Liaison Sub-Committee on Scrutiny of Strategic Thinking in Government
Oral evidence: Scrutiny of Strategic Thinking in Government, HC 31
Tuesday 5 March 2024
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 5 March 2024.
Members present: Sir Bernard Jenkin (Chair); Harriett Baldwin; Mr Clive Betts; Liam Byrne; Philip Dunne; Iain Stewart.
Questions 1 - 75
Witnesses
I: Jill Rutter, Senior Fellow, Institute for Government; Alex Thomas, Programme Director, Institute for Government; and Professor Matthew Flinders, Professor of Politics, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Sheffield.
II: The Rt Hon. Lord Robertson of Port Ellen KT.
III: Lord Sedwill KCMG.
Written evidence from witnesses:
Witnesses: Jill Rutter, Alex Thomas and Professor Matthew Flinders.
Chair: Welcome to this session of the Sub-Committee of the Liaison Committee, which is looking at how Select Committees can scrutinise and encourage strategic thinking in Government. We will kick off with brief introductions from each of you. Would you say who you are and introduce yourselves?
Jill Rutter: I am Jill Rutter, senior fellow at the Institute for Government and a former senior civil servant.
Alex Thomas: I am Alex Thomas, programme director at the Institute for Government, leading our work on the civil service. I am a former senior civil servant.
Professor Matthew Flinders: I am Matthew Flinders, professor of politics at the University of Sheffield.
Q1 Chair: Thank you very much indeed for being with us. I will kick off with the first question. What exactly is strategic thinking in Government?
Professor Matthew Flinders: I think strategic thinking is all about how you design effective and integrated policy, with the emphasis on integration. I think strategic thinking—strategic capacity—has three elements, one of which is often overlooked. The first element is a mid to long-term dimension; the second is a horizontal, cross-governmental dimension; and the third dimension, which is often overlooked, is the historical dimension, so learning from the past. One of the biggest challenges we face is a lack of institutional memory. For me, strategic capacity is about being able to reach across those three dimensions with clarity.
Chair: Very good.
Alex Thomas: I agree with that. For me, it is about having a plan of action to achieve a defined set of objectives. I would pick out five things: first, determining the objectives and priorities in which they sit; secondly, allocating resources; thirdly, organising institutions and structures to implement those objectives; fourthly, the implementation of policy; and fifthly, evaluation.
Jill Rutter: I don’t have very much to add. I would go with the starting point of, “What are you trying to achieve?” An important part of it is understanding the context. It is what Matt was saying about how we got here and the history, because quite often you go wrong when you set objectives but do not understand your current situation well enough. What you are then trying to do is align your policy resources and capability inside and outside Government to achieve those objectives. You also need to think about the risks and the linkages and interdependencies with other areas you are working in.
The other thing it requires—Alex mentioned evaluation—is regular reiteration. It is about not necessarily changing those objectives—you might want to update them—but thinking, “We’re trying to achieve this. Are we making the progress we expected? Are there other issues we need to be dealing with or any unintended consequences?” You regularly update it as well, because it should be a lodestar for what you are trying to achieve.
Q2 Chair: We gave you some thoughts on paper about the answer to that first question. How does our wording align with your own thinking?
Alex Thomas: For my part, the content is very close. I would pick out “the cohering over time of reality”, as Jill was saying, along with policy, activity and resource. There are two comments I would make. One is that point about evaluation and the iteration of the activity being embedded in it. Secondly, the former practitioner in me would say that the definition you provided has quite a lot of brackets in it. It is a bit long. Something punchier that maybe talks about a plan of action would be a good starting point before getting into the detail.
Professor Matthew Flinders: I thought it was very interesting. Again, I had some concerns. It seemed a rather technocratic definition. For me, strategic capacity is very simple: it is about emphasising and developing connective, catalysing and collaborative capacity. It is also simpler than that: it is about asking, “What is the story we are telling?” There is a big link between strategy and story. What is the story we want to tell about where we are going, why and how we are going to get there?
Chair: Anything to add, Jill Rutter?
Jill Rutter: No—as long as successful implementation means, “Are we actually delivering our objectives?”, because you can implement your policy quite successfully at one level, but it might not necessarily actually change things on the ground. You can cut income tax, but do you grow the economy if that is why you thought you were cutting income tax? I think there is an interesting question about how far that goes.
Q3 Chair: How should Government understand the difference between policy and strategy, and plans?
Professor Matthew Flinders: I think it’s quite simple. Actually, sometimes strategy is doing nothing, and we forget that. If you think about the classic policy cycle that we teach a lot of students, strategy is the high-level ambition, under which lies policies, under which lies implementation. There is obviously an inter-relationship between them, but there is a layered dimension, and strategy is about the high-level ambition of where we want to get to, how we define the problem and why we want to get there. Really, the strategy is the anchorage point from which everything else should flow.
Chair: And policy comes after strategy.
Jill Rutter: Yes.
Alex Thomas: I think so, although I would emphasise Matt’s point about the fact that you are doing a strategy whether you know it or not. The question is whether you are doing an active, thought-through strategy to achieve something, or you are just blowing with the winds.
Q4 Chair: Professor Flinders, what do you mean by strategic scrutiny?
Professor Matthew Flinders: What is interesting is that in the past—forgive me, but I have been through this debate about how to build and sustain strategic capacity for the last 30 years—we often see this as an issue for the Government. Actually, in many ways, strategic capacity is too important to leave to the Government, and there is a great role for Select Committees to divine new forms of supportive scrutiny to help the Government to think about strategic goals through new ways of engagement and new ways of partnership. For me, strategic scrutiny is a complement to building strategic capacity. What we lack is strategic scaffolding to support Ministers and officials, and Select Committees could, and arguably should, play a stronger role as part of that positive strategic scaffolding.
Mr Betts: I am just thinking that the idea of scaffolding to support Ministers might not be—
Q5 Chair: We feel on the scaffold most of the time.
What would you say to people who insist that strategy is not possible in the modern age?
Jill Rutter: I think it’s more important to have some sort of view of what you are trying to achieve; otherwise, you will find yourself buffeted by the latest thing that is happening and forced to react. If you manage to think, “Actually, this is what we are achieving and this is why we are doing this,” it gives you a greater robustness about sticking the course, which is one of the things you may be pressured not to do. I actually think that’s wrong: I don’t think there is any reason why the modern age should make strategy more difficult. Sticking to it may be harder, but that makes it more important.
Q6 Philip Dunne: We are asking our witnesses to give us good examples of the UK’s strategic thinking being deployed in practice. Could you illustrate for us where you think it works?
