🚪 Be the last person in the room with the minister

In this week’s interview, Dewi covers:

1. Why you should focus your efforts on junior civil servant engagement

2. The downside of the UK’s overly legalistic approach to governing

3. The challenges of intergovernmental workings between the nations of the UK and Ireland

We’ll be running Communicate to Persuade again soon, our 5 week online course that teaches you how to be a more persuasive communicator. Ditto our Generative AI for Policy Communicators. Check out the web pages for more information.

Have a great weekend when you get there,

Tom

The three things a special adviser needs to do

Firstly, you have to work around the hierarchy of the civil service and invest in those relationships with the people lower down who are actually doing the work and equally invest in those from outside who will be affected by your policies or even want to challenge them. Don't get caught up in the ‘it's all about being at cabinet’ and meeting your director general all the time.

But, secondly, you do need to invest in the leadership of your department. You will realise that ministers, and even less advisers, don't have the currency to move people around in the department or change the structures. It’s the permanent civil service that does that. So, you’ve got to ensure that as far as possible, the leadership of the department are aligned with what the minister and the government want to do.

And thirdly, always make sure you are the last person in the room with the minister before one of those moments where the minister has to step up and deliver… at cabinet, meetings with other ministers or externals, speaking on the floor of Parliament, whatever it is.

The value of junior civil servants to a political adviser

As an insider I got a lot of value from investing in relationships with junior colleagues. And not just because they are the ones actually doing the work who understand whatever policy in detail.

The more junior civil servants might give me intelligence on what’s being blocked by senior civil servants, or even coming to my desk–not in a surreptitious way– and saying ‘we are working on this ministerial advice but there's a blockage somewhere that means we can't get it to you.’ 

Then I’m informed so I can give a bit of push back in my weekly meeting with a senior civil servant and get things moving.

→ Read Andy Ormerod-Cloke’s interview (former Deputy Director in DfE and DESNZ), for more on why junior civil servant engagement is important.

What does the type of person in politics tell us about the values of the system?

Every single member of the Chinese Politburo has an engineering degree of some kind. And as Dan Wang says in Breakneck, something like every candidate for US president and VP going back 45 years went to law school. 

His view is that China is an engineering state. It uses a sledgehammer to get things done. Whereas America is a legalistic state, and it's the gavel that decides everything.  It's all about process and making sure you've ticked off certain things. 

That's even more true in the UK. You see the civil service trying to deliver reforms, and often it feels as if it’s the legal advice that's the most important thing. Legal advice seems to be there to prevent things happening and that drives civil servants behaviour, which ends up driving ministers’ behaviour. 

Ministers and officials need rules and regulations to prevent bad faith actors. But we should be measuring policy development and delivery against the impact it might have on the common good and better lives, rather than the bogeyman of potential judicial reviews, legal advice and pretend consultations.

Single metric impact assessments go wrong

The way the schools performance measure had been set out was that you didn't need a GCSE [academic qualification], but a BTEC [vocational qualification] would do it. Now, BTEC has its place, but it is a less accurate record of a 16-year-old's academic achievement and progression.

What we discovered was a lot of schools in disadvantaged areas were putting 100% of their kids in for BTEC, and getting a 95% pass rate. And it was doing down those kids because they then thought they were brilliant at science, but you can’t go on to be a doctor if you have a BTEC. It was fundamentally gaming the system and the targets schools were meant to be meeting.

I'm a big believer in data and using it to inform both policy delivery and understanding. But that was a great example of how measuring the wrong thing leads you down the wrong path. It’s something we’ll be looking at as part of the new national Research Capability Hub for social scientists.

England needs to learn from its fellow nation states

PolicyWise works across the nations of the UK and Ireland. Our Wise in 5 briefings compare policy across those administrations on everything from tourist taxes, to cosmetic procedures, to education for refugees. Each administration can learn things from the others, but that’s not without challenges.

Sometimes you hear anglophobia in the devolved nations. England is seen as the big brother philosophically, it's generally a bit of an outlier to the others, and there can be a sense of ‘we're not going to learn from the pesky English.’ That's just wrong, isn't it?

At the same time, there is sometimes still the view that Westminster policy, which generally is English domestic policy, is the norm or the standard, as if it is the real policy and the others are just diverging from it. Well no, that's not how devolution works. 

The other countries' systems or policies are happening in their own contexts and for their own reasons, generally not as a response to what's happening in Westminster. Westminster may find it can learn from them. We’ve got to do better at getting the culture and structures of intergovernmental relations right.

-> Read PolicyWISE’s research in this space here.

Yes, you do need to engage Reform

I’m of the view you have to engage as long as a party is not beyond the pale, and Reform is not beyond the pale. So, I think you should engage with them and their prescription on what's going wrong. Some of that has merit in terms of political disempowerment, and the distance between decision-making and the people who are on the blunt end of those decisions.

Look, they have two metro mayors in England at the moment and those mayors don't have a massive prospectus yet and are looking for ideas. That is an opportunity to engage–they are in charge of big budgets and will have an emphasis on place-based policy.

→ We’re helping a number of clients think through their approaches to Reform. Reply to this email if you would like to discuss how you should approach the changing political winds.