In recent years, ministers’ armoury of policymaking weapons has been growing fast: as well as civil service policymakers, special advisers, inquiries and consultations, they can now deploy the tools of ‘open policymaking’ – outsourced policy advice, the ‘What Works’ research network, and new forms of citizen engagement – or bring in external experts, either enobled as ministers or to join the constellation of ‘tsars’.
Of all these ways to develop policies, only the last stands largely unbounded by dedicated protocols, spending approvals, formalised oversight or clear systems of democratic scrutiny. Indeed, the flexibility of the tsars model boosts its attractiveness to ministers, who legitimately demand the ability to bring in specific experts to work to bespoke briefs on unique and complex pieces of research and policy development.
However, the flexibility that allows ministers to choose the right person – and to fashion the right job for them – also provides the opportunity to capitalise on some of the tsars model’s less desirable characteristics. Every Whitehall-watcher has seen a tsar brought in simply to give an existing ministerial agenda a sheen of external legitimacy (e.g. Sir Philip Green and his civil service ‘Efficiency Review’) or to attract media interest (and neither Gordon Brown’s enterprise tsar Sir Alan Sugar, nor David Cameron’s retail tsar Mary Portas, managed to turn star quality into tsar efficacy). Equally, because tsars are so dependent on their ministerial patrons, their recommendations can be abruptly dismissed as political priorities or ministers change (indeed, this dependence is, for politicians, another of their advantages).
Of course, every policymaking tool has its flaws – but all the rest are governed by processes or systems of scrutiny designed to ensure that public money is well-spent. In this context, the new draft tsars code produced by King’s College (see feature) is a welcome starting point for debate. And at its core lie two recommendations which seem entirely sensible: that ministers should have to explain why appointing a tsar is the best course of action (ideally, they should also tell us why their appointee is the right person for the job); and that departments should have to report on what actions have been taken as a result of their work.
It is hard to see how such boundaries would damage any legitimate and defensible tsar appointment; but they would constrain ministers’ ability to misuse their power, bringing in a tsar purely to create party political advantage, head off a negative media story, or rubber-stamp a predetermined course of action. That should help ensure that public money is spent for public benefit – and that British tsars don’t follow their Russian predecessors, operating in a world of secretive and unaccountable political power, but instead create genuinely heavenly policy advice.