Professor Matthew Flinders: I will give you a couple of examples from the past. The social exclusion unit under the first new Labour Government took a distinctive approach to thinking about strategy. It brought together a wide range of people with a very focused problem in mind, and it undertook a very detailed analysis of the root of the problem rather than the symptoms of the challenge. It also had success: tangibly, it changed things out there on the streets in Scunthorpe, Swindon or wherever. So the social exclusion unit was very interesting.
Sure Start is also an interesting case study for strategic capacity, which is very hard and complex, and tends to be long term. Sure Start was an ambitious, potentially transformative agenda that crossed generations. What happened with Sure Start, arguably, is that a distinction emerged between good policy and good politics, and politics won out.
Jill Rutter: I was going to come in on Sure Start. We did a case study on it, and we had a very interesting and informative roundtable. I remember a comment from a now very senior Back Bencher, which was that in many ways it was a typical new Labour effort. Maybe that is a bit political, but there was a lot of emphasis on building Sure Start centres and much less clarity about what was supposed to happen in those centres.
One of the problems in the UK Government, and a reason why strategy is important, is that we have a lot of ministerial churn. One effect of not having a strategy for Sure Start was that every time the Minister changed, the objective that the workforce within the centres was supposed to be delivering changed. One minute it was about assistance to young, unskilled parents and potential interventions there, but at other times it was about increasing female employment by offering childcare. Her view was that if they’d had a proper strategy for what to do with the centres, it would have a more effective intervention than it was.
Alex Thomas: I agree with that, but I was thinking about the question slightly differently. Thinking about my time as a civil servant in the coalition Government, probably one of the more successful strategic approaches was austerity, which sounds like a slightly odd thing to say. If you think of the coalition Government, you think of the “programme for government”, which was important, but I would argue it was a list of actions rather than a strategy. The strategy of that Government as a whole was austerity.
It was a successful strategy, whatever you think about the pros and cons of the direction of travel, because it involved marrying a political project with the Government administration, and it provided a means to take difficult decisions over the course of that whole Parliament. The driving factor for that Government was in large part based around that—both the political and administrative desire to balance the books and so on. That is an interesting example at a macro level.
Q7 Philip Dunne: I am intrigued, Matthew, that you came up with Sure Start as an example of good strategy, and Jill said it actually wasn’t good strategy because it descended into debate about buildings or employment and it wasn’t properly thought through. Could you clarify what you think the best things were about that strategy?
Professor Matthew Flinders: Sure Start took a generational approach to understanding how certain people born in certain circumstances needed extra support around them. It attempted to build capacity through Sure Start centres up and down the country and, actually, if you look statistically, you can see a lot of success now that Sure Start can be credited with.
However, I also agree with Jill’s point. One of the issues around a strategy is that, by definition, you want it to be clear and succinct, but at the same time it has to be flexible and agile. I think about education policy today and all the different things that are laid down at the door of schools. The issue with understanding strategic thinking is that the strategy is a flexible direction of travel and framework within which certain policies may change, if and when ministerial priorities or ministerial postholders change, but at least you should still have a strategic view of where you are going and why.
Jill Rutter: If I could add an example, I think the Climate Change Act has, in a sense, by setting a long-term goal for net zero, actually conditioned thinking. We can debate how good the net zero strategy is, but by dint of saying that this is something we are aiming at, it has reduced the potential buffeting that that might have had in the coalition years by being a bit of an anchor of a public commitment. It is also a very important signal to the private sector, which I think is an important additional element of Government being clear about its big, long-run objectives—that Government itself cannot do everything. It is quite important to do that. The idea of the Climate Change Act was quite a good example of strategic thinking from outside Government that was then imported into Government.
Q8 Philip Dunne: That would be an example of the strength of current UK strategic thinking, although it depends on political consensus to get carried from one Government to another. Can you think of some weaknesses of our current strategic thinking and things that could become strengths?
Jill Rutter: I will pitch in. I am very aware that we have the Chair of the Treasury Committee here. I think we have an incredibly unstrategic approach to tax policy, and we are seeing that being played out now. We have to do it Budget by Budget. Briefly, in the early 2010s, we had a clear approach, at least on the corporate tax side, but since 2016 we have seen things going in one direction on corporate tax and then another, and because we treat tax very much as a thing where the Treasury shies away from anything that looks like any sort of tax strategy, we end up just making policy in debating it in the weeks running up to the Budget and waiting for the Chancellor to produce the famous rabbit. I think that is probably at the worst end; I speak as an ex-Treasury official who used to do tax policy, but I think we see the lack of that.
It is quite interesting that the Chancellor may be effectively doing quite an interesting structural reform of the way we tax income, but he is not presenting it as that, if he cuts national insurance again tomorrow—who knows? It is quite an interesting rebalancing with freezing the tax thresholds, but he would never present it as a big, major rethink of the way in which we tax different sorts of income in the UK.
Professor Matthew Flinders: I think Alex made the really good point at the beginning that we have a strategic approach at the moment, but it is too often muddling through. When you think about the case studies of the positive that we started on, they are exceptions to the general rule. What we do not have is a systemic emphasis on strategic thinking, and what we lack—going back to the possibly unfortunate scaffolding analogy—is the internal-external challenge that the Climate Change Act has put in place in that discrete area. The weaknesses are well known: churn, siloed thinking, departmental-itis, high levels of adversarialism and policy advice developed in secret. In many ways, if you were going to design a system to mitigate against strategic thinking, you would probably end up with quite close to what we have.
Alex Thomas: I also think we are poor at identifying a strategy and turning it into a set of priorities and objectives at the start of a Parliament. As well as in the individual areas, Governments have tended not to take advantage of that moment at the start of a Parliament to translate a manifesto into a plan for government, to begin to wrestle with the trade-offs and to give the civil service, other Departments and the whole system of government and those who want to work with the Government a clear idea of what their strategy is. I do not think Governments have been good at doing that.
Look at the King’s Speech: it is largely a list of legislation; it is not a description of how the Government wants to go about its business. We have been working for the last year or so on the Commission on the Centre of Government, and we are launching it on Monday. One of the things we will say—this is a trail—is that there is a strategic vacuum at the heart of Government. Governments, and Prime Ministers, do not take advantage of the opportunity to set out their stall. As we were saying earlier, that does not mean there is no strategy, but it does mean that the Treasury, for its strengths, steps in with spending reviews for the strategy, so decisions are taken in the absence of a clear guiding light.
Q9 Philip Dunne: One final quick question from me. You gave evidence from the institute on international comparators, and pointed to Finland and Singapore, which have embedded strategic thinking into their structures of government. Are they the best examples? Are there things that we can translate here from those or other examples?
