Policy by Design

An excerpt from Stand & Deliver: A Design For Successful Government (2014) Ed Straw

Professional policymaking prevents piss-poor performance.
Adaptation of a workplace homily

Next up for the Treaty are policymaking and the means to get many more good decisions produced by the system of government. Stringent feedback is of itself a powerful control on the quality and quantity of policymaking and decision taking. Knowing that poor results will come back to bite you would discipline governments, ministers, civil servants, lobbies, newspapers, advisers, academics, and think tanks. This is vital – but after the event. Policy discipline would be there to get more right in the first place. The more we get right going into the pipe, the less needs to be corrected at the other end. ‘Policy by design’ is intended to get as much right as possible going in. So how do we get good decisions?

The Monetary Policy Committee’s model for decision-making is instructive: It was set up to depoliticise the task of setting interest rates. Five members are from the top posts of the Bank of England, and four are appointed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It meets monthly. Its members discuss and vote. The minutes and votes of each member are published – disagreements, opposing views, changes of mind. It is transparent. Expert commentators join this dialogue through the press, and in explanations to parliamentary committees. Each member’s personal constituency joins too back at the university, bank, partnership, or other place of work. Transparency brings a lot of knowledge, experience, and brain power to bear. Challenge and difference are encouraged (how grown up.) At the end of the meeting members vote, and the majority set the rate for that month. Round we go again, in wide deliberation and learning, to the next month’s decision. Here we have a pre-determined decision-making process, not politics.

In the commercial world there is the discipline of due diligence. When one company wants to buy another, it conducts checks on the subject’s health and future. There are the obvious inside examinations of the accounts and other management information to check their veracity and to see what careful analysis might throw up; and the less obvious but no less important assessment of its market and customers and competitors. Are its products in demand, ahead of the competition, exceeding consumers’ expectations, going to be sidelined by new technology, and so on? Good due diligence is systematic with set checks that have been found to get a decision as right as possible, and a professional institute requirement.

Norman Strauss, one of the most original organisational thinkers, proposes this about policymaking:

“Ethos – defined as the characteristic spirit and genius of a society, culture, policy, system or idea – or an amalgam of them – embraces the summation of what we stand for today; it is also tomorrow’s vision of what we want to stand for then. Stafford Beer called these two distinct positions ‘the inside and now’ and the ‘outside and then’. Thinking about them requires successive utilization of divergent and convergent multi-disciplinary thinking, together with abstraction, transduction, and learning skills, if change is to be managed successfully.

So one can redefine governance as continuing ethos management from now to then; as eras are created and fashions and zeitgeists pass. Or, at its simplest, if what was promised in an election is to be delivered in office … The need is both to take in more inputs and to understand how to manage the contradictions, paradigms, systems of thought and analysis, complexities, alternative values, potential policy shifts and conflicts of opinion which their variety provides. Ultimately, I expect we will need to define another governmental separation of state power – beyond the executive, legislative and judiciary to become skilled in the ongoing variety all of this. I know of no country or institution which does this well, so there is a pressing need to create one ab initio. We could call this fourth separation of power the ‘Plurality’ – E pluribus unum; out of many (ideas) to one.

Without such continuous, because institutionalized, organic thinking across all aspects of society, government (and/or regulation) will not be matched to the complexities of preventing the emergence of critical national and global problems that require urgent solving – if not first prevented in a ‘just in time’ or ‘well before they become urgent’ way.

The number of upset countries, distraught citizens, failing companies and failed leaders thrown up by the global financial crisis proves just how much such basic reappraisal of our bandwidth in governing, regulatory, organisational, structural, constitutional, institutional and leadership systems is still required.

Opposing opinions must be reconciled more effectively by institutions learning to practice higher order unifying concepts, such as ethos, so that all of the best available knowledge is properly evaluated and absorbed by the governing system … According to Stafford Beer, it is ethos alone that can unite disparate policy functions, purposes, meanings, and motivations clearly, to summate what an organization, nation, or political party stands for.

