Progressive governments must build the capability for joined-up policy-making
The UK Labour government was elected with a perfectly reasonable diagnosis that the country was in urgent need of national renewal, and that this could not be delivered overnight. They nevertheless promised to start the job of delivering the change the country needs.
We are now almost two years into the term of the government, and the polls indicate that voters do not believe that the government is on track to keep its promise. And the statistics on cost-of-living, economic growth, and the state of public services suggest that, on current policies, voters are right to be sceptical.
This article asks: how could the government improve its policy-making and keep its promise to the British people?
In short, to succeed, the government must build the capability to see the big picture, think about it holistically and analyse and formulate policy systemically:
- The government is getting many little things right, but it is missing the big picture of what will make voters feel that national renewal is on-track;
- On the biggest issues, there are many areas in which policy undermines the objectives in another area – the lack of joined up policy will prevent delivery;
- The government therefore urgently needs to build capability for joined-up policy
The government is missing the big picture
Members of the government are working hard to keep their manifesto promises. The fact-checking organisation Full Fact has a tracker following the progress on “92 key pledges” from Labour’s manifesto. Of these, 19 are achieved already, 18 appear on track, 23 are in progress, 7 appear off-track, 5 have clearly not been kept and a further 20 are still to become clear. That sounds pretty good, and it seems that the government believes that it is on-track overall.
Part of the problem lies in the idea that these are 92 key pledges. Some of them are clearly vitally important, for example:
- “The government will deliver a milestone of higher living standards in every part of the United Kingdom by the end of the Parliament”
- “Labour will get Britain building again … with 5 million new homes over the next parliament”
- “Kickstart economic growth to secure the highest sustained growth in the G7”
If those were delivered, voters would almost certainly feel that renewal had begun.
But others are clearly less vital, for example:
- “We will introduce a Football Governance Bill, which will establish an independent regulator to ensure financial sustainability of football clubs in England”
- “We will immediately update the National Policy Planning Framework to undo damaging Conservative changes, including restoring mandatory housing targets”
- “Labour will end the VAT exemption and business rates relief for private schools”
Unfortunately, the vitally important pledges are all off-track while the less vital ones are those which have been delivered.
Having 92 key priorities is functionally equivalent to having none. If something is going wrong with one pledge, you just deliver another. It makes it impossible to have a determined focus on the really vital issues. As a result, the government runs a grave risk of being perceived like Biden’s administration: well-meaning, but ineffective on the biggest issues like the cost-of-living crisis.
A lack of joined up policy will prevent delivery
Part of the problem with the really big issues is simply that they are so big. Because of their size and complexity, they are interrelated with many other areas. And that means each policy has knock-on effects which need to be understood and handled in policy terms.
We can see that there are numerous examples of policy in one area undermining the achievement of vital objectives in another.
The first two of these issues in depth have been assessed in detail by 99% project members: our recent paper on Rewiring for Success, presented in Parliament in February, explains the way the Bank of England’s remit works against progressive initiatives and against the interests of 99% of British citizens; and this article, which over the last week has become extremely relevant again as oil prices are set to rise further, sets out in detail the problems with the way we currently handle inflation and the risks that we will repeat the mistakes of last time. And our reports on the NHS have shown the extremely high cost of failing to fund the NHS in line with need: If the NHS fails, the UK economy will fail with it.
We have been able to assess the interactions; the government must also start to do so.
The UK must build capability for joined-up policy analysis
To tackle these issues is not straightforward, which is why our politicians have not tackled the problem already.
The first challenge is simply to acknowledge that the problem exists – and that can be politically difficult.
The second challenge is to think systemically about them. This diagram is taken from our first NHS report, and it shows the complexity of the cause-and-effect relationships which exist in the real world.
Some people find such a diagram overwhelming. But even those who find it helpful to see the cause-and-effect relationships mapped-out like this cannot easily say what they imply. The way things play out over time (the ‘dynamics’ of the system) are not self-evident; they are an emergent property of the system.
| Why humans are poor at predicting systems’ outcomes
Even a far simpler set of causes and effects, like those for the spread of an epidemic, is hard for a human being to process. Epidemiologists often use a (relatively) simple ‘Susceptible, Infected, Recovered’ (SIR) model to analyse the spread of an epidemic. In its simplest form, there are two main chains of cause and effect in an SIR model: one to do with infection and one to do with recovery.
But even in this simpler case, the implications of the cause-and-effect relationships are counter-intuitive to many people. In the early stages of an epidemic, the relationships imply that the growth is roughly exponential (the epidemic grows at a constant percentage per day – it starts negligibly small but builds up to a very high rate). Epidemiologists know this well, but not everyone finds it easy to believe. In the early stages of COVID, the Conservative MP, Sir Desmond Swayne, called for Patrick Vallance and Chris Witty, the two senior scientists, to be sacked for showing a chart which said that, unchecked, the virus might kill 200,000 people and calling for government intervention to prevent the spread. He claimed that they had no sense of proportion and that their numbers were implausible. They were, of course, right; and he was wrong. |
So systems thinking alone is not enough: to formulate sound policy, we must be able to analyse the behaviour of these systems, or we will fail to understand the world – and our policies may be self-defeating.
In many business problems, it can be a valid (and powerful approach) to take a large complex problem and decompose it into smaller problems each of which is easier to analyse, and then reassemble the small solutions into an overall solution to the larger problem. This is the reductionist approach. But even in business, there are systems with emergent properties that make this approach invalid, for example project management.
In government, the need to think holistically is greater as, unlike a business, the government is (or should be) responsible for the results of its actions on society, not just on a small set of stakeholders. As the examples in the table above show, current (and past) government policies are riddled with interactions which means that one policy, if pursued vigorously, can damage the achievement of other policy objectives.
For the government to deliver renewal, it must first stop shooting itself in the foot.
Conclusion
In our Working Paper on Rewiring for Success, we called for a new Department of National Strategy, to address these problems. The Treasury should conform to and support national strategy, and its performance should be measured on how well it does that. Today, national strategy has to conform to Treasury rules – and there is no measure of how well the Treasury is performing.
We pointed out that a wide range of skills, including but not limited to the analysis of complex systems would be needed in this Department. And we said that these skills were not currently present in government (or else we would not be where we are).
This makes addressing the challenges difficult. But it can be done: the discipline of System Dynamics emerged specifically to help with this kind of challenge, and with the emergence of new technologies, it is becoming more feasible to apply to a wider variety of real-world problems. Other countries have strategy departments with these capabilities. We should, too.
A government which wishes only to shrink the state and leave the outcomes to the markets neither wants nor needs the capabilities we have described; but any government which wishes to deliver outcomes that benefit the entire population needs to build these capabilities.
We are working on how to make these skills transferable and scalable, to enable a progressive government to deliver on its promises.
If you think this is important, please share the article widely.
And take a look at the 99% Organisation, and join us.
2 comments so far
I found this article to be a beautifully balanced appraisal of our current situation. Your point about the competence of ministers and their supporting organisations to deal with such complex issues is well made. I am aware of your efforts to be heard and to offer support for change but what feedback are you getting? How receptive is Rachel Reeves to your advice? She presides over the leading issue – getting the economy to perform and finance all other desirables. I don’t see any evidence of that. I would add that overpopulation is at the root of many of our other problems. Who is dealing with that?
Our biggest challenge is to get access to the Front Bench. Since Labour came to power, we have had no direct contact with Rachel Reeves — and that, as you say, is critical to do.