Alex Thomas: Finland’s approach is quite interesting, particularly because Singapore tried to institutionalise it, as Singapore often does. There are some other interesting examples. The Netherlands and how they do spending reviews is quite interesting. They are much more issue-specific; they take a particular policy problem or question and look at that through the lens of a spending review, wrestle it to the ground and then set budgets that way. Canada deploys mandate letters, which happen inside Government a bit at the moment, but I would argue they are not terribly successful in setting out a coherent view of what the Government should do; there should be a much more public setting of mandates based around priorities. Scotland and Wales do interesting things about programmes for government, so there are points to learn there.
Professor Matthew Flinders: The Netherlands also has a Scientific Council for Government Policy, which is an independent body established in legislation. It is there to bring together, to generate and corral, the evidence on big, looming future issues coming down the line and deliver it to both Parliament and Government, and both then have to issue a formal response. That really does set in train an emphasis on strategic thinking that we are completely lacking here.
There is more broadly, internationally, a big literature on what is now called positive public administration, which is learning from success and how to embed strategic thinking. There is a huge literature on learning from policy successes. Very little of that work ripples into the day-to-day life and understanding of the civil service. There is no need that it should not.
Q10 Iain Stewart: You touched on the role of the centre of Government, No. 10 and the Cabinet Office, without giving away too much of your publication next week. What should its role be and how well does No. 10 and the Cabinet Office fulfil that currently?
Alex Thomas: I am very happy to keep plugging, so thank you for the opportunity. There are lots of roles for the centre of Government, and I will not go into all of them now. Jill has written about them as well, and I am sure Matthew has, too. We are saying that the primary role, particularly in this context, is to set direction. Given what I said earlier, you will not be surprised to learn that I, we, think that the centre of Government is not as good as it should be at setting direction. We also argue that the Prime Minister is, like it or not, the executive leader of the Government and should be supported as such, so we think the centre of Government should be geared around the priorities that the Prime Minister sets.
You can argue about the institutional arrangements—I will not give the too much of the game away by saying what we will say next week—but I think there should be a more coherent centre that first helps a Prime Minister to set their Government’s priorities, the whole-of-Government priorities. It is not about cutting out Secretaries of State or anything else. It is about helping the Prime Minister to set and then present those whole-Government priorities, and then is geared around delivering those priorities with as clear a distinction as you can get between the proactive, the strategic and the reactive, which will always flow into the centre of Government.
I would say that No. 10 and the Cabinet Office are not strongly set up, despite often excellent people working there. Institutionally they are grinding against each other, and then the strong institution of the Treasury comes in. We need to harness the power of the Treasury to a whole-Government agenda that should come from No. 10 and the Cabinet Office as that part of the centre.
Q11 Iain Stewart: The Cabinet Office has had functions transferred to it over the years. It has had a significant increase in staffing—more than threefold over the last eight or nine years. The IfG has previously suggested that it is responsible for everything but has little real control. So if it has had all these extra resources and functions, why has it not been giving that strategic lead?
Alex Thomas: Because the resourcing and the functions have not gone into the strategic part of the Cabinet Office. Again, we would argue that the Cabinet Office has become incoherent in how it is organised. You are completely right that that increase in headcount is around the functions of Government, such as human resources, commercial, project management, and digital. All of that needs to be done somewhere. You could argue that could be slimmed down a bit, but that activity needs to happen somewhere.
There are two very distinct parts of the Cabinet Office: the bit that does strategy and brokering, and the secretariat, and the bit that does the mechanics and running of Government. The Cabinet Office also has veterans’ affairs, aspects of the borders, and all sorts of add-on bits of policy that I think you need to clean out. Its policy function should be kept to the strategic and the brokering, as well as policy on certain limited aspects of the Constitution and the Union—that is what I would argue.
Q12 Iain Stewart: What is the right balance between the centre of Government being—I am going to borrow from some railway terminology—a guiding mind, as opposed to being the Fat Controller who directs everything? When you have cross-cutting issues, to what extent should individual departments be left alone to co-operate together?
Professor Matthew Flinders: The balance of departmental autonomy vis-à-vis the centre has always been an issue of tension and debate. It is increasingly clear that the centre does not have the capacity to act as a strategic brain in quite the way that it needs to. The system is supposed to work like a hub-and-spoke model, with the Cabinet, No. 10 and the Treasury at the hub, directing, controlling and co-ordinating the various spokes. That really is not working at the moment. There have been so many different reforms over the years, but they tend to be very partial. No. 10 will develop different policy units and delivery units, but there is a huge amount of institutional churn even at the centre. There is not a real systemic strategic approach to joining up. There is no lack of strategic reports out there at the moment; the fact is, though, that they are incredibly fragmented and all over the place. What we need is a central strategy under which everything else then co-exists.
Alex Thomas: I agree with that. The centre of Government should not be doing very much; it should be setting direction and then holding the rest of the Government to account for achieving that direction. One of the things we will argue next week is the UK is a highly centralised country but with a weak centre. A weak centre has an impulse then to control and to draw in policy and decision making, from levelling-up funds through to some of the decisions taken in Covid, through to chess sets for local authorities, to be a bit trivial. I believe that one of the reasons for that impulse to control actually stems from a weakness. If you strengthen the centre in setting strategic direction, and it is focusing on the things it really should be focusing on, it is then perhaps less likely to intervene in those areas that are more marginal and are not really about the direction setting that the centre has to do.
Q13 Iain Stewart: I have one final quick question from me for this part. What lessons can be drawn from successful co-ordinations, such as the vaccine taskforce and roll-out, which was a high-pressured, immediate and important task? What lessons can be learned from that and applied more widely in strategic thinking?
Professor Matthew Flinders: The lesson that can be learned is that amazing things happen in times of crises, and bureaucracies, processes and institutions that formerly struggled to work together can suddenly find ways of adapting very quickly, under very specific pressures. I also think one of the key issues is around leadership. Very often, strategic capacity is built around individuals—they are the ones pushing for it, they believe in it, and they understand the need to have that integrated ability—but when those individuals move on, it has not been embedded systemically.
Alex Thomas: Clear objectives and the right people are the two things I would pull out.
Jill Rutter: I think that is right. We have seen that in other areas: we have done case studies on things like the reduction in homelessness that show what happens when you focus on a problem. The question is then extrapolating that to business that is a bit more normal. The vaccine taskforce worked under very interesting conditions, where basically money was almost no object, because getting a good vaccine deployed quickly was such good value for money. Most people work under far more constraints than that.
Q14 Harriett Baldwin: That leads very well into my questions, so thank you very much. Ultimately, we need to follow the money. As we were hearing, one of the big ways in which things get centralised is through the Treasury basically being in control of what gets spent, and it has a huge influence right across Government. Do you think it does the strategy setting well, or could it do it better?