In my view, good government is Ethos Management, and I suspect he would agree.

Perhaps the modern democratic state needs to be redesigned around these precepts if vision, policies, values and multiple motivations are to be captured in a distinctive ethos, enacted by a Viable System and coupled with the effective governance that leads to optimized citizen engagement and satisfaction for the majority, without alienating too many minorities. Then we could hope that we have at last created an organisation and operating culture, that is best suited to carry out the ruling values, derived from the distinctive ethos, which summates the critical policies that citizens voted for.

Strauss, the Monetary Policy Committee, due diligence, and the Treaty are all pointing in the same direction: a pre-determined process, tests, and governance to make policies work.

Ten Tests to Make Policies Work

There are ten tests to check if a policy has been developed properly: what is the point of this policy, is it consumer/citizen based, is it based on insider information and experience, has the public been engaged in its development, have all the stakeholders’ interests been considered, are other countries’ experiences the answer, have all factors and influences been taken account of through systems thinking, have the mechanisms for effective delivery been designed, and what will it cost. By exception the final experimental test would come into play.

1. Point test

What is the point of this decision, policy, law, regulation, programme? What is it intended to achieve, what results are desired (against which, of course, the feedback will be set)? Is the point of one aspect of welfare policy to support the broken poor or to enable the aspirant poor, to quote the Big Issue? What is the point of aid? Relief of starvation, building water supplies, giving cash to governments to do something useful with? If the latter, what would a ‘ruthless examination’ find? That aid feeds corruption? Many decisions and policies would fail and fall by the wayside of wasted government at the point of the point test.

2. Consumer/citizen test

Has the policy been developed from the consumers/citizens it is supposed to be aimed at? It must start from the cohort that is the object of the policy, understand their motivations, incentives, the conditions around them. Why do they behave as they do? What changes would improve their lot or change their behaviour in ways that would realise the policy objectives? Segmentation starts here.

Welfare policies should start in the families of those they are aimed at, with the policymakers working in those families, often using the techniques of consumer strategy. (The switch for MPs from travelling in the remote first-class carriages to standard class on trains diminishes paperwork time but connects with many more real lives.)

Fishing policy starts on a fishing boat. Policymakers would spend much of their time out in the field and far from a desk. Successful public services start with a real knowledge of the people and their needs that they are serving.

A ‘consumer analysis’ of domestic violence illustrates what can be found. We despair at the stories of a wife and mother enduring abuse for years, but never leaving her partner, and, in effect, going back for more. Why stay? The routes out provided by the state to the woman are first to criminalise the father of their children, second to put the father of their children in prison, and finally to take the children into care. What an offer! The alternative of a regular punching is, sadly, the rational choice. A consumer-based policy would look very different to the state’s current offer.

Adoption policies should follow successful and failed adoptions through the several bodies and procedures to determine what happens and how in practice, not on paper. Adoption is one of a considerable range of social problems – underachievement, tax-negative families, poverty, low aspirations, homelessness, teenage pregnancy, long-term unemployment, social exclusion, career criminals, disability, family breakdown – that can only be understood by being as close as possible to the lives of those with these problems.

Living their lives, even for a short period, is the best means to grasp their motivations, cultures, and barriers, and to experience the public services they receive and their positive and negative or neutral impact. Front-line staff often are the closest you will get to these lives. Sitting at a desk, surrounded by broad statistics, or seeking the best argument to support your political label or moral preference rarely solves social problems. If you really want to know the results for recipients of housing and other benefits, go and sit with people receiving them.

3. Insider test

This is the equivalent to the consumer/citizen test but for organisations. We will never get to grips with something as complex as rogue banking unless we have a deep grasp of life inside these organisations, why people behave as they do. Some have argued that in European financial services, the only people who really know what is going on, and thus what needs monitoring or preventing, are the financial institutions themselves. Knowing

how these industries work on the inside is essential to being able to regulate them successfully. This means deep expertise from inside from current employees willing to talk straight, ex-staff, specialist deep journalists from the likes of the Investors Chronicle, and/or analysts experienced at getting inside the minds of people inside their organisations.

