Two new reports on policymaking reform
The IfG and Jonathan Slater have blessed us with content
Apologies, this somehow reached almost 3,000 words. I think I had blogging withdrawal.
In the past week, Whitehall watchers have been treated to two separate reports on reforming policymaking in the civil service. The first, by the Institute for Government, comes alongside another paper on a statutory role for the civil service, led by Alex Thomas who amongst other roles in the civil service was Jeremy Heywood’s principal private secretary. The second comes from Jonathan Slater, former permanent secretary at the Department for Education, where he was also head of the policy profession for the civil service. Whilst recognising that these authors are far better qualified than I am to discuss such topics, I couldn’t resist the urge to provide my thoughts about them. And as usual on this blog, I think I come across as pretty critical of the works I’m reviewing, but the reason I’m bothering to review them is because I think they have a lot of worthwhile things to say.
The IfG paper, or I Still Haven’t Decided If I Want to Apply to Their Vacancy
Better policy making draws on over a decade of IfG research, as well as a series of recent discussions with policy makers past and present. The first half is in many ways a summary of the received analysis in Whitehall policy reform, which hasn’t changed much since the 1968 Fulton Report. The main problems are:
Short-termism
A lack of specialist knowledge in policy areas
Poor implementation
Poor cross-government working
‘Whitehall parochialism’, i.e. the government is detached from the frontline and external expertise.
Solutions are always the area where these types of reports tend to diverge from each other a bit. The IfG focuses on three broad areas. The first is improving accountability for policy advice, decisions and outcomes. This means greater accountability for both ministers and officials for the decisions they make and advice they provide. The second area is more expertise and the right skills in the civil service. The third is around structural reforms to strengthen the centre of government to broker more effectively between departments. There’s nothing wrong with any of this - there’s a reason every single report about Whitehall policymaking for the past 50 years has covered the same ground. But I’m not sure it quite gets to the heart of the issue.
I’ll start with some minor quibbles before my substantive disagreement. The call for a stronger centre is a common one, yet often those working in a line department feel trodden on by the centre. The problem is that the centre is simultaneously too big but too weak. A stronger centre is not a bigger centre with more demands that distract line departments. Instead it is a smaller centre, which holds departments to account for big things without micromanaging them. I also think that especially in middle-management, people already anchor their career around policy specialisms. It’s just that decision-making power is in the hands of senior civil servants (of which there are fewer roles, so it’s inherently harder to progress whilst staying specialised) or in central departments (which don’t have the resources to specialise).
However, the main thing missing for me is that all this analysis is about the supply of policy advice and none of it is about the demand for policy advice. The big problem from the ground as I see it is that a smart person can in one or two years amass more expertise in a policy area than the system typically demands. From then on, becoming more of an expert is only more demoralising as there’s no benefit accruing to you but you realise more and more why things are wrong. I say ‘the system demands’ very deliberately - any individual minister or senior civil servant would always want you to have more expertise at any moment in time. The IfG aren’t unaware of this - their report on using evidence in energy policy is quoted in this paper and explicitly makes the choice not to cover demand. They also reference a paper by Jill Rutter, still at the IfG, which discusses this with regard to evidence and evaluation and concludes that demand is probably the bigger problem. Yet they still mainly describe it as an issue of supply.
To be fair, better accountability is primarily a demand response. Currently the main demand for advice comes from senior officials and ministers, who are all too busy to be experts in its quality, or spend time sending it back for improvements. Improving the accountability for policy advice is about making sure people will be rewarded in line with its quality, because it will get more scrutiny from Parliament, senior managers or the public.
However, their proposals on accountability land fairly softly. “Ministers should be accountable over a longer period”, “there should be a stronger dedicated head of policy in each government department who is accountable for the overall quality of the department’s policy advice.” I suspect the IfG are pulling their punches a bit here, in order to land somewhere they consider achievable. Proposing big reforms makes them easier to dismiss as pipe dreams, and harder to pitch. The problem is that by pulling their punches, they leave plenty of room for suggestions to be delivered in name but not in practice. A frequent issue in organisations is people following the letter of the rules without actually changing their practice. The more incremental and bureaucratic the reform, the easier it is to ignore or game.
I’ll return to thinking about the demand for high quality policy advice later, but first want to discuss the other paper.