Jill Rutter: The really interesting question about the Treasury—I am sure that Alex will has more to say—is about how completely it has bought into and supports overall Government strategy. There is a question about the spending review: is the spending review really aligning with what the Government have said their critical priorities are? Most Government spending cannot go on critical priorities; most public spending has to go on what it went on before, but I think there is a really interesting question about where that comes from. I think that the Treasury’s tendency to pick off Departments one by one to get the settlements it can actually militates against having a very clear strategic approach to spending allocation.
In tax policy, the Treasury is not really a team player; it thinks that only it has the responsibility for raising revenue, and that is quite difficult. The way in which tax policy and measures in the Budget are developed is absolutely inimical to strategic thinking, and could be much better. I think the Treasury should become a really important partner in delivery. It obviously has a really important role in control and value for money, but at the moment it is slightly at arm’s length from the core missions of the Government and is not acting supportively enough. That is something that Alex’s report has more to say on.
Alex Thomas: It is exactly that. I think the Treasury sets strategy pretty well for the Treasury, and that is fine; that is what it is there to do, and each Department should be able to do that.
Q15 Harriett Baldwin: How would you articulate what its strategy is?
Alex Thomas: I would say that it depends on who is leading the Treasury. One of the things that our previous research has found is that, rather than being the institutional behemoth resistor, which is how the Treasury is sometimes seen, it is actually a highly politically attuned Department: it is politically attuned to the Chancellor. Again, that is fine. If the Chancellor’s priorities are to balance the budget, that will be what the Treasury strategy is designed to achieve.
What we are arguing, as Jill said, is about harnessing the power of the Treasury to a whole-Government strategy, some of which will absolutely involve balancing the budget or promoting economic growth, but that is a political decision for the Prime Minister and Ministers. We will be proposing a different process by which you reach spending allocations, for example—a more collective process, rather than one that is solely owned by the Treasury. As I say, it is about harnessing it for those cross-Government objectives.
There are interesting and good arguments for splitting the Treasury, and there are also good reasons not to split the Treasury. I would be more interested in harnessing its power before you start dismantling it. We may come on to talk about that.
Q16 Harriett Baldwin: You have seen Lord Maude’s report on exactly this topic. He wants the function of spending control to be completely moved out of the Treasury to a new office of budget and management. Do you support that as a way of addressing some of these issues?
Alex Thomas: I think that it is a perfectly coherent plan. A large part of me thinks, “Let’s not dismantle one of the bits of the government machine that we think actually does work.” You always have to draw lines somewhere, but I worry about divorcing spending decisions too much from the overall macroeconomic management of the economy that the Treasury does and the fiscal position. Lord Maude recommends ways around that, and I think that is interesting.
Before we go there, though, I would be interested in working to better align the decisions that currently are made—not entirely exclusively, but quite heavily exclusively—by the Treasury in a single line to the Prime Minister and then individual Departments, as Jill was describing, to whole-Government priorities, before we move around with too many machinery of government changes.
Q17 Harriett Baldwin: Professor Flinders, on machinery of government changes—abolishing whole Departments, setting up new Departments and so on—does that help or hinder strategic thinking?
Professor Matthew Flinders: Well, we certainly have a long history of mergers, abolitions, overlords and various attempts to join up Government. I think there is more we can do on trying to break down the siloed thinking. We have had experiments with joint teams and joint Ministers that could be taken forward. I think that a real innovation, if there were to be a cross-governmental strategy, would be to have more of a matrix model, where you had Ministers for Departments and Ministers for thematic topics in a much clearer way than we have had in the past, because it has tended to be fairly ad hoc in how we have used that model.
I am always slightly suspicious about institutional reforms and process reforms. For me, the biggest thing about embedding and rebuilding, or building, strategic capacity is culture and understanding, training and skills within the civil service and Ministers. Unless you have that cultural commitment to understanding why strategy matters, you can cut and divide the cake all day.
Jill Rutter: Could I build on that by saying that Ministers are absolutely critical in this, because civil servants take their lead from their Ministers? If their Ministers are absolutely clear that, rather than regard their Department as their “fiefdom for now”, they see it as a critical enabler of a cross-cutting Government goal and that is how they want their Department to behave, rather than defending its budget and that sort of thing, civil servants will take their cue from that if they think that the Minister is basically going in to bat for the Department.
One of the risks in the way in which we make decisions, particularly the sort of Cabinet Committee process when it happens, is that we end up with too much “lowest common denominator” policy, which everyone can live with but nobody really likes, rather than a mechanism to confront Ministers with genuine real choices—difficult political choices that Ministers, not civil servants, should be making—and then to task Departments to go away and do their bit for it and be held properly to account.
Professor Matthew Flinders: Can I just enter a really naughty word—the P-word, “politics”—here? There is a clear politics of strategic capacity that we need to be honest and open about. It is very easy for us to sit here and say, “It would be great to have a cross-governmental strategy and a cascade of underpinning documents and processes.” There is a very strong political dimension for Ministers, in the sense that maintaining strategic ambiguity can be very helpful—it creates capacity for blame shifting and blame games if and when things go wrong—and strategic thinking is very difficult.
There is also a more short-term dimension; if you are to harness strategic thinking, you need Ministers to understand that they might not get the credit for what they have done within two years, three years or 18 months. You are essentially embedding long-term thinking, and the reward structures through which Ministers move on and move up might have to reflect that in order to drive behavioural change.
Q18 Mr Betts: I was going to follow on about exactly that point, actually. We have a problem with social care in this country. Everyone can see the problem; it is not difficult, in terms of demographics, to see it getting worse, and people think we know what we might have to do. The Germans had the problem identified 20 or 30 years ago and brought in policies that have basically stayed in place since, and we are still arguing about it. Isn’t that simply a massive failure of strategic thinking in Government in this country?
Chair: “Yes” will do.
Alex Thomas: Yes, and of politics. That is the short answer. Very briefly, to add to what Matthew was saying, I think that to solve social care, maybe a Minister would stay in post for five years or 10 years, but a Government with a secure majority has a fair shot at being in post for five years, and that is why I come back to the need to set that priority at the start of a Parliament. Then, whatever Minister is in place, the Government’s agenda should be to prosecute that. To the extent there is a strategic administrative question in there, it is about persistence over the course of a Parliament. However politics is the other side of it.
Professor Matthew Flinders: I think there is also a political culture and maturity dimension. Our constitutional configuration gives us a strong ebb and flow of differences and a high level of adversarialism. Even if a policy was seen to be working reasonably well, a new Minister from a different party might not want to be seen to be sustaining it and might want to terminate it for political reasons. The issues you raise about how you embed long-termism take you back to basic constitutional questions about cross-party working and mature, embedded thinking—real basic questions about our system. The irony, as Alex raised earlier, is that we are globally known as a power-hoarding democracy that should be able to get things done, but we are terrible at implementation and long-term thinking.