4. Engagement test

This is a useful point to introduce DAD and EDD. Decide– Announce–Defend is the traditional government decision-making process in many countries. It is the top-down, expert model with which we are accustomed. From big decisions like the use of nuclear power or the route of a new train line, to local decisions like high-street remodelling, a planning decision, hospital closure and a flood-defence scheme, the arm of government with the powers looks at options in private, may do some public one-way consultation, reaches a decision, announces it publicly and holds its breath. Often, the stakeholders of various shapes react, and the management of the government body goes into defence mode. Sometimes, the decision is forced through, sometimes dropped and sometimes the battle wages for years. Defending the decision is a high-cost and time-consuming process. But it is how decisions have been taken in an authoritarian world and it appeals of course to those taking them who have high control needs in the case of ministers, or oversized intellectual egos in the case of civil servants.

Engage–Deliberate–Decide is how the Canadian government went about its health-service changes (see www.treatyforgovernment.org for details). The first step is to engage with the public on the problem, but without bias. Is there a problem? If so, what is its nature? Next, start the education so people are as well informed as reasonable before making up their minds. Surprise surprise, people often change their minds once they are properly informed. The most vociferous critics can become local champions. Then, ask the people interested to produce options. And finally, ask them to decide on one. By this means, the level of agreement reached is usually higher and consensus is achieved.

Implementation is much easier and quicker with a committed public, the decisions are often better because no distant centralised government body can possibly hold all the information relevant to a decision, and whilst engagement costs money the end-to-end cost and time is less. It takes time, and it is a learning journey, but the more contentious the decision to be taken, the more engagement is worthwhile.

EDD takes a fundamental shift in attitude by public sector management. The public is not stupid. The public comes in many forms. Different interests and needs underpin the stated position. But, once properly engaged and informed, the public will identify responsible, workable solutions, which reflect the whole system they experience in a way the remote policymaker or manager has neither the time nor the knowledge to replicate.

Constituency surgeries are a very odd lens on the world, representing little. Opinion polls are very limited engagement and provide little understanding of real lives. Statistical averages analysed in think tanks are not engagement, and never produce workable solutions. (As an important aside, think tanks need to expand their repertoire to cover much more than the limited set of issues in which they have expertise, including for example technical ones like tunneling for power lines, the speed of road building, and construction pollution.) Talking, listening, enquiring, experiencing the lives of others by being with them; service sampling through working on the front line of services; consumer analysis and strategy; and the tools of facilitation – all these will shed light and insight and produce workable solutions.

Public engagement would be appropriate in some and perhaps many cases. Proper engagement would necessarily meet the stakeholder, insider, and consumer tests, and is thus fully aligned in purpose. For big complex changes, like reform of the health service, substantial engagement along the Canadian health reform model would be needed. (The coalition government would not be having the trouble it is if it had engaged on its NHS reforms.)

Lastly, engagement has a value in itself in a modern society: it extends democracy to specific decisions (and some research concludes that there is a causal correlation between the extent of democracy and happiness); and is an antidote to preferential lobbying. Closed-door deals of convenience to a business, politicians or civil servants cannot be done. EDD has a lot going for it. Perhaps most importantly, contrary to the dismissive opinions of experts in government, the public is very capable of both grasping the issues and of bringing much-needed knowledge and expertise to the table themselves. Properly engaged, I would trust an EDD decision much more than a DAD decision. Let’s remember our starting point for the Treaty: government fails.

5. Stakeholder test

This would be applied to determine how those impacted by the policy fare, and whether their interests have been represented in the process. It would consequently exclude any policies that created de facto franchises to print money be they oligopolies of pension fund providers, or a closed Civil Service. Preferential lobbying would also be outed.

To explore how this test might apply in practice, let’s look at a really contentious issue – immigration – from a stakeholder standpoint. My purpose in selecting such a dif cult problem is to see where a cool and unprejudiced assessment might lead us.

