📜 Is your policy politically bulletproof?

Pressing issues were like little piranha bites out of my day, and with each one the amount of time I had to think about the long term eroded. When I came into government, I remember talking to another special adviser who had worked in government before. I said that I wanted to spend about a third of my time thinking about longer term stuff. He laughed, shook his head, and said ‘you are completely naive’. You quickly realise that if you try and grip everything, you grip nothing. I came in thinking ministers need to have more control and oversight. Over time though, I realised that there is only so much you can oversee; you have to focus on where the politics adds most value. 

We always talk about how difficult it is to get anything done and how slow Whitehall moves, so let’s do something about it. There are lots of ways in which you can improve it, but it requires buy-in from officials to say, ‘normally we are used to discussing among ourselves first, but we have to accept that the minister will have much more of an involved role earlier on’. In return, you’ll buy maybe two months at the other end of the process through a consolidated business case approval. It will mean we get our hospitals built, or digital technologies rolled out more quickly, or whatever it is. It requires a leap of faith from officials as well as the political class to say ‘we’re in this together’. Everyone finds it demotivating when things move too slowly. We need to be honest about how it can be improved rather than hiding behind the process.

I thought I’d have more time to read reports, but I barely read anything beyond the executive summary from an external organisation. If the report was longer than 10 or 15 pages, there was no way I was reading more than two or three pages. That’s not because I didn’t want to, quite the opposite. I wanted to engage more broadly with think tanks because we didn’t have time to do as much longer term thinking as we’d have liked. Think tanks offer a really good mechanism for pinching great ideas. That said, when we did find the time to engage, the spread of the quality of those ideas was too wide.