📜 It possibly lost me my seat, but...

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The Treasury has heard it all before

Every case that goes to the Treasury will say ‘if you spend now you're going to save money in the future’. Everybody wants those returns, but they’ve heard it all before and they are sceptical about whether they’ll be realised. To get traction, you need to develop your argument further than a theoretical saving. Usually that means a pilot or a randomised control trial–the more scientific, the better. The problem is that by the time these pilots have concluded then the ministers or the agenda may have moved on. Trying to line up what’s needed together in a timely way is the challenge. 

Read the first paragraph of James Nation’s interview for more on this.

People are not normally irrational

Ask what is driving specific policies or prior decisions, because often people will then say ‘This is behind that decision, and they need to satisfy this colleague, or they need to get that from the Treasury’. What you’ll realise is that a lot of civil servants, as well as trying to get their policy through in difficult political circumstances, are also in this giant continuous negotiation with the Treasury. They’re making sure they’ve got enough negotiating pieces to get the money released, or keep it in the department for future use.

The jigsaw puzzle the minister has to solve

Being a minister is a weird old role. The first thing you need to do as a minister is step back and try to look at the bigger picture. You’re unlikely to have deep background on your brief, and sometimes it is impossible to make sense of it when you get submissions representing micro bits of policy being presented to you by civil servants. To civil servants the micro policy makes sense–it’s just the latest bit of delivery. But to the minister, it’s like somebody giving you a jigsaw puzzle without the front cover. You’ve got to figure out how it all fits together. So take the time to understand that. You want someone to tell you: ‘We started this journey a few years ago. Here's the big picture. This is what we've done so far. This worked. This didn't. Here's what we're going to be coming to next.’