The Jonathan Slater Paper, or Hey Wasn’t This Your Job
Jonathan Slater’s Fixing Whitehall’s broken policy machine repeats all of the same criticisms, so I won’t restate the problem. He probably places more emphasis on the disconnect between policymakers and customers/citizens/the real world. This reflects his background in local government and chimes a lot with me. I only spent a year in local government, but it was the first year of my career. My next job, whilst in the civil service, was in an operational delivery team, in fact working at the interface between policy development and operations. Formative experiences exhibit far stronger influence than later ones, and I agree with Slater that this time has made me a better civil servant than if my first job had been in Whitehall policy.
He writes that most previous papers don’t get to the root cause of the issue, which is that what matters is what gets rewarded. This is an explicitly demand-focused explanation, and is completely right. If people are rewarded for being fixers and courtiers, the civil service will produce that. If people are rewarded for producing accurate and informed policy advice, then the civil service will produce that. Although this does focus on macro-level incentives rather than the incentive for any individual piece of advice.
Slater recognises something else that chimes well with this blog - the civil service bears more responsibility for reforming itself than it sometimes lets on. If every criticism of the civil service was a criticism of ministers, I wouldn’t feel comfortable writing any of this - civil servants aren’t allowed to criticise ministers and this blog isn’t an exposé. The civil service is responsible for managing itself, within the boundaries of government policy. Those bounds leave a lot of room for manoeuvre and the civil service sometimes avoids grasping the opportunity for reform.
The audience for this paper is quite clearly his former permanent secretary colleagues. The first and main recommendation is for sustained leadership from the top of the civil service to solve the problems of policymaking. In particular he urges them to reward civil servants based on meaningful changes they have delivered on the ground, rather than ministerial edicts they have met in Whitehall. He emphasises that this must come from the top, and made this even clearer during the launch event. He suggests we follow Singapore’s lead and say anyone getting to permanent secretary must have spent at least 3 years managing something big and operational. This is great - a hard, demand-focused rule for encouraging policymakers to understand delivery.
The second branch of his recommendations focuses on improving civil service accountability. This would be done by making it much clearer that civil servants should be accountable to Parliamentary select committees for their advice. He also thinks that civil service advice should be accountable to the public, although he isn’t prescriptive on how this should happen. Should it all be published by default? Should senior civil servants be expected to publicly discuss their advice in an open meeting? He points to New Zealand who publish their advice after a decision has been made, and says that the civil service should do this earlier, as the advice is being given. He claims that Parliament can insist on this, as is its right, but I’m not really sure what Parliament should be insisting here. Yes, they can force the publication of specific pieces of advice, but it’s unclear they can force all advice to be developed in public without a majority. This sort of reform appears to need the support of ministers, which goes against the theme of the rest of the paper that these things don’t need ministerial support. I agree that this would improve the quality of civil service advice, but this is a more radical political change than the rest of the paper and I think Slater tries to hide that.
At the launch event of Slater’s paper, I pushed him on the question of why he hadn’t managed to change things when he was in Whitehall and there were maybe only 3 officials in a better position to change the policy profession. His defence was essentially that he had managed to make gradual differences in DfE, although there had been some backsliding. And that this reform required continued effort and leadership from across the civil service. I sympathise a lot with this response - reform is hard and takes time and leadership. But I also find it somewhat disappointing. My reaction is sort of “is that it?” I admire the call to arms, but relying on willpower when incentives are against change feels anti-climactic. I don’t see how this is sustainable over an entire generation of civil servants, when Slater and Gus O’Donnell seem to think we’ve already gone backwards a bit since they left.
For changes to stick and be meaningful, the incentives need to change. Some of this can come from senior leaders changing how they act, but a lot of the incentives come from how the system is organised. Perhaps Slater thinks that in the short-term, the best thing is to get civil service leadership to seriously put their weight behind the problem - once they do, it’s their job to find out how to change the system to improve incentives. Slater is setting out the strategy, the civil service can worry about the implementation. I see some merit in this, but at the same time Slater complains about how the civil service isn’t very good at implementation, so maybe he could give them some ideas to start with.
How might we change incentives? A big one for me would be encouraging the most junior relevant official to advise on policy. I get the sense that years ago, junior officials would frequently brief ministers. These days, mainly senior civil servants (typically 10+ years into their career) do the bulk of the briefing. Partly this is a result of the expansion of the civil service meaning there are more SCS, but roughly the same number of ministers. There’s only so much time with ministers, so naturally this is taken up by SCS. But it doesn’t encourage junior staff to develop expertise, as they know they won’t be the ones briefing the minister. If you want to see how Whitehall really works at a junior grade, you move to a private office or the central departments because that’s the only place you can actually see how things work (and be noticed by people who can advance your career). Slater actually made this point at the launch event, saying something like “if you’re an ambitious grade 7 in the civil service, you feel a pull to go towards the centre to progress your career”. He then reached his hand through the computer screen, grabbed me by the lapel and whispered in my ear “that’s right, I’m talking to you, buddy.”