Many countries in Europe have experienced the rise of ‘right-wing’ parties with strong anti-immigration agendas. Liberal minds tend to worry furiously about them, urge better explanations of the value and need for labour migration, indulge in statistical warfare, or otherwise blast them for being racist and of course plain wrong.

Now, where do the displaced ‘indigenous people’ go for representation? Who is looking out for their interests? The established political classes have written them off. This is how the left-wing blog Liberal Conspiracy put it in making sense of the statistics and rebutting the hysteria of the Daily Mail and others: ‘In 1991, just after the end of the Thatcher decade, two out of every seven jobs in the UK labour market were in the non-service sector. By the time New Labour took office in 1997, this had fallen to one in four and by 2008 it was only one in five. That’s what’s really hurt the white working class in Britain, their failure/inability to adapt to the changing labour market, and the rise in the number of foreign-born workers during this period is, for the most part, a by-product of that failure, not its cause.’ So that’s OK then – it’s their own fault.

But does ‘their failure/inability’ mean that this group of stakeholders does not count? Or cannot see that access to ‘their jobs’ is cut off? Or that housing allocation criteria based on ‘need’, in practice privileges immigrants over them? And do they still have the vote? Or are they to be put in a siding somewhere and forgotten? And is Liberal Conspiracy a wing of the Tea Party?

Perhaps this Liberal Conspiracy paragraph does more to explain the rise of the BNP than anything. Since the minimum wage, has there been a single policy specifically for the white working class? In ignoring the stakeholders called ‘displaced existing citizens’, governments have driven people into the arms of the right-wing parties. Where else could they go? Their traditional representatives in left-wing, working-class, social democratic, and liberal parties had all deserted them. In ignoring inconvenient variables, the government gave rebirth to the BNP. The BNP became the equivalent to the Migrants’ Rights Network – a ne charity with government funding that exists to further the rights of migrants. Where is the equivalent body furthering the rights of existing citizens who become internal refugees or who are otherwise affected by migration? In practice, this exclusive role is taken by the BNP. In the accepted order of things, it is perfectly all right for the MRN to work solely and preferentially for one group, but not for the BNP to do the same for the other. Immigration is often a zero-sum game: one person’s gain is another’s loss.

The EU has free movement of people as a cornerstone of its free-market vision. At the macroeconomic level, this should maximise growth and produce the integrated, borderless, thriving, diverse, Europe of our dreams. At once we would be Italian, German and French. Brilliant. But post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory takes no account of feelings – feelings of ownership, of nationality, of identity, of responsibility – nor of the time to adjust to something new. In pursuing free movement of labour throughout the EU – an economic policy – the economists, of course, missed out people.

Humans take time to change and adapt to new things. We react to change, usually adversely at first, even when it is beneficial. From family upheaval to mass redundancy, people follow the well- established path of shock, denial, depression, anger, resignation, acceptance, and understanding. Mass immigration is a major change and takes time to adapt to. There is a rate of absorption that is exceeded by the c.500,000 immigrants (plus illegals) to the UK in 2007, which cannot be gainsaid by the left blogs explaining that net migration is well down. The policy has been treated as a switch thrower, when it is a slow migration, in more than one sense.

Possibly the most xenophobic European country is France, and here the tensions produced by the mass arrival of foreign cultures and values appear at their strongest. All countries regard themselves as the best in the world, but France has always had perhaps the strongest identity with what being French means. Impose on that Rumanian, Albanian, Iranian, Ugandan, and Indonesian values and see what you get. Suddenly, the whole foundations of being French, following an extraordinary period of post-war prosperity, social harmony, and peace, are shaken. Does the existing population want them shaken? Would you? Has anyone asked them? Free movement of labour is positive at the margin, but immigration brings not just people but cultures too. Sometimes the mass arrival of foreign cultures can feel threatening. And the Islamic colonialists mean it to.