Q19 Mr Betts: On pensions, we did it. We got a cross-party agreement before the 2010 election and we stuck to it. It is not impossible, is it?
Professor Matthew Flinders: It is not impossible, but it needs dedicated work and, on a larger scale, cultural change and maybe institutional change to bolster that.
Jill Rutter: The really interesting issue is: why did the Turner Commission work and the Dilnot Commission on social care not work? In my view, Andrew finished too soon. He did not go into the issue of, “So how do we pay for this?” I think he was slightly addressing the wrong issue as well. It was capacity and social care as much as who pays, because both were problems. Maybe that is a bit of hindsight. If the Dilnot Commission had worked more like the Pensions Commission—which worked brilliantly in the sense of getting everybody to agree there was a problem, getting a solution and then socialising the solution and building a coalition of support for it before the election—we might be in a better place on social care.
We have not mentioned it, but I also think institutions like the Productivity Commission in Australia are very useful; rather than set up new reviews, Ministers have a more standing capacity to outsource some of these difficult policy problems and produce good analysis. They can then go round, test opinion and have open days and things like that and do the policy discussions that we shy away from. We have a great quote from James Purnell in the report we did on the Pensions Commission, saying that it basically took the issue of raising the state pension age from something that would have been an absolute scandal to something that is on page 56 of a newspaper and can now be outsourced to John Cridland to advise on. It has gone from being politically undoable—well, of course, the population is getting older, so over time the pension age will increase. We brought in automatic enrolment and did it gradually, and it was not blown off course by a change of Government in 2010. They are very strong lessons. There has to be the political will to want to do it and set up arrangements to do it. Hopefully we might get that and then a refusal to play politics with it by labelling things “death and dementia taxes” in a very non-useful way.
Q20 Liam Byrne: It feels like we are at one of those moments where we have big geopolitical shifts. We are having quite a lively debate about new sovereign capabilities that our country might need. Therefore, it feels like this imperative of stronger state organisation and new strategic thinking is coming up the agenda somewhat. Are you aware of anywhere where these strategic thinking skills are being developed either among Ministers or civil servants? Let me start with Alex.
Alex Thomas: No.
Q21 Liam Byrne: That is quite a categoric “no”.
Alex Thomas: I mean, not in a coherent way, no. I was very interested in the evidence you had from Pamela Dow, who talked about some of her efforts to inject this in a pragmatic sense. It is always going to be difficult to teach strategic capability or to build skills and strategic capability outside of the work an individual civil servant or Minister is doing. There is something about how we build in these sorts of questions to the actual situation as it exists, and the policy and implementation problems that Ministers and civil servants are grappling with is in the injecting particular experts, enabling conversations, and allowing discussions about trade-offs to happen. There is a role for teaching strategy, but it is a narrow role.
Q22 Liam Byrne: Do you think we know how to do it?
Alex Thomas: I think some civil servants know how to do it, but it is quite—
Q23 Liam Byrne: Do we know how to develop those strategic thinking skills?
Alex Thomas: I am not sure that enough work has been done on that, so I think not.
Q24 Liam Byrne: Jill, what do you think?
Jill Rutter: I would probably defer to Alex on that. I think that the last few years have been so unstable and difficult to navigate, with changes of direction coming through really quite frequently. We have had a lot of ministerial change and changes in circumstances, then we have suddenly been confronted with and gone from Brexit to the pandemic and things like that. The bandwidth has been very badly stretched inside Government to do anything. I am not a foreign policy expert at all, but people who worked on the integrated review refresh said that they thought that process was much better than the first integrated review, and they were able to bring in more thinking and insights and felt that there was a better environment for strategic thinking then.
Professor Matthew Flinders: I think it is very interesting. If you look at the submission of evidence that has come to this Committee from the Cabinet Office, it is quite clear that a lot is going on, but it is really fragmented and all over the place. What we do not have is any overarching strategy catalysing, connecting and forging collaborations within those little pools of excellence that we have, but stuff is going on. The creation of a new hub for the centre of excellence for the policy profession in Sheffield is a huge opportunity to inject a strategic lens through everything we do, which has potential. There is lot of activity at the moment, but it is almost hyperactivity.
Q25 Liam Byrne: We live in an age of shockwaves now. We have had to go through this ABC of British political history of austerity, Brexit and covid. This could be a new normal. It could be that the challenge is that we must retain the capacity to deal with pretty big shocks while at the same time developing strategic thinking capability among both civil servants and politicians. So help us God, we might want to try to do that together at times.
Alex Thomas: Yes, and I think, listening to this thought-provoking conversation, there is something about active permission being given to civil servants to do this sort of stuff absolutely under political control.
Q26 Liam Byrne: Do you think that they have active permission today?
Alex Thomas: I think they have less active permission than they have had in the past, for some of the reasons that Jill and Matthew talked about. It would be in the interests of successive Governments to give that active permission and to want more challenge and policy engagement. There is something a bit too passive at the moment about the way in which civil servants talk about their role.
Jill Rutter: I wrote a paper for the Institute for Government’s constitutional review, which I wrote as an independent person, in December a year ago. That argued that the civil service should be able to do more on its own account for which Ministers do not have to be held to account.
For some of the thinking through difficult future problems that Ministers may not want to commission work on, it would actually be good if, as part of their stewardship and longer-term capacity role of being ready for shocks or a change of direction, we tasked permanent secretaries with ensuring that their Department was across future developments. It would not be a huge, big thing, but it would be about being able to do that without Ministers having to appear and defend what they were doing.
We had this way back in ’97 when I was the press secretary at the Treasury. A document by the Treasury strategy unit was leaked to the shadow Chancellor, and the Chancellor was confronted with it, saying, “You're planning for the UK to join the euro.” He probably would have been happy to do so, but he was not; at the time, he was planning to make the Bank of England independent. That was in a Treasury document, which he had never seen and was totally unaware of. He dismissed it, but actually that is the sort of thinking that you should allow Departments to do. At the moment, because they just work for the Government of the day, they are not authorised to do so.
Q27 Liam Byrne: Just before you come in, Matthew, in terms of incentives, culture and behaviours, do you think that they are in the right place to foster the kind of strategic thinking skills that we need today?
Jill Rutter: I think it is totally dependent on who your Minister is. If you have a far-sighted, grown-up Secretary of State—it sounds patronising—who accepts that there are lots of different views and that you are preparing for and thinking about things, maybe. Ken Clarke would brush it off; he was fine with it and would dismiss it as a kid in the office. Some others would be much more sensitive and think that you were doing things and undermining their agenda. It is a conversation—
Q28 Liam Byrne: So it is a bit haphazard.
