📈 Why we should adopt the philosophy of marginal gains

I really enjoyed Lord Mark Pack’s phrase “the accumulation of sludge on the statute book” (Orwell would approve of the metaphor.) Mark is referring to legislation that has been passed by Parliament but that has never actually commenced. Law that has been adopted, but not adopted; it is neither alive, nor dead.

If our goal is a ‘policy win’, we may say we have succeeded (the legislation has passed). But if our goal, as Rakesh argued it should be, is “a meaningful or measurable difference in people’s lives”, then we have failed: nothing has changed.

Even when legislation does commence, it still doesn’t mean anything will necessarily change. There is a difference between an ability to do something, and a desire to actually do it.

An example: last weekend I joined many thousands of Londoners in having my bike stolen. It’s a bike that I’m fond of—I rode it 2,000km from London to Ukraine to fundraise for landmine removal. Many people got involved in that ride (forever grateful for your company and wind breaking skills, Tom!) including Revamp Bikes who sprayed it in United Kingdom and Ukrainian colours—the paint job is epic.

Within 48 hours of the theft, we had identified the thief’s eBay account as they sold off the parts, and found out where they live by buying one of their other listings. But there is nothing to be done: the police are not interested.

The legislation is clear—theft is illegal—but meaningless. It’s meaningless because the Metropolitan Police’s policy is not to do anything about theft. The Police have the ability to do something, but they have no desire.

All of which leads to today’s provocation: is there any point in calling for new legislation unless you’ve done the deep thinking on how it will be commenced, implemented and actually used?

Tom
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Secondary legislation: power to the government or madness

When people talk about secondary legislation, they often talk about concerns over how much power it gives the government to slip things through quickly. That is a legitimate concern, but my goodness, so much secondary legislation moves so slowly.

Alongside that, there’s the commencement issue. There are bits of legislation that were passed years ago that have never been commenced. Perhaps the most famous example is the legislation to change the date of Easter a century ago [in the Easter Act 1928]. Despite receiving Royal Assent, it’s never been enacted. 

This leaves us with a mad level of complexity in the statute book, and becomes really quite operationally challenging and confusing when one clause in a piece of legislation has been enacted, but another clause has not. 

Build the statute book like a codebase: structure it

If you think of the statute book like a codebase, well, no developer would do it this way. There’s stuff that has been coded multiple times in different ways, bits of code that nobody’s ever got round to actually turning on: it just slows everything down and makes it harder and more error-prone.

We need to clean it up. The challenge is partly that there’s little career benefit to a politician or civil servant from being the one to go around tidying stuff up. We’ve never had the bureaucratic equivalent of competitive cycling’s belief in marginal gains, that mindset that the way you get dramatic success is to marginally improve lots of different things.

Politics and the British government is very much in the mindset of looking for the big solution, rather than the 1,001 ways we can make life a bit better.

→ What’s the legislative equivalent of Deel’s use of ‘ghostbusters’?

Know your audience, and what they can do

Most of what I hear and see from think tanks and lobbyists is what they want the Prime Minister or Cabinet to do. They’re focused on the big picture and that’s natural. 

But you’d get a different approach if you were to ask, bearing in mind that I am a backbench opposition politician in a small party: What might I be able to change? What might I be able to have some influence on? 

If we take the example of political reform at the moment, it’s natural to want to talk about big picture things in political finance regulation, such as whether there be a cap on donations. And hopefully I’ll be able to have some influence on those things, but really where I can be effective is right down in the details, like ‘what are the government’s plans to change the design of poll cards?’

For most of us, a lot of the outside lobbying and engagement isn’t pitching at what we’ve got the biggest hope of being able to change.

The Lords is about scrutiny, not policy making

Informing the scrutiny process in the Lords is rather different from lobbying about policy. One of the best things to suggest to a Peer is ‘these are the top questions you might want to ask’.

If you think about transport for example, you could say ‘You might want to look at how the DVLA is operating and how much money it’s taking. Is it being run efficiently?’ as opposed to ‘We’d like to persuade you that HS2 is a good/bad idea.’

The difference between the Lib Dems and Labour…

Some joke that you’re more likely to find a Lib Dem pointing at a pothole, and you’re more likely to find a Labour politician waving a Palestinian flag at an event. 

It’s sort of unfair but also has a bit of truth to it in the sense that I think what particularly motivates a lot of people in the Lib Dems is the desire to get stuck into fixing something practical, something you can actually deal with. 

Are you most motivated to go out tomorrow to campaign for a new pedestrian crossing outside a local school or are you most motivated to sit down and talk with your friends about Donald Trump's foreign policy? Both matter but it’s the former where you can make a direct difference.

The Lib Dems strategy is about seats, not national vote share

If you look at what has been really successful for us, it’s been to focus on winning seats under the electoral system that we have. When we’ve really focused on chasing seat numbers under first past the post–and not maximising national vote share–it absolutely has delivered the goods. And therefore we’re very much focused on maximising our seat tally because in the end that is what matters.

The Reform coalition may well suffer if net immigration collapses

Immigration tends to unite Reform voters. But what divides them are all of those other more traditional left-right issues: you will find plenty of Reform voters who are split on whether we should cut taxes and shrink the state or whether we need more money going into public services to make them better.

At the moment we are seeing net immigration numbers falling through the floor. The big risk for Reform is that the thing that is so important to keeping their disparate coalition together may well not work for them politically as an issue in a couple of year’s time when net immigration has fallen massively, when it’s maybe even gone past zero, and when that has really fed through to public opinion. 

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