Making policy on policymaking

The civil service may employ a very skilled set of policymakers, but somehow every government ends up accumulating a set of painful scars marking the places where policies have proved too controversial, risky or flawed to implement. The forests sell-off debacle is a recent example, and the NHS reforms now appear to be foundering. So something is clearly going wrong in the way that policies are developed and delivered – and a recent report by the Institute for Government attempted to tackle some of the current weaknesses.

The report, Making Policy Better, called for a re-think and restructure of key sections of the policymaking process. Ministers, the report recommended, should be more hands-on in the early strategic goal-setting stages of policymaking. Civil servants, meanwhile, need to improve their analytical skills, be more open to peer criticism, and challenge ministers more robustly. Other key practical solutions include the creation of policy directors within departments and of a head of policy effectiveness in the Cabinet Office – moves designed to put in place individuals with a specific responsibility for testing policies, and thereby avoid the scenario under which officials are too scared to challenge ministers over unworkable policy ideas.

The relationship between civil servants and ministers must be depersonalised, says Jill Rutter, the IfG’s programme director and the report’s co-author. “Civil servants need to be able to say: ‘My job is to say whether this policy meets the required standard.’ They need to see policymaking as a profession. The real value comes when both sides do their jobs and work jointly.”

In the past, Rutter believes, civil servants have too often either proved reluctant to consider the political implications of policies – leading to policies that can’t function in the real world – or exercised a form of self-censorship. “In the past civil servants have tried to do the politics for the ministers and edited out options that they deem politically unacceptable, because they don’t want to come across as politically naïve,” she says.

In the report, which draws on interviews with 50 senior civil servants and 20 former ministers, Rutter found that former ministers often complained that they were presented with worked-up policy ideas rather than involved in policymaking at the outset: “It’s a bit ridiculous that ministers say they aren’t involved in policymaking at the right stage,” she says. “You need ministers to engage; if ministers become technocrats, then you have got it wrong. Ministers can bring a different lens to the debate.”

The report’s implications for civil servants are still more fundamental: officials must challenge each other’s ideas more strongly in order to produce better policy. “It comes across strongly that civil servants don’t have a strong culture of learning and self-criticism,” says Rutter.

Responding to the report’s recommendations, some former Labour ministers argued that the established civil service career paths – which fast-track high-flyers through a range of jobs to gain broad experience – mitigate against the development of subject expertise among policymakers. But several argued that sharpening civil servants’ ability to challenge poor policy requires a cultural change, rather than a more formalised responsibility to speak up against policy risks.

According to former Cabinet Office minister Tessa Jowell, the failings of over-cautious officials have “more to do with a weakness of temperament” than any ambiguity in the constitutional relationship between ministers and officials. And Margaret Hodge, chair of the public accounts committee, says that when she was children’s minister civil servants were quite willing to challenge her – perhaps because she “always appreciated being challenged intellectually.”

Where ministers are less tolerant of challenge, she says, new mechanisms are unlikely to solve the problem: “It needs to be part of the civil service training: you can encourage a culture of engagement rather than ‘safety first’.”

There’s also a responsibility on the part of ministers to involve themselves in the detail of policymaking – and to do so early on. “It’s important that ministers actually deal with the civil servants who do the work, rather than the ridiculous hierarchy where they only speak to senior civil servants,” says Hodge. And Jowell has little sympathy for former ministers’ complaints about a lack of policy consultation. “In a sense that is their own responsibility,” she says. “There’s a balance between knowing what’s going on and your own priorities. The most important thing is clarity about the priorities and agreement on the timescales for implementation.”

Sir John Elvidge, the former Scottish government permanent secretary, welcomes proposals for ministers to get more hands-on at an earlier stage. However, he warns that the IfG’s idea of inserting new procedural requirements into the policymaking process – such as a dedicated stage for challenges to policy ideas – may slow things down without significantly improving the final policies. “The key is to find a mechanism that resolves any issues early,” he says, “but you have to be careful not to try to create mechanisms out of something that is not much more than common sense.”

Moreover, says Elvidge, emphasising civil servants’ responsibility to challenge ministers “could lead to an adversarial position – and civil servants are already legally obliged to offer full and impartial advice”. Instead, he suggests that making routine the publication of the analytical components of policy advice would ensure civil service advice covers a broad range of options and “lead to a better, informed debate.”

Sue Cameron, the Financial Times’ Whitehall columnist, agrees – and welcomes the report’s suggestion that policymakers should be judged on how effectively they engage with other organisations. “There’s a need for greater partnerships with public services, particularly if you are reorganising them,” she says. “There needs to be more external engagement, with civil servants going out and speaking to human beings.” Other parts of the report are also “eminently sensible”, she adds, citing the recommendations to involve ministers at an earlier stage in the policymaking process, and for both civil servants and ministers to have greater clarity over what they are looking to achieve.

However, Cameron has reservations about the proposal for a policy director to sit in each department and report to select committees. “I don’t know if that is real life,” she says. “I don’t think you’ll see civil servants going to a select committee and saying that their minister’s policies are around the twist.”

David Blunkett, the former home secretary, argues that the report’s major shortcoming is that – despite Rutter’s claims – it separates policy and delivery. “Those who develop policy and the legislative bill should go on to see everything implemented, and that’s lacking in this report,” he says. And several people suggested that laudable ideas about better involving ministers in policymaking could fall foul of diary secretaries. “There are uncomfortable realities on which well-meaning recommendations can founder,” says Elvidge. “The most important is the enormous demand on ministers’ time. Most ministers lead completely insane lives with their duties and trying to manage a personal life.”

Bob Ainsworth, the former defence secretary, agrees: during his time in government, there were indeed a lot of frustrations caused “by work rate and the nature of the issues we were dealing with”. And James Purnell, who led both the work and pensions and the culture, media and sport departments, suggests that other duties may have to lose out if secretaries of state are to get more involved in the nitty gritty of policy making.

“It would help if we reduced the speeches and stakeholder meetings ministers attend. A lot of people can do those things, but only top civil servants and ministers can change policy,” he says. “The biggest challenge is to create space for people to prepare – properly, and strategically.”