Jill Rutter: It's very personality-driven and relationship-driven
Liam Byrne: Matthew, what did you want to add?
Professor Matthew Flinders: I was just going to add that that role of having independent, frank, hard discussions outside of Government, depoliticising things, is exactly what the Dutch Scientific Council For Government Policy provides.
Also, we talk about strategic capacity through a deficit model and it is quite clear that there is a deficit. However, it is really important to understand that there is also a huge opportunity here, which is a positive opportunity to reframe and reimagine how we make policy, with a real, clear strategic focus that we have never had before.
I am quietly concerned that, when we have this debate, it is always slightly pessimistic. We look at the past: “It’s never worked. Boom, boom, boom.” I think that, precisely because of the issues you have just raised, a window of opportunity is opening, whereby there will be a much stronger awareness of the rationale and why strategic thinking matters. I think that the report that the Committee is producing could really put down some of the blueprint and structure around what that might look like. At the moment, it is not systemic at all; it is not cultural at all, but that can change.
Q29 Mr Betts: My question is about young people. Some of the big issues that are affecting the country now, around climate change and around the building of homes for the future, will really impact on young people, yet we are not very good at engaging with young people, are we?
I will give you one example, which has amazed me. In my Select Committee, we are looking at long-term planning of the built environment and the impact on young people. We looked at the national planning policy framework, which is the Government’s framework for planning. In the whole document, there are two mentions of bats, two mentions of lorry parking and one mention of young people in the whole document. Does that show us that, in terms of our long-term thinking or strategy, we just do not take young people and what the future might hold for them into account?
Professor Matthew Flinders: No, but I think this goes back to the point I was making about the opportunity that exists. The public are strategic actors and pulling them into the process through—one of the great issues about making a public policy, as Jill just said, is that it is incredibly secretive. Actually engaging people through the innovative ways that we now know work well when it comes to deliberation, participation and reaching hard-to-reach groups that are called “hard to reach” for one reason or another means that people can be pulled into these more open and expansive conversations about what our strategic future looks like and how we get there together.
I must raise this issue, because it’s very worrying. The latest research on young people’s commitment to and trust in the values of democracy is very, very worrying. The gap between young people and political institutions, political processes and politicians is absolutely shocking, and we need to close that gap through innovation and reimagining and—again— by thinking and bringing them into the conversation about how they want to redefine their lives.
There is a double dynamic: not only does that process add to the value pluralism through which policy is made at a strategic level, but the process itself is also shown to rebuild public trust and confidence and understanding about why politics is so hard. Sorry, I got a bit carried away there, didn’t I?
Q30 Chair: Can you expand on how strategy in Government becomes a whole-of-society approach?
Alex Thomas: Not to be too flippant, but not calling it “strategy” is probably part of it. I mean, think about what Matthew was saying. Wales is quite interesting on young people and future generations, as it has a Future Generations Commissioner at the moment.
However, I think there is a danger in that being—I mean, it obviously does need to be in the sort of advocacy sphere and at the kind of overall strategic level. I think it is about embedding civic participation in what I, as a former civil servant, would call policy, or the kind of the policy decisions that are being made in Government.
So, absolutely, have a sort of input at the strategic level, but embed throughout the process the decisions that politicians, Ministers and Governments are taking every day, as well as the interests and views of the whole of society, however you define it, which is for politicians, of which I am not one.
Professor Matthew Flinders: It is part of the strategy on strategy. How do you engage with multiple publics in multiple ways to bring them into the conversation? How do you promote democratic listening and not just democratic voice? Actually, young people are massively interested in politics. We all know this around the room. I do gigs in pubs, rugby clubs and churches, and it is about creating the fresh, boundary-spanning structures through which younger people feel they really can be heard and play a role.
Jill Rutter: One of the things that we have made it impossibly difficult to do with the changes that Lord Maude and the GDS made to gov.uk—this is a personal bête noire of mine—is that you cannot work out what Government is trying to do. If you look on gov.uk, it works perfectly well if I want a new driving licence or a passport, but it is a disaster area in terms of communicating what the Government’s objectives are and what they are trying to do. I might go to the Prime Minister’s five pledges or whatever, but I cannot find that in anything on gov.uk. If I look in the education pages, I cannot find out what the Government are trying to achieve on education, and I cannot find out what DEFRA is trying to achieve or anything, because it is a sort of uncurated morass of recent announcements. It is an absolute mess.
Liam Byrne: We need a mission-driven Government. Maybe that is the answer.
Q31 Chair: I am sure Lord Maude will want to respond to what you have just said.
Jill Rutter: It works perfectly well for consumers, but it works hopelessly for citizens and accountability.
Q32 Chair: I think he would argue that that was the emphasis, but maybe it should not have been; maybe it should have been broader.
Can we just round this session off as briefly as we can by looking at how Parliament can engage in this to promote strategic thinking, perhaps through Select Committees? If politics is a problem, what can Parliament put in place that could control that? People suggest a strategy review body with powers analogous to the OBR, but would that be a parliamentary body or would that be an internal Government body? The OBR is not a parliamentary body. What do you think about that?
Alex Thomas: I think some of the things that we will be recommending around clarity at the start of a Government about priorities would enable Parliament to then get a lock on that. A body like the Liaison Committee can then say, “All right, we understand what your priorities are. Let’s scrutinise that.” That points to a frustration, Sir Bernard, which you will be more familiar with than we are, about how difficult it is from the parliamentary Committees’ perspective to get a lock on Government if Government do not themselves have the structures that you can scrutinise.
On a central Government institution, I would not create a new separate strategy thing, but a whether it is the Cabinet Office or No. 10 or some kind of variation of that that could be actively scrutinised by a Committee like this one, that would help. I also think, as Matthew said earlier, that Government are not short of strategies, but those documents that get closest to giving a window on Government’s overall strategy—the departmental statement of accounts and the outcome delivery plans—are often very boring. Taking those really seriously and Parliament showing Government that it is taking those really seriously is one kind of way to get in. I will not get into how Parliament might organise itself.
Q33 Chair: I will just finish with Professor Flinders. You have talked a lot about a collaborative partnership between the Executive and the legislature. That is not how it works at the moment.
Professor Matthew Flinders: I know, and that is why, if we want to be fit for the future, we need to change how we work. Part of that is that MPs on Select Committees will have to have some self-restraint when faced with Ministers who dare to put down some strategic ambitions in a very complex and turmoil-based world.
