is a lot less data in the 1993 paper than in today’s strategy documents. There are facts and figures, but they are few and far between. By contrast, today’s documents burst with figures, tables, graphs and economic analysis. This is partly technological, in that it would have been a hassle to print lots of tables and graphs in a mostly pre-digital world. In 1993 parts of the document could have been written on a word processor, but there was not widespread use of graphs and tables as standard. There were also far fewer quantitative analysts in the civil service. Despite the increase in data and evidence, the policy arguments haven’t moved on all that much - we’re still debating the same issues today as are picked up in this paper.

Another surprising thing is how much the paper focuses on governance and administration rather than what we might today call ‘policies’. The paper is mostly about rather dry topics such as the organisation of departments and committees, and the split of responsibilities between them. In 1993, government ‘policy’ had much the same definition as it might in a private business, e.g. a privacy or HR policy. Policy was the government’s approach to the administration of a particular issue. Today ‘policy’ is often used more like a tangible noun. A policy is a thing that has been announced, often a policy scheme which provides some funding or achieves a particular goal. There is much less of a sense today of an ongoing administrative role for government that strategy documents are shaping. Government is still playing that ongoing role, it just appears less in policy documents.

Realising our potential is less problem-driven than today’s papers. Whilst it does come down on the side of certain changes and interventions, there is not a sense that something is wrong and the paper is responding to that with fixes. The paper is not about a problem - it is about an area of government and society. It is about science and technology, in all its forms and purposes. There may be problems related to this, but it is only about those to the extent that they must be addressed by a paper on science and technology. It’s less obvious from the paper itself what it is responding to and what the political driver behind it is; those reading it are presumed to know the context.

Related to the above is that the document covers everything the government is doing in relation to the area. There are references to schemes that have been running for a few years, and the government doesn’t intend to touch. One of the schemes, Link, connects academics and businesses and I only heard about it through this, but a search online suggests one research council is still independently running a Link scheme. These days a lot of strategy documents cover what the government is going to do over the next few years. There is less of an attempt to comprehensively set out everything the government does, although this varies between policy areas. Some of this may relate to the scope of government activity increasing, but I also expect it is a change to focusing more on novelty and less on ongoing administration.

Lastly, I have one observation that may be more particular to R&D policy. As I said, Realising our potential is about everything science and technology related in government. This includes the science base and science for the economy (modern day BEIS leads), science for defence (MoD), science and technology for civil departments (Go-Science), international science (BEIS and FCDO), the supply of science skills (BEIS and DfE). Nowadays, these issues are often split up between multiple different strategies, e.g. the Integrated Review for defence. As I say, I think this is partially about the policy areas, as some other areas have more one-stop-shop strategy documents (like the Integrated Review!) Science policy used to be a Cabinet Office lead, whereas these days it is split up between departments, albeit with some central coordinating committees.

I have focused above on the differences between this old paper and modern government strategy documents. If I had to summarise these differences, it’s that modern policy papers are much more clearly written with a public and media audience in mind. However, my overall impression is one of a lack of change rather than a radical break. The differences are mostly surface-level, and don’t change the overall sense of what the document is doing or the policy debates it engages with. 

I’m interested in reading the 1971 Rothshild and Dainton reports on R&D as well, but unfortunately those aren’t available online. If I ever get around to visiting a library they’re in, I may make a follow-up.

1. Other people like to look at headlines from around the time they were born. I read government White Papers. What are you looking at nerds, you’re reading this blog!