🏛️ The role and function of government reviews

Why do governments commission reviews? Let’s count the ways….

The first reason might be to kick a difficult issue into the long grass while still appearing to be seen to do something about it. A review is powerfully suggestive of action, sometimes without the pain of having to react–at least in the short term.

The second reason might be to satisfy a client class in politics. Look at the work being done with the now-ditched definition of Islamophobia. That’s an example of reacting to tribal pressure from inside a party.

Another is to react to public anger and opinion beyond a certain point of momentum. Yes, social media has accelerated that process and often you see people piling in after something awful happens. But a lot of the time people are just baffled and bewildered about how on earth the things we see unfolding on our TV screens are allowed to happen. They want to know what’s going on.

And the last reason is to do the right thing. When he commissioned our review into Islamist extremism in British prisons, Michael Gove had just left the Department for Education, where he was concerned about infiltration and subversion by Islamist extremists (you’ll remember the Trojan Horse affair). When he went to the Department of Justice he wanted to ensure Islamist extremism didn’t have any purchase within the criminal justice system he was now in charge of.

Integrity beats telling people what they want to hear

Whether you are conducting a review for the government or the opposition, the approach needs to be the same: your personal integrity about the task you’re given, your independence, and an analytical rather than emotional or partisan approach, are going to deliver far better value for any political party than just giving people the answers they want.

I am philosophically conservative—two minutes on my timeline on X would tell you that—but I’m not a member of any political party. I would always want to write something whose conclusions and recommendations are evidence-backed and tell a compelling story, so that any political party that wanted to could adopt them, because they are common-sense, honest and represent a straightforward approach.

Lived experience matters—but don’t fetishise it

Many people who work in policy have no real experience of the thing that they’re talking about. But at the same time, we can take ourselves down a rabbit hole by saying it’s only people with lived experience who are qualified to talk about and think about how we might change things. That is not the case: academia and rigorous study holds a lot of value.

📣 The interlude

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Do you understand the frontline challenges of your policy domain?

When ministers think about changing things, there’s an obvious attraction to getting all the senior people into the room. If it’s the prison service, you get all the bureaucrats and suits—the 5,000 of them who work in prison service headquarters, completely detached from the front line—and they’ll give you very sophisticated answers.

But if you really want to understand how to change things, you must talk to the people who make the culture you’re trying to change. Those are the people on the front line. They don’t have the status of all the people with the eggs and bacon on their shoulders, yet they are the people driving the business you are trying to change.

If you don’t have the unmediated views of the front line, your policy diagnosis is going to be fatally undermined. 

Supervisors make or break a culture: who are yours?

One of the things I’m incredibly passionate about is the importance of supervisors on the front line in making and changing cultures, either for good or for ill. Take Charing Cross police station, where the whole culture had become toxified with racism, misogyny, and homophobia. It had been allowed to fester because either nobody was paying attention to the good supervisors, or the supervisors weren’t good enough to model the behaviour the organisation expects.

There is no point in producing endless amounts of paper at the top of an organisation if it has no impact on how things are actually being done. If you as the leader can’t be visible because there’s only one of you and the organisation is hundreds or thousands strong, who are you relying on to make your moral authority stick? You’re relying on your supervisors.

“They are Satanists. We will kill them wherever we find them”

I was in Jordan around 2017, doing some work with their equivalent of the Home Office. I was explaining our review into Islamist extremism and its conclusions to a senior official–he was a huge guy wearing a t-shirt with King Hussein’s face on the front, so you knew where he was coming from. 

I was talking about the problems of Islamist extremism in a very roundabout, British-Irish sort of way, and eventually I stopped bloviating and said, “Do you have a problem with these sorts of people?” He just looked at me directly and said, “They are Satanists. We will kill them wherever we find them.” 

Now, I’m not advocating for that position, but it speaks to a wider issue about our whole approach to risk in the UK. We have a slavish devotion to process and a lack of institutional curiosity, rather than a focus on outcomes. 

The question is: have we got the balance right?

Thank you to the 122 of you (+4 on last week) who have referred colleagues to this newsletter. The views expressed in Policy Unstuck interviews are those of the interviewee, and do not necessarily represent Cast from Clay’s view.