Collections of lifelong neo-Nazis may be waiting out there for their moment, but mostly people’s attitudes are the product of their experienced environment. The EU economists have destabilised national cultural identities, and people feel uneasy. Should the new French identity jettison that which has been held fine for so long? How is the new identity to be decided upon? By referendum? Or will it emerge serendipitously from the melting pot, undesigned and unchosen? Will the new one be better, preferable, or worse? And will communities hold together in the way they have for years? The French cannot have felt this disturbed since the Second World War (an objective and not in inflammatory comment). People do not take kindly to invasions: and mass immigration can feel like a legalised invasion.

Identity is another subject of complexity. I only observe here that humans seem to need to identify with something including place, that place includes a country, and that identity then lends stability to that place. If it is exploited or ignited then xenophobia can result, and indeed war. But pan-national organisations exist to limit the excesses of national identity, from NATO to the Latin American Integration Association. Mass or rushed immigration is destabilising.

The fault in generating extreme nationalist parties lies with the economists and their exclusion of many stakeholders, and with the liberal minds who believe immigration should flourish without reference to its effect on those who have lived in a place for generations. In their world, it is the current population’s job to put up with as much disruption as occurs without complaint, and the penalty for objection is to be branded racist, bigot, politically incorrect in the use of language, or whatever. The white refugees from Tower Hamlets have no rights. The EU would do well to put its ‘free movement of labour’ objective on hold until this has been worked out and factored in. I worry.

One final point. Whether you or I agree or disagree with these arguments does not really matter. The fact is that right-wing parties with significant support exist, and substantial opposition to immigration exists. Telling these supporters they are wrong, or bad people, will not change that. It may well be that you and I are more sophisticated in our adaptation to change, or just ‘better’ people. Or we would like to think so. Or the antis have been more affected than you or I, and have lost more. Or are more concerned about the loss of national culture. None of this matters in the sense that sufficient people exist who, rightly or wrongly, oppose the existing scale of immigration for this to be a problem for us all. They vote, they are stakeholders, and they matter just as much in a democracy as you or I. This rate of change will always produce a major reaction, which cannot be wished away.

A balanced, progressive and sustainable policy for immigration would take into account all the stakeholders and all the costs and outcomes. Tomorrow’s immigration is not about whether, but about how much, when, at what rate, and the adaptation deal between immigrant and resident. Immigration is one of those policies that cannot be imposed successfully on various unwilling sections of the public for the very obvious reason that this big a change cannot proceed without collective commitment. Like it or not, it’s called real democracy. Variables will not be kept out of the equation for ever simply because they are inconvenient.

(NB this was written in 2010/12, several years before the Brexit referendum.)

6. ‘Other countries’ test

Globalisation has its problems and its benefits. World-class manufacturing has brought us all untold riches of consumer durables. Modern government has been running long enough for similar-country-based practice to be assessed, learnt form, and used at least to inform home policies. The world has been using a variety of models in each sector and sub-sector – from health to financial regulation to adoption – for long enough for usually one to be worth using. Increasingly, successful policies from other countries would simply be lifted and used (subject of course to the other tests here, in case unseen factors not present in the UK are key to its success, or factors present in the UK would make it unfit for purpose). If someone else has tried it and it works, that represents a prima facie policy from which any diversion can only be justified by excellent analysis. Why would you not adopt from the US the enforcement method for planning breaches when the UK method is so ineffective? Other countries’ experience is the quickest and cheapest way to sort many of the easy improvements.

International comparisons have driven huge improvements in the products and services we get from companies. They should be the norm for policymaking for governments with the humility to know they do not have all the answers, with the vision to understand that experimentation and diversity lie at the heart of success, and with the curiosity to find out what others do. Being an island nation has benefits, but it limits the citizen-learning that occurs more easily in continental Europe as different practices in every field are sampled whenever driving across a border. We in the UK have to try harder for this valuable source of experience.