Another aspect is bringing ministers into the management of government. We have a distinction of responsibilities between ministers who decide and civil servants who manage. But as both papers point out, this distinction between policy decisions and implementation and management is counter-productive. I’m not just talking about managing delivery, but also managing the policy process - civil servants keep this mostly within their sphere of influence. The problem is that every ministerial decision impacts upon the management of the civil service, by shaping priorities and what staff are working on. I’m sure it happens on occasion, but I have rarely heard of a civil servant explaining to a minister the consequences of their decisions for the management of the staff and other resources in their department (except where decisions are explicitly about workforce issues). Civil servants need to help ministers understand what it takes to make good policy. I suspect a lot of this stems from fear of seeming to delay. Saying “yes we can do that in one month, but give us three months and we’ll get you a better outcome” sounds like getting in the way of things. Explaining these things is not about making ministers in charge of management, it’s just about explaining the full consequences of their decisions.
The above suggestions are still fairly soft and cultural, however. My bigger answer to this question is going to come in my response to this year’s Bennett Prospect Prize is about “what is a 21st century civil service for?” My answer there touches a lot of the ground of these two papers, as well as the IfG’s paper on a statutory role for the civil service. I was worried when these papers came out my essay would look plagiarised. Whilst it covers similar ground, I think it holds up as suitably original. I’ll publish it here once the judging is over.
Addendum: the root cause of low demand for quality policy advice?
Note: I am further outside of my area of expertise than usual in this section. It should be considered speculative musings.
The easy answer to the question of demand is to pin the blame on ministers. If only ministers cared about the quality of advice, civil servants would produce better advice. Instead, they are interested in fixers who can get them out of a tight spot. But as Jonathan Slater says, this is rarely true of ministers. Whilst they do want people to get them out of trouble, they tend to respect civil servants who actually have deep knowledge and capability. Ministers certainly have a lot of influence - Slater seems to skim over the fact that they have a lot of influence over the recruitment of top civil servants these days. From my perspective, concluding that demand for policy advice comes from ministers is stopping one step short in the causal chain.
So what is the source of the demand for high-quality policy advice? For me, this is due to the state of public discourse. Frankly, most public discourse is incredibly shoddy. The best ideas do not get amplified and commentators flit from crisis to crisis rather than addressing long-term issues. I’m not just blaming the media here, although they play their role. The entire system of public discourse seems to work against reasoned, expert debate and open, inclusive customer or citizen consultation.1 The job of government is solving collective action problems, but we’ve somehow eroded our ability to collectively act. This blog post is not the place to get into the big debate about why this has happened. I just think it’s worth bringing up because it seems to me to be a leading cause of government mistakes. The absence of questions about the quality of public discourse from discussions about policymaking seems baffling to me. Policy civil servants spend a lot of their time worrying and panicking about what might get said or leaked publicly about their policy area, and yet writing about policymaking rarely acknowledges this. It’s typically relegated to another part of political debate - no, that’s not about how government works, that’s in the box marked ‘society, social media and culture wars’. It’s like there’s this line between “how to run government” and “how to promote a healthy society” and the line is somewhere in the few hundred metres of Westminster between the IfG and Demos headquarters.
Another aspect of this is that some people have forgotten what government is for. I set out my thoughts previously on Polly Mackenzie’s writing on how to improve policymaking and the humble policymaker. I stick by what I said there, but I think the argument for greater democratic participation is actually strongest when based on public understanding of democracy. When there was a lot of local participatory democracy, people had a frame of reference for understanding national politics. These days, most people don’t participate in any politics at all, so are able to detach national politics either into a tribal competition or as a manager to be appealed to. It’s not so much that national politics would be improved by public participation because the public have great views on how planning policy should be reformed, or even that devolving the decision locally will improve things because it’s better delivered locally. It’s just about people being able to understand what the national government is for.
This was really good. I read the Slater piece with a certain amount of bemusement to be honest - very little that was genuinely new and as Roy Keane would say: 'That's your job'. Increasingly feel as if the civil service reform debate has been done to death - we know the problems, we know (perhaps a bit less) what needs to be done - so we should really be asking constantly 'who is blocking change and why'? Slater's piece like a lot of others seems to pull punches when it comes to answering this... Good luck with the Bennett prize!