Interview: Gavin Poole

“It’s been a strange journey for an aircraft engineer, a very strange journey,” says Gavin Poole (pictured above). “From 20 years’ military service, into the Centre for Social Justice.” It certainly isn’t typical for an ex-RAF officer to become the executive director of a think-tank – but Poole isn’t a typical ex-RAF officer.

“Commanding men, I found that many had all sorts of issues, and that got me thinking about what was going on in people’s lives,” he recalls. Poole’s flair for tackling social and personal problems in the forces led to a job as an adviser to Labour’s defence secretary Des Browne and veterans minister Derek Twigg. “I looked after armed forces personnel and their dependents, service veterans’ mental health, drugs etcetera. And that led me down this path,” he says.

Poole’s job in the Ministry of Defence also opened his eyes to some of the difficulties of coordinating action across Whitehall. He was involved in producing 2009’s Service Personnel Command Paper, badged by the Labour government as offering “cross-government support to our armed forces, their families and veterans” – but as soon as the departmental ministers turned their attention elsewhere, the work programme stalled. “Everybody was involved: health, communities, education, the Cabinet Office,” remembers Poole. “It was published with great fanfare. Then it disappeared.”

The attention of departmental officials had moved on. “Could we get another meeting with any of these guys? No,” he recalls. “Now we were in the delivery phase, it was: ‘Sorry, the minister’s busy doing something else’.” Short political attention spans and a failure to reorientate departmental objectives, he had found, can stymie even the best-intentioned initiatives.

A few years ago, Poole’s interest in social issues brought him into contact with Philippa Stroud – his predecessor at the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) – and Iain Duncan Smith, former Tory leader and the CSJ’s founder. “I think there was a connection there because of our military backgrounds,” says Poole – Duncan Smith is the son of an RAF flyer, and a former Scots Guards officer – but the pair also share a “deep-seated belief that people need some help, because there’s a big divide opening up between those in the lower socio-economic groups and the middle and upper range”.

Man on a mission
As this suggests, the CSJ’s mission is to understand the dynamics behind poverty and to advise the government on how to tackle them – and those dynamics, Poole says, go way beyond a simple lack of cash. “If you give money to an alcoholic, they’ll just fill the house with vodka,” he says. “We need to go to the root causes of poverty.”

Sceptical about the UK government’s track record in tackling deprivation, the CSJ holds that the state’s efforts to address social problems have often ended up exacerbating them; giving money to the alcoholic. “We have a state that drives inequality,” says Poole. Given its critique of big-state interventionism, its belief in free markets and its ongoing work with Duncan Smith, the think-tank is often seen as a Tory vehicle; but Poole insists that its approach is “definitely about values and principles rather than attaching ourselves to a party.”

“We have no difficulties in saying that we’re centre-right,” he adds. “But if you said to the people working here: ‘This is a Conservative think-tank’,” half of them would probably leave.” Indeed, Labour’s socially-conservative MPs David Blunkett and Frank Field sit on its Advisory Council – along with foreign secretary William Hague and Tory MP Robert Halfon – and last August Poole was very critical of the government’s approach to the spending review, arguing that instead of protecting the most cost-effective services, it was imposing “equal cuts on all programmes, good and bad”.

Poole is equally keen to downplay the thread of Christianity that runs through the CSJ. “To say it’s shaped by a Christian ethos is wrong,” he argues. “There are many things that drive people’s agendas here.” Faith is clearly one of those drivers: Duncan Smith, Stroud and Poole are all Christians – something that has clearly helped shape their desire to tackle poverty. Yet Poole insists that the CSJ does not have a Christian mission: “Do I come into work every day thinking: ‘This must be based around a spiritual message?’” he asks. “No!”

Gathering the evidence
Poole’s desire to sidestep questions over the CSJ’s Christianity is rooted in a fear that the think-tank will be stamped ‘Christian’ in the public consciousness – something that could undermine its reputation for evidence-based policymaking. “Other organisations are based on ideology and deep-rooted beliefs, but for me it’s really important that the policies we put forward are based on facts,” he says.

