The preponderance of London-based think-tanks reinforces concerns about the over-centralised nature of British government and the economic and political dominance of the capital
I recently read a report in Prospect magazine about its annual ‘Think Tank of the Year’ event held in London in the company of many of the good and great in our society. What struck me immediately is that all of the think-tanks involved in this event were located in central London.
I subsequently did a small amount of further research and soon discovered that, apart from those in Wales and Scotland, there doesn’t seem to be any policy think tank in the UK that is located outside of London, even though over 80% of the UK population lives outside the metropolis.
This seems yet a further example of the massive over-centralisation of the UK. In almost no other developed country does the largest city dominate to the extent that London does in the UK.
In some countries, such as the US and the Netherlands, the capital is not the largest city and this provides a balancing effect between two centres. But the over-centralised UK means that political power is concentrated in London and no doubt this explains the over-concentration of think-tanks in the capital.
London also dominates economically as well in that it has a disproportionate level of economic activity, compared to other parts of the UK, resulting in huge disparities in income and wealth.
The over-centralisation of power in the UK might not matter if the public policy development and implementation that emanated from it could be regarded as a success. Instead, it is something of a disaster zone. Most of us can probably think of several disasters in public policy while we might struggle to think of anything that was an overwhelming success.
In 2010, the Institute for Government asked political science academics to identify what they saw as the most successful public policies of the past 30 years. The results from the 150 respondents showed little consensus – the most successful public policy (the minimum wage) received only 24 first preference votes.
The third, fifth and sixth most successful were seen as: privatisation, Sure Start and the Human Rights Act, policies that raise many eyebrows outside Whitehall. There were hardly any votes for policies in the key fields of education, defence and transport. Hardly a glowing testimony.
This constant policy failure, under all governments, must surely follow from the over-centralised and amateurish political and administrative systems we have in the UK. I remember being present, some years ago, at a presentation given by the (then) Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit. This was a unit that reported directly to the Prime Minister and had responsibility for overseeing the implementation of the government’s Public Service Agreements (PSAs) designed to enable policy objectives to be achieved.
At first I was amazed and them bewildered by the tone of the presentation, which seemed to believe that instructions given from offices in Whitehall would eventually be translated into the right sorts of action by schools, hospitals, local authorities etc in Bradford, Birmingham, Bristol or Bolton.
I recalled the words of former US President Harry Truman who was quoted as saying ‘people think I give orders from the White House and make things happen. Actually, I spend all day kissing backsides to make things happen’. The only inaccuracy here was that Truman used a cruder word than ‘backsides’.
The failure of this approach is clearly set out in a report by the National Audit Office, which gave central government departments a score as to how far successful they had been in meeting their PSAs. The average across all of them was only 45%. Only two departments scored 100% and five departments scored less than 25%.
Prime Minister David Cameron is now talking about using the eurozone crisis as an opportunity to reshape the European Union along different lines and more akin to what the UK government might wish to see. Is not the UK financial crisis also an opportunity to reshape the development of public policy and the management of government more in line with what is needed in a 21st century globalised world?
Are there not rich benefactors somewhere out there who would finance the creation of a network of policy think tanks across the UK that could create public policy in a different manner to the stale and outmoded themes currently emerging from London?
Malcolm Prowle is the co-author of Public services and financial austerity: getting out of the hole published by Palgrave Macmillan
