Get real on Whitehall policy-making, by Jill Rutter

19 Apr 11
Poor policies cost money, damage the economy, force people to suffer from bad public services and ultimately undermine faith in government and the political process.

We all have an interest in policy being made well-made – poor policies cost money, damage the economy, force people to suffer from bad public services and ultimately undermine  faith in government and the political process.

So it is worth time and effort to make policies better.  The last government had repeated goes at that – looking at the process for policy, the qualities of good policy and how policy was organised. Those led to improvements – but Institute for Government research suggests that at the end of those thirteen years, both ministers and civil servants were still frustrated at the way policy is made in Whitehall.   We conclude that is because those attempts focused on policy-making alone without paying attention to the real world in which policy is made – a world of pressures on ministers; an adversarial political culture; and ministers and civil servants wanting to move on and up, and therefore looking for new initiatives to get them noticed.

That was the world as was.  The new world is one of hefty cuts in administrative budgets, and a government committed in principle at least to decentralisation – doing less in Whitehall and leaving more decisions out there.  So the nature of policy making has to change. Out go 'delivery chains' yanked from SW1; in comes the notion of 'system stewardship' – taking responsibility for the direction of travel, but exiting from most of the individual decisions.

So what next for policy-making?  In our report, Making Policy Better, we argue for a series of changes.  First, the government should commit to a new set of policy fundamentals – the building blocks of good policy.  Those include clarity on goals, roles and accountabilities; a focus on responding to external views, and a greater emphasis on policy design.  We want each department to commit to how it will observe those fundamentals.

Second, we need to change the system within which policy is made – to tilt it in favour of better policy. We recommend doing this by meeting ministers’ complaints that too often they did not feel in control of the policy process – that they were brought in too late, saw only 'pre-cooked' options and were given too little time to respond.  A new Policy Director in departments would be responsible for making sure ministers were properly engaged in policy-making – but would also be responsible for the quality of policies across the department. In particular, they would be responsible for making sure there is the internal challenge that many told us is lacking now.

We want to bolster that change with stronger controls.  The Accounting Officer responsibility of permanent secretaries for value for money should be expanded – so that they can object if they think the policy process is not good enough to provide a sound basis for the policy to proceed.   This gives the civil service a formal role – and duty – to act as guardians of the public interest and challenge poor policy-making.   Ministers could overrule – as they can on VFM now.  But they would have to do so through a public 'policy direction'.    That would act as a powerful incentive on both sides. It would make it easier for ministers to resist the pressure for knee-jerk reactions; it would also force the civil service to improve the quality of its advice on what should be its core expertise – how to make policy well.

More changes are needed to ready both ministers and the civil service for an outward-looking world, where policy is made by many different actors, rather than looking in and up. But these changes offer the prospect of making policy better, in the real world of politics.

Jill Rutter is programme director at the Institute for Government. The IfG report on policy-making can be found at http://bit.ly/gnxS1x

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