I do not think there is a need for a new Select Committee. The addition of the core tasks might be of some benefit, but overall, the issue around a strategic lens within parliamentary scrutiny is going to come from the Liaison Committee. It will also potentially be a role for the Liaison Committee going forward. Really interestingly, we have not touched on this, but in many ways, this role is also, you might say, better fitting with the Select Committee in the House of Lords. I think there are interesting ways of promoting what I am calling “a strategic lens”, but it will come more from leadership from people around this table than from necessarily creating new institutions or new pieces of paper.
Q34 Chair: That is my final question: what are the Government not producing that Select Committees should be able to scrutinise?
Jill Rutter: As Alex said, your starting point is that, for instance President Biden is about to give his state of the union speech but we do not have one coherent speech—or document—by the Prime Minister where he sets out, “This is what my Government are about achieving. This is what we think are the most important things to be doing. This is what we are trying to do, and these are the policies and how we are allocating resources to try and do it.” I think that would be incredibly helpful. You have sub-strategies, but you do not have that big linking narrative, because we don’t use the King’s Speech in that way. We get a bit of that in the Budget, but obviously there is a very arcane lens on it. I think that is amiss: you don’t have a statement by which to hold them to account.
Alex Thomas: You have a manifesto, you have what the Prime Minister says on the tarmac of Downing Street, you have the King’s Speech—
Jill Rutter: You had the programme for government with the coalition.
Alex Thomas: You have all these different bits, but you don’t have a coherent translation of the Government’s political objectives into a programme for government.
Chair: Liam, last word.
Q35 Liam Byrne: Briefly—as you mentioned there, Jill, we have had these moments in the past. The coalition agreement actually had Gantt charts that Oliver Letwin used to oversee. Once upon a time, we had the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit and the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit, with reasonably clear delivery objectives, so there may be some things from the past that could be restored as a model. Is there anything you would highlight?
Alex Thomas: I do think the coalition’s programme for government is important, but although it guided the Government’s objectives and what the Government did, it was a list of actions rather than outcomes. I think you can take that as a starting point and elevate it. I agree with you on some of the internal institutional points. A unit focused on priorities, delivery and performance would be very helpful.
Jill Rutter: The bit that was missing for me in the programme for government was any analysis of why it was these things—a problem statement at the start saying, “What are we trying to do?” I am about to go to an event on missions-based government, so I would be very interested to see whether there is any thinking on that.
Chair: Thank you very much for joining us. We have to move on to our next witness as swiftly as possible, but we are most grateful to you.
Witness: Lord Robertson of Port Ellen.
Q36 Chair: Good afternoon, Lord Robertson. I will come straight in if that is possible. We shared some wording with you about what a shared understanding of strategic thinking might look like. How does this appeal to you? Maybe you haven’t seen it.
Lord Robertson: You may have sent it; I may not have read it.
Q37 Chair: How do we persuade the Government that they need to have a shared understanding of what strategic thinking and strategy is? What should it look like?
Lord Robertson: We persuade them by illustrating it with issues that are not being dealt with and cannot be dealt with inside the existing structures. That is easier than trying to find a vocabulary to describe something that is not easy to describe. It is about the “too difficult” box—Charles Clarke wrote a book about this. Issues such as how we deal with China in all its manifestations, how we deal with the risks and opportunities of AI, how we deal with care for the elderly and how we get to net zero are all multi-departmental issues that cannot be dealt with by individual Departments, and yet the British Government is run according to individual Departments.
I was Secretary of State for Defence, and I remember on day one effectively being told, “You will be judged by how well you do for defence.” That is the measurement. You leave the collegiate atmosphere of the shadow Cabinet, you become a Minister or Secretary of State, and you are told, “That is the box on which you are going to be judged.” Indeed, Gordon Brown set up a committee called PX, which examined the public expenditure of all Departments. Individual Secretaries of State were arraigned before this courtroom of our peers—our peers being the people who had very small budgets—and we were cross-examined about our Departments.
The effect was not to produce a much more manageable view of an individual Department’s accounts. You became a patriot for your Department because you had to learn it; you had no officials with you—zero officials—which I can tell you is a scary proposition for anybody new to a Department. It was about the ways and means and ends of policy in the areas more explicably projected as being the ones that we cannot deal with through individual Departments.
Q38 Chair: What would you say to people who insist that strategy is not possible in this complicated and fast-moving age?
Lord Robertson: I would say “rubbish”. It has to be. We have got to deal with these problems. Some of these problems are in front of us today. You can have a Prime Minister standing on the door of Downing Street and saying, “I’ve got a plan for the care system”—when he didn’t have and couldn’t have and wasn’t going to have—but that does not help with the problem that is then faced by hospitals that are bed blocked because care in the community is unaffordable. How do we deal with the manifest problems that will face us with artificial intelligence, and yet the opportunities that are also there for us all to grab hold of? A strategic approach is the only way in which you will be able to deal with that.
I was listening to the last contributions, which I thought were interesting, about politicians wanting quick deals. That is right—there are politicians around this table—but some of the bigger issues have to be dealt with strategically when other issues are the day-to-day issues that you are faced with, which can produce the quick wins.
Chair: We need to speed through as quickly as possible. After you, we have Lord Sedwill.
Q39 Iain Stewart: Let us look at the role of the centre of Government—No. 10 and the Cabinet Office—in overseeing those important cross-departmental strategic issues. To what extent should they be a guiding mind and allow the individual Departments to co-operate, and to what extent should they be a directing mind?
Lord Robertson: I think they need to be a much more centralising, organised organism than they are at the moment. The paper that I produced as evidence for the Committee—I know the amount of material you have must be huge—was the product not just of my view but of the views of a group of people. The Chairman of this Committee is a member of the group, but he is not an author of the report. Our group includes Members of Parliament from the major political parties, including a couple of Labour MPs who then became members of the shadow Cabinet. We’ve got senior military officers, think-tank specialists, industrialists, former and present senior civil servants, and NGO executives. It is a group of people who are concerned about the way in which we are not able to deal with these grand strategic issues.
In the paper, not only do we analyse the problem that this Committee has been set up to look at; we actually give you a series of prescriptions. Your question is answered in this paper. The group is now going to write to all the political parties with two specific ideas from our discussions that we believe are important, although we will have a lot more. One is that we should establish a school of government to which civil servants and Members of Parliament would go to learn about the way the system operates and how it might better operate. That is completely lacking at the moment—and I speak as somebody who has been in Parliament for 45 years. We preach lifelong learning and we do nothing. We are the one group of people for whom we do not actually do anything in terms of real, genuine education and training. A school of government would deal with that.
The second proposal is the creation of a Joint Committee of both Houses for the future. There is the Welsh model, which I think previous witnesses were describing. It is alive and well and working in Finland as well. On the specific question that you asked: yes, there needs to be a much greater co-ordination at the centre, from the Prime Minister’s Office through a series of other mechanisms, which will bring together the cross-cutting issues that need multi-departmental consideration.
