We, the undersigned... by Tony Travers

8 Mar 07
Number 10's online road-pricing e-petition was a huge hit. Not in terms of the likely fate of that policy but because it encouraged nearly 2 million people to put their point of view. Not a bad thing in today's apathetic political climate, argues Tony Travers

09 March 2007

Number 10's online road-pricing e-petition was a huge hit. Not in terms of the likely fate of that policy but because it encouraged nearly 2 million people to put their point of view. Not a bad thing in today's apathetic political climate, argues Tony Travers

'We will consult the public.' Such simple words. Such an attractive idea. Who could oppose the notion of asking people what they want or don't want? The present government has invested much time and effort in consultation and opinion polling. Major events have been held to gauge public reactions to the NHS. Councils are required to test customer satisfaction. Citizens' panels have been created. Indeed, critics have accused Tony Blair of 'government by focus group'.

Can there be too much public consultation? The off-the-record attacks on poor Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, Number 10's head of strategic communications, and the alleged brains behind the now infamous idea of encouraging the public to sign petitions on the Number 10 website, suggest many senior Labour figures were badly annoyed by the impact of the recent publicity given to the petition about road pricing.

As you might remember, this stated: 'We the undersigned petition the prime minister to scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy.' It was signed by a grand total of 1,808,518 people and gave massive public exposure to the question of whether or not Britain should start charging for road use. There can be little doubt that, as an exercise in public participation, it was a huge success. This was the 'choice agenda' at a macro level. It probably tells us something important about the future of politics.

Matthew Taylor, until recently head of the Downing Street Policy Unit, has defended the use of petitions. He argues they are a sensible way of testing the opinions of the electorate at a time when politicians have less confidence in conventional methods of gauging the mood of the people. The public appears to be increasingly fractured and fractious, with polling suggesting that trust in politicians has seriously diminished.

Taylor, now chief executive of the RSA, has a point. Commenting last weekend on an initiative that involved inviting 60 members of the public into Downing Street to consider the future of public services, he said: 'The competing interests to be resolved are not just between different social groups but within the contradictory needs of individuals.' This is surely correct and a significant problem for politicians in all parties.

If the Blair government learns nothing else from the 1.8 million signatories to the road-pricing petition, it will at least have realised that the issue will have to be handled with care. In last Thursday's Daily Mail, the prime minister said it would be 'kamikaze politics' to force through road pricing amid widespread public opposition. An equivalent petition about the poll tax might just have saved Mrs Thatcher's political skin. Tony Blair's e-response to those who signed the petition was careful and promised a very long lead-time to any road-pricing scheme. Moreover, the idea of a government-sponsored vehicle tracking system (as a way of collecting tolls) was probably killed stone dead by the petition. As if to stress the importance of the issue, the PM has subsequently been interviewed on the Number 10 website by Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond.

The second most popular e-petition concerns inheritance tax, signed by more than 100,000 (and counting). Others concern issues varying from opposition to the banning of photography in some public places (47,000+) to support for the continued funding of the RAF's Red Arrows aerobatics team (43,000+). The prime minister's experiment in cyberspace consultation has proved more successful than he could possibly have imagined.

Some traditionalists have argued that petitions, like referendums, are the tools of tyrants. A bad government might put populist propositions before the public to secure assent for dodgy or illiberal policies. The reason we have evolved our particular kind of representative democracy is to ensure that minority rights are unlikely to be trampled upon by despots and ideologues.

Yet other democracies have opened themselves to binding propositions of the kind that, on the basis of the above argument, would be likely to tie the hands of legislators and oppress minority rights. The United States, in particular, uses votes of this kind to override state and local governments. Yet there is no evidence that such an approach has produced evil results.

Anyway, the government is not bound by the road pricing petition. Britain remains a representative democracy where MPs, councillors and mayors can either take heed of or ignore public opinions. There are plenty of other ways for people to express their views to government. Pressure groups, the press and, in extremis, street protest can all influence (or not) the way a government behaves. The only votes that really count are those cast in elections.

Thus, for example, Blair decided not to change his Iraq policy after the massive march in central London against the war. Ken Livingstone has moved ahead with congestion charging in the capital, despite opinion surveys that have suggested opposition to the policy although other polls have supported the idea. Thatcher memorably ignored evidence of opposition to the community charge. Capital punishment has not been re-introduced despite significant public support for it.

And yet politicians are desperate to know what the public thinks about a range of issues. In part, this is for the cynical reason that governments and councillors wish to be popular. It is from this reasoning that the accusation has arisen that the Blair government operates 'government by focus group'. But politicians also worry with good reason that the public is increasingly mistrustful of them and that there is a need to reconnect with the electorate.