I wonder what other countries’ experience would tell us about schools? This thought was triggered by the surprise of an Italian as to the extent of private schooling here. In his country private schools are only for the ‘mad and the bad’. Interesting. How come they seem to have consistently good schools? What if theirs were looked at not simply from a structural perspective – selective versus comprehensive, local authority versus free schools, etc. – but from all angles. How well aligned are they? Is the local population hard- wired to the school? Do they have real local government and therefore real accountability? Teacher training? Pay? Turnover? Curriculum? Results? Real vocational education?

7. Systems thinking test

No policy/decision works in isolation from its context. Exogenous factors always impact the point. This is the test to determine if the policy takes account of the inconvenient variables, if it is joined up, if it is holistic, if it has considered the knock-on effects and the unintended consequences. This is what is called systems thinking, and it is a powerful discipline.

Let’s have a look at a contentious policy area (or perhaps I mean take a look at it contentiously) – the reduction, by government, of activity that is harmful to the health of those who engage in it freely.

Governments can be quite sophisticated in their thinking. They can also suffer from tunnel vision, or if not a tunnel then a deep gorge. The tendency is to take a single issue – smoking, say – analyse how to reduce it, and focus hard on the solution. In many circumstances focus is what is needed to deliver change, but only when the analysis has looked at the wider landscape. What is over the other side of the ridge? If we do implement this policy, what are the knock-on effects?

Smoking is undoubtedly bad for us. Many have thankfully and successfully given it up for good. The public health campaign has been a remarkable success. But, taking a system-wide view, what would we find? Are some of us doomed to smoke, or be fat?

Whilst many have given up smoking, in the last forty years the ‘pandemic’ of obesity has gone the other way. Obesity has similar morbidity, health costs, and productivity costs to smoking. Of course, effective government action for obesity itself (as happens, in part, in Denmark, where legislation restricts the use of trans-fatty acids in food production) looks overdue. The addictive qualities of fats and sugars could be taxed to the same extent as are those of tobacco. Is it an outrage to wonder if an apple should become cheaper than its calorific equivalent provided by addictive foodstuffs? Pricing has some affect. There is no point in allowing crap to be sold so cheaply.

Welfare benefits are used to buy addictive foods for babies and children, starting them early on the escalator to obesity. This is one of the strangest uses of public expenditure. Government is effectively funding obesity. What would be the advantages and

disadvantages of conditional benefits in the form of vouchers that could only be redeemable for healthy food? It feels uncomfortable, but presumably less than the discomfort the child will suffer if obese in the future.

Governments are often impotent in matters of human behaviour. Education, education, and education are the best they can do. As with recreational drugs and young people, the most effective strategy is to ensure the effects of each drug are well known. Prohibition does not work. Nor does the war on drugs. A consistent policy for harmful substances would be to add addictive foods to the list of Class A drugs, making their possession a criminal offence. But it also raises the question as to whether and how policy should seek to control behaviour. (It will not succeed, of course, but often this is not the objective.)

In the way public policy debate is framed in some countries, human vices are not allowed. The widespread pretence, even in our own heads, is that we should live by some higher calling or superior morality, which excludes vice. Thus, anything that alters our consciousness, such as alcohol or cannabis or magic mushrooms, or potentially damages our health, is wrong. But, in an otherwise hard and unfulfilling life, in a low-paid job and poor housing, with a lost or stressed family life, the only pleasures for some are alcohol, cigarettes and recreational drugs. The consumer is quite aware that these are ‘bad’ for him or her, but consumes them nevertheless. Is that the ‘wrong’ choice? Who am I to make that judgement? Is it a judgement for government?

An alternative basis for policy decisions is to accept that humans do have vices, and to enjoy. For all of history humans have sought out so-called ‘mind-altering’ substances precisely to alter their minds. Is this a ‘vice’ or a fact of the human condition? Educate, persuade, offer, prevent the wild excesses of capitalism, and do not dole out money for negative consequences. Do what you can. Otherwise accept a ‘ flawed’ society.