Small wonder that Poole emphasises the CSJ’s objective, evidence-orientated approach: the think-tank’s January report, Outcome-Based Government, presents a powerful set of arguments for shifting the government’s approach from one based around politics-led demonstrations of public sector action to one that emphasises research-led policymaking and creating real change in wider society. It’s an ambitious aim – but the CSJ’s track record suggests it will gain real traction.

It was, after all, Duncan Smith’s think-tank that – well before the election – developed a radical set of benefits reforms; reforms that last week began their passage through Parliament. With its founder ensconced as work and pensions secretary, the CSJ has enormous influence: Stroud now works as Duncan Smith’s special adviser; the think-tank’s policy director Charlotte Pickles has become a DWP expert adviser; and the report’s author, Stephen Brien, has just come back from a stint advising the DWP on benefits reform.

In essence, the report argues for a relentless focus on evidence and outcomes, rejecting short-term political advantage and inter-departmental turf wars in favour of a rigorous and scientific concentration on holistic results. Politicians too readily bend with the wind of popular opinion, says Poole, and too easily confuse activity with success: “So the measure of success in policing is putting extra policemen on the beat, when actually it should be reducing fear of crime, or increasing the number of crimes detected and prosecuted – and you might be able to do that with fewer policemen.” Rather than measuring its effectiveness by the work it does or the money it spends, the report says, the government should set out what it wants to achieve and build policies around that.

Changing to create change
As governments age, Poole argues, they struggle to retain public support and become tempted into short-term populism: in its later years the last government launched initiatives that were little more than “a number, usually with millions attached, invested in the population to demonstrate that they were doing something about an issue”. And there’s another political obstacle to evidence-based policymaking: politicians must be ready to ditch a policy if the evidence suggests that it isn’t working. “That’s not a u-turn,” Poole insists. “If something’s not working we need to understand why that is, not pour more money in.” He does accept, though, that explaining such policy alterations to the media and public will require “strength of character”.

This task of explanation would be easier, Poole argues, if the government more honestly evaluated its work: failures are often airbrushed away to avoid loss of face, limiting the ability to learn from experience.

The report also suggests creating an “Office of Spending Effectiveness”: an equivalent of the Office of Budgetary Responsibility for policy issues, it would “make sure that funding is allocated against a programme with set objectives, set outcomes, proper strategies and agreed methods of delivery”, says Poole. In essence, the new office would police departments’ adherence to evidence-based, outcome-focused policymaking – and the new set of departmental business plans would probably come a cropper. These “focus on reform activities, rather than outcomes”, the report complains – though Poole is as unenthusiastic about their predecessors, Public Service Agreements.

The ambition behind the later version of PSAs – to ensure coordinated action by departments on cross-cutting problems – was a good one, says Poole. But they were overly focused on activity rather than outcomes, and suffered from the same problems that halted progress on the Service Personnel Command Paper: “As an official, where are you going to focus your efforts? The PSA where the lead sits with your own secretary of state, or the one led by another department?” The answer to this problem, he continues, lies within the question: it is down to secretaries of state to swing their departments behind cross-government strategies. “We need firm leadership from the secretaries of state, the cabinet, the PM, to say: ‘These are our top priorities’,” argues Poole. The social justice cabinet committee, he adds, enables its chair Duncan Smith to coordinate policies with other key ministers.

Accounting for government action
In order to develop and agree that common cause, the report argues, the government needs to dramatically improve its understanding of how much its services cost, and develop a common methodology to measure ‘social return on investment’ (SROI). If this methodology can capture all the quantitative and qualitative benefits of public sector interventions, showing how action in one field produces returns and savings for a wide range of government departments, then government will be well-placed to make investment decisions – and departments will be incentivised to support each other’s work. Poole highlights the USA’s Washington state, which for 20 years has used a SROI system to shape its services: the model is being adapted for UK use by the social justice charity Dartington, and will be available later this year.