Pollster Ipsos Mori's huge body of evidence suggests that councils that communicate directly with the public achieve higher levels of satisfaction than those that don't. And polls show that the proportion of the electorate who believe their council keeps them well-informed dropped from 51% to 43% between 2003 and 2006.

The public's opinion of national politicians is similarly pessimistic. Polls suggest that while the government's policies for the NHS are relatively unpopular, people are generally satisfied with their most recent visit to a local hospital. It is easy to see why both Labour and Conservative politicians are considering handing over the management of the health service to an independent board.

Petitions will almost certainly become one of the tools in the politician's armoury for the simple reason that they test the salience of the electorate's opinions. Polling is an important source of evidence, but it cannot always show how strong the public's views are. A petition that can get almost 2 million people to sign it suggests that opposition to road pricing is real and, potentially, politically dangerous. Interestingly, no-one dared put up a counter-petition in support of road pricing, suggesting there are fears that pro-charging opinions are less salient than 'anti' ones.

Even the most environmentally conscious proponents of charging for road use are now treading with extreme caution. Transport 2000 director Stephen Joseph has said: 'What this petition shows, as we've been saying all along, is that road charging on its own is never going to be acceptable. We think we will need some kind of road charging, but it needs to be part of a bigger package, including reductions in taxes.' If the environment movement sees a danger that inept implementation could kill off such a potentially useful policy, it is easy to see why Blair is cautious.

There is a wider message for politics here. The road-pricing petition is simply another way of finding out in advance what politicians learned some years ago about local taxation. Put simply, it is electoral suicide to make changes to public policy that will, in a very visible way, take money away from marginal voters. Road pricing would have to be 'felt' to be effective. By charging people for every mile they drive, there would be millions of gainers and losers. The former will not react, while the latter will march on Downing Street.

It is possible to see how other bright policy ideas could come to grief if implemented without a thorough test of public opinion. Take the idea of a 'personal carbon allowance' to encourage us to cut back on damage to the environment. Under the scheme, outlined on Monday this week by Environment Secretary David Miliband, all UK citizens would be allocated a flat-rate carbon allowance each year that would be stored as points on a plastic card. Points would then be deducted for every purchase of non-renewable energy, such as electricity or petrol. Those who did not use their full allocation, such as people who do not own a car, would be able to 'sell' their surplus carbon points into a central bank, which could then sell them on to bigger users.

Sounds great, doesn't it? But think of the political obstacles. What about poor people who live in remote areas (such as Welsh hill farmers) and rich people who don't use a car (such as dowager duchesses in Kensington)? What about Scotland, where the winters are colder and darker? And surely Londoners, who have good public transport (much of it funded by national taxpayers), would have a huge advantage compared with people in most of the rest of the country where trains and buses are generally poor?

Moving to a personal carbon allowance makes perfect environmental sense, in the same way as road pricing could reduce car use and thus help to cut congestion. But the problems of getting from where we are today to the better world that needs to be created would, potentially, destroy the government that attempted to achieve it.

This risk is also the major obstacle to the reform of council tax. Even if the whole country agreed that another system of local taxation would be better than the present one, the gainers and losers on the route from one system to the other would terrify ministers into the avoidance of reform. Remember what happened to council tax revaluation in England? Blair abandoned it for fear of the electoral consequences.

If politicians ask the public for their views, they must be prepared to cope with the messages that come back to them. Using public consultation too late in the process of introducing a controversial policy will simply induce alarm and despair. Doing it early on, of course, risks the avoidance of any tough decisions where opinion seems resolutely against a change.

Last week's decision by Brighton and Hove City Council to introduce a lottery for school places looks like one that had not been subjected to e-petitions or other deep opinion-testing techniques. It is a controversial decision by councillors that will either prove brave and popular or a serious vote loser. But it points to the need for politicians to make difficult choices and occasionally to pioneer new and possibly unpopular approaches to public services. Decisions about the availability of expensive drugs, currently left to the

National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, are another example of hard choices where an understanding of the public mood would be important.

The use of petitions, focus groups, citizens' juries and other consultation techniques can alert politicians to potentially fatal electoral resistance. The next question is: how to inform the public of the need for policy change that might leave many people worse off? With politics held in such low esteem, it appears likely that other means will have to be found to promote good but unpopular policies. Non-governmental organisations, non-political 'experts' and informed members of the public might have to be enlisted to conduct a full debate about reforms such as road pricing, environmental levies and the reform of local taxation.

Politicians will probably have to cede the leadership of much of the debate about such policies to people outside conventional politics. This change will raise the profile of lobby groups, think-tanks, scientists, universities and other, more trusted, institutions. But, in the end, we must keep a system where elected politicians make decisions about the future of government. Consultation is a means, not an end in itself. Having said that, Wegg-Prosser is a hero, not a villain.

Tony Travers is the director of the Greater London group at the London School of Economics

PFmar2007

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