A more general word on policies aimed at stopping people dying, as embodied in the state’s life-prolongment programmes: they should recognise one of the more obvious facts – everyone dies. Some die before they want to. Whilst understandable, the war on dying may be as useful as the wars on drugs or terror (and as destructive and costly – it’s killing the NHS). The purpose of living is not ‘not to die’, as some policymakers seem to believe. We are all trying to navigate life by finding a balance between what is good for us and what we enjoy, between prevention and cure, between duty and freedom, between ecstasy and boredom, always aware that good and bad luck may be around the corner, and conscious that we will never know whether our choices have given us a better or worse life than our neighbours. The narrow pursuit of ‘not dying’ represents a narrow understanding of life.

In terms of systems thinking, five factors are in play. ‘Groupthink’, on a national scale, is the first – smoking is bad for you and we all got caught up in believing it was right to reduce it and by whatever means. The second is the fatal attraction of simple policies (I wonder what is the psychology of this?). The third is the psychology of the moral high ground. Some people are strongly motivated by moral superiority over others. Saving lives, especially saving people from themselves, as with stopping them smoking, represents high moral worth. The fourth is the pressure felt by government to do something, even though it may be ineffectual. Fifth, governments are free to take decisions in any way they want. Political pressure is the only restraint. Decisions can be made on no information, awed analysis, prejudice, or an anecdote on the 10.47 from Pitlochry.

So if the lone smoking policy had been checked for its systems thinking, the voters would have found a number of ignored variables: substitute pleasures like eating and their cost to government and society; the underlying causes of smoking and obesity and thus enduring prevention; consistent taxation; use of benefits; quality of living vice as perhaps an ineradicable component of the human condition; and the value of waging a war on dying. Quite a lot. And now we are experiencing an obesity epidemic.

For successful government, disciplines must exist to ensure the decision process is based on evidence, that the evidence represents real lives, the analysis is comprehensive, and the objective clear. Is the objective to save lives through stopping smoking? Or to save lives in total? If person X lives longer by stopping smoking but dies prematurely through obesity, is that a result or a waste of persuasion money? The scope here to spend and fail is considerable.

8. Delivery test

Will the policy deliver the proposed results? If so, how, and what evidence is there to show this? Much legislation would find its way straight into the bin at this point. Are public places cleaner when dropping litter is made illegal? Or are there other ways? This test is about the ‘how’ of turning the policy into practice. Is the delivery method a) proven to have worked elsewhere, or b) worked out thoroughly (in terms of how to get from ‘now’ to ‘then’, to use Strauss’s phrase), and c) aligned?

9. Cost test

What would the policy cost to execute? A reasonable estimate needs to be made of direct costs to all arms of public sector, and to individuals and companies – for example whole costs of money laundering checks for children, a hospital closure, a specific tax change. The benefits would be estimated here. In some cases the need for the policy will be so obvious as to remove any need to justify by measuring its benefit, but in other cases a proper cost–benefit analysis would be required to pass this test. Fundability would be tested here too – is there sufficient government funding for it, or would some other public expenditure have to be reduced to make way for this higher priority? Vetting here would extend to the ‘one in, one out’ policy for legislation and regulation, leading to old laws or programmes being abandoned.

10. Experimental test

Some policies and decisions will not have the comfort of past practice, feedback, other countries’ experience, and engagement. Some policies are by necessity experimental. This is entirely appropriate, and governments should be free to say so. Some issues – the so-called wicked problems – remain tough to solve: social mobility, secondary schooling, social disadvantage, and so on. As in other disciplines, an experimental policy would be monitored to see if it is working or not. Governments are expected to solve some very difficult problems. Science faces dif cult problems too. Science conducts experiments where the answer is not known.

Much of the task of government fits into the ‘not known’ box. Why on earth does government not routinely experiment? It is entirely legitimate for government to analyse and produce a theory for a solution, just as science does. However, science does not accept the theory as the answer until it is experimentally confirmed. Governments routinely omit this rather crucial step. Randomised trials, the norm in scientific experiments, and other approaches used by NICE would be applied. (Randomised trials of government policies are being promoted by some in the current UK Cabinet Office).