With the use of better data, stronger evaluations and payment-by-results systems, Poole argues, government procurement will improve – and about time too. “There’s been a catalogue of catastrophes,” he complains. “We reference 14 or 15 National Audit Office reports where consistent failures in procurement mean that we’re paying way too much and there’s no way of measuring outcomes. Government is not good at this kind of work.” An SROI model would also boost procurement from the voluntary sector, social enterprises and small businesses, Poole believes, because the additional benefits these organisations bring would be recognised and valued.

Local politics
Alert readers may, however, have spotted a problem with the CSJ’s ideas. The report’s proposals require that cost accounting be standardised across government, and that departments use a consistent, universal system of measuring SROI. Like the Big Society, Outcome-Based Government is at risk of running slap-bang into the localism agenda. The coalition is committed to giving departments the freedom to shape their own policies, and imposing universal metrics would run counter to the drive to remove central targets and liberate frontline service providers; it is harder still to imagine the coalition setting out a basket of outcomes towards which all parts of the public sector should be working.

Poole acknowledges that some people believe localism means Whitehall can’t tell frontline service providers exactly what they should be trying to achieve. But the centre certainly should be stating its aims, he argues; localism means letting providers decide how they achieve objectives, not what the objectives should be in the first place.

Indeed, Poole argues that because the CSJ’s approach relies on defining outcomes rather than methodologies, it furthers the localism agenda by freeing frontline workers to use whichever techniques are most appropriate in their area. “The answers to problems very rarely lie at the top,” he comments. “It’s local people who know how to make things happen.”

In defining the objectives, though, Poole believes that the state must lead the way. Take children entering school, he says: the government might decide that they should all be potty-trained, or be able to eat with a knife and fork. “It’s not wrong for a government to say: ‘It’s down to local government to make sure they can do this. I’m not going to tell you how to do it, but it’s something that you need to be working towards’,” he says. “You define what this government wants to achieve, then let local government and local communities deliver against that.”

Mandation by persuasion
In the final analysis, this still sounds like a set of central government targets – albeit targets designed to improve the lives of citizens rather than control those of public sector workers. And when pressed, Poole goes a little wobbly on whether service providers would be mandated to work towards those outcomes, or whether it would be the job of central government to persuade them to do so. “These are principles that the government can define,” he says first – but then: “You’ve got to be able to persuade, not mandate. You can’t enforce, but that’s real leadership: the ability to take people with you without the ability to enforce it.”

At this point, sceptics will raise an eyebrow: an approach that involves gathering evidence on all the impacts of public interventions, and ensuring that all public bodies build policy around all those impacts, would break down pretty quickly if some of those bodies decided not to play ball. Yet this agenda is an important one if we’re to come out of the other side of the public spending squeeze with not just a smaller government, but a better one: a system focused on producing results efficiently, rather than activity ostentatiously.

“There’s an economic recovery at the moment, with the coalition working on deficit reduction and activities to promote growth – which is great; we need that,” says Poole. But if the government doesn’t tackle the state systems that foster welfare dependency, family breakdown and poverty, he argues, growth will be wasted. “We need a social recovery too,” he says. “That’s just as important, if not more so, because if we don’t have a social recovery we’re going to build up costs which could negate the benefits of a recovery.”

Whether this report’s recommendations will be widely taken up remains to be seen – but there is at least one substantial chunk of government where they’ll be taken very seriously indeed. Having taken many of the CSJ’s previous recommendations into the DWP – where they’ve transformed the department’s approach to benefits and jobseeker support – Iain Duncan Smith will champion this report at the heart of government.

Asked whether the report will be important in helping to reshape the DWP, Poole replies: “Absolutely, yes.” Indeed, the ideas behind it can already be seen at work in the department – both in the payment-by-results systems adopted for the Work Programme, and in the reforms under way within Jobcentre Plus.

Poole adds that the CSJ has already talked to Cabinet Office minister Oliver Letwin, the Tories’ policy mastermind, “about how we can do some further work for the Cabinet Office on implementing and assessing key programmes”. The ideas behind outcome-based government may face plenty of political hurdles, but they also have plenty of powerful friends. “We published the report on a Tuesday, and that Thursday it was on the social justice cabinet committee’s agenda,” says Poole. “And this is just the start.”