By default, experimentation does occur because different countries often use and implement different policies. This diversity in thinking and solution is potentially a very rich source of proof. One of the benefits of devolution (as to Scotland and Wales, and to the states and Länder in the US and Germany) is that different solutions can be and are tried. The Whitehall ‘answer’ is no longer the only option.

Experimentation is key. Conducting makeshift evaluations to prove a policy works is not. Nor is defending what you’ve done is not either. The Human Rights Act is essential, but in practice it has proved to be wrong in a few places, not least because of the way our courts interpret these things. So change the wrong bits. What are the actual chances of getting a law like this, plus the court interpretation, 100% right? Zero. So why does government behave as if it has? Learning is essential.

Who Owns Policy?

Those then are our ten tests. How do we make sure they are applied properly?

Under the Treaty no one would have a monopoly of policy – not politicians, civil servants, or PSOs. Policymaking would not be ‘owned’ by the government or the Civil Service. The custodian is actually the ten tests. Policy and decision-making would be an open process – both to prevent cake capture and to produce better decisions that are better understood.

Yes to private discussions of all sorts of options, but the formulation of the finished policy requires openness. This requires adult behaviour with everything on the table and thus some easy headlines of mock outrage. But the media will grow up, as they and we have done over the marital affairs of politicians. The Treaty is intended to generate the mindset of ‘we all own the decision’ – the objective is to get the right decision. In this system, more democracy improves the quality of decisions.

Fifth Separation of Powers

How do we make this happen? Applying the disciplines to get it right would be the fifth separation of powers after the executive, judiciary, legislature, and Resulture. Policy vetting would follow the existing course of legislation through the Commons and the Lords but would be provided by separate and powerful committees with the ability and remit to refer back to the executive those policies failing the ten tests. Select committees would support the vetting committees through their specialist knowledge. Providing it acts with the emerging independence of mind seen in its recently freed select committees, the Commons can perform this vital role effectively. (Until 2010 the prime minister and coterie controlled select committees through their hold over appointments of their chairmen and members. They were part of the system of executive patronage. After the 2010 election, all MPs voted via secret ballot for the chairs and members. These committees have become rather more useful, although have much ground to make up to fulfil their proper role in the system of government, and have nowhere near the bite of their US counterparts.)

If the Commons cannot, then this power would have to rest solely with the second chamber. The ‘ten tests’ policy and decision process would be supported and reinforced by the administrative ‘Northcote–Trevelyan’ Civil Service. This separate arm is described in Chapter 11. The tests are of course a stimulant to learning. This will gradually get everyone used to this very new way of thinking, so that think tanks start presenting their proposals already tested. Expertise on policymaking will be built in Parliament, becoming a specialised career for some MPs and lords. In time we may see certified policymakers.

Operating all this vetting represents a lot of work, given the policies and decisions streaming out of government. Care would have to be taken at the start not to suffer the experience of Japan when it introduced some vetting in a similar vein.

Selection and the right to retrospective vetting might be needed for a time. But, first, the overloaded stream would reduce perhaps not to a trickle but at least to an ordered flow by the discipline of policy vetting, reducing the quantity of wasted or misplaced policies and its cost. Initiativitis would be obliterated. Huge savings are available with this upfront work. Second, policies are only worth their effect on the ground, they have no value in themselves. Putting time and effort into getting policies right is essential. What is the alternative? Continue to fire ill-conceived policies with all the enormous costs and failings described earlier at the citizens, consumers, businesses, etc.? What joy. Or invest time and thought to get it right first time? A no-brainer.

These ten tests would immunise government against media- frenzy policies, and against the psychopathologies of politicians in the form of the need to be right, the need for personal power, and the need to control. The tests also stop prejudice dead in its tracks, along with preferential lobbying, overload, the ‘something (anything) must be done’ approach, ‘reform’ for the sake of it, and legislative OCD. Clarity in policy design relegates moral questions too. Well worth the price.