We also need to build in the devolved Administrations. A lot of the academics who will give you evidence forget completely that there are all these areas that have now been devolved completely, with legislative power. We therefore tend to think about direction, whether strategically or tactically, in terms of England. The Cabinet Office deals with England, but it has to bear in mind that there are devolved authorities that not only make policy but deliver it as well.
Q40 Iain Stewart: How could we encapsulate the lessons from where we have had a successful co-ordination of policy? Take, for example, the vaccine taskforce. That was in a moment of high pressure and crisis, and had to be dealt with, but it worked, by and large. How do we make that the norm?
Lord Robertson: You learn the lessons and apply them. One of my frustrations in life, having been the Secretary of State for Defence and then Secretary-General of NATO, is that while we are we are very good at lessons learned exercises, we are absolutely appalling on implementing the lessons as they come. With NATO, we had a crisis in what is now North Macedonia in 2001, and we solved it. We actually prevented a war from taking place, and we built a multi-ethnic Government, which 20 years on is still in existence. We included some of the key insurgents; the guys who actually carried the guns are now part of the Government of North Macedonia. We wrote the lessons learned from that, and then when NATO went on to Afghanistan, and other countries went on to Iraq and Libya, we simply ignored completely those lessons learned.
The vaccine taskforce is an extremely good example, but not the only example. There is the counter-terrorism strategy under CONTEST. Clive Betts was mentioning the way we did pensions. Universal credit is another example of how you get cross-party consensus, and it goes through the electoral cycles. It would be useful if we actually learnt from these examples. But of course, the vaccine taskforce got wound up and we went back to departmentalism.
Q41 Mr Betts: You mentioned Gordon Brown’s role in spending when you became Secretary of State. Do you think it is helpful that the Treasury is controlling spending, and almost controlling strategy as well? Do you think the two things fit well together?
Lord Robertson: No, they do not. Our paper identifies a clear recommendation on that. The role of the Treasury—we have a Treasury Minister here as well—is usually to stop things happening, rather than creating things happening. We need to look very carefully at the role of the Treasury. Next Monday, I think, the Institute for Government will publish its recommendations about reform of the civil service, and John Major and Gordon Brown will be at the launch of the document. Two former Chancellors of the Exchequer will be there to tell us how to reform the system. If they have been invited and have seen it, we know what it is going to say. The Treasury has got to be seen and see itself in a positive—[Laughter.] When I saw that, I thought, “This is not a rival for my document; this is going to give more power to the Treasury.”
Q42 Mr Betts: In terms of how strategy can be developed better, was your experience in NATO that that body was better at developing strategy than you could do it as Secretary of State for Defence in the UK Government?
Lord Robertson: Well, it wasn’t when I went there, but it was better when I left. It is based on a strategic concept, so they have a process, almost every five years, of delivering a strategic concept. There will be another strategic concept document before the summit meeting in July of this year, and that will try to give the strategic vision of what the world is that NATO is going to plug into. I resisted doing one when I was there because they had done one in 1999 that seemed to me to fit the purposes—it even mentioned terrorism, which became more high profile after 9/11—and I thought, “How am I going to get 19 countries to agree?” But there is a new one, and I believe there is now a process towards getting that. So yes, under duress and because of circumstance, NATO had to produce a strategic concept within which the organisation worked.
Mr Betts: And that does not happen in Government in this country.
Lord Robertson: No. I was listening to what was being said by your previous speakers—you have the manifesto and the King’s Speech, and then you have ad hoc Budgets coming along, but you do not have an overall vision of what it is we want to achieve and how the “too difficult” issues are going to have to be dealt with. That is where it crystallises. It is somewhat vague, and our group has struggled with the vocabulary and definitions as well. If you get bogged down in definitions, you go nowhere, but if you actually look at where the problems are—the “too difficult” problems—and then recognise that our Government system is based far too much on Departments and how well the Minister performs who is responsible for the Department, you begin to see why strategy is necessary.
Q43 Mr Betts: How do you get a mechanism that gets round that? Does it simply put more power into No. 10 and the Cabinet Office?
Lord Robertson: Well, no, you have a series—I do not want to take up the time of the Committee, because this paper is here and we lay it out in there. We did a lot of thinking and a lot of consultations, and we came to a series of conclusions about how that would work. We recommended having a chief strategy officer, and looking at how the Government should systematise the strategy and operations delineation of Cabinet Committees, so that you actually look at both planning and policy and execution, with the emphasis on delivery and execution. I thoroughly recommend that you read the outcomes—it won’t take you hours, I can tell you.
Q44 Philip Dunne: George, you mentioned your idea of re-establishing a school of government. What would be the essential elements of the curriculum?
Lord Robertson: It would be to deal with the constitution of the country, for a start. A lot of Members of Parliament, and therefore potential Ministers, do not really fully understand the way in which the country operates and the system operates. You sort of learn on the job. I became an expert, near the end of my political career, in the way in which legislation was put together, because I was the European spokesman at the time that the Maastricht treaty came along. I discovered—this is after 20 years in Parliament—how the Cartesian logic of parliamentary draftsmanship was created. These are basic things which you would think were needed.
The British-American parliamentary group sends a number of new Members of Parliament to the Kennedy School—or what was the Kennedy School until the Heritage Foundation objected to that, so they now send members of Congress to the two different ideological departments. But we send people out there to learn about the American constitution and American Government; we do not do it here. Therefore, especially with the churn of Ministers, people come in oblivious to what is going on and are in the hands of some very senior civil servants, who have seen it all and have seen off a lot of Ministers, as you know only too well.
Q45 Philip Dunne: Over the years, we have had various schools and colleges of government, and different Ministers or Governments have transmogrified them into one thing or another and then cancelled them. Does this have to be a new institution, or should it be built around the Institute of Government or some existing set of students?
Lord Robertson: It has to be new and it has to have very clear objectives in terms, as you say, of the curriculum and who attends it. But it has to be something fairly sophisticated and detailed as well. In the Ministry of Defence, there is a Defence Academy. I found out while I was Defence Secretary that I had a bigger budget than the Department for Education. My education budget was bigger than the Ministry of education’s was, and we did training extremely well—from kindergartens in the British Army of the Rhine, right up to university standard; we were giving degrees. It was a study that I put in place that created the Defence Academy, which is the umbrella organisation for all the various training elements.
Military training is really, really good. I remember going to HMS Raleigh, which is where the young naval recruits are involved, and they take, basically, school drop-outs—a lot of them are people who have dropped out of school—and turn them into remarkably self-disciplined, teamworking experts. It is remarkable to see.
So it isn’t as though there isn’t some exemplar there. If you go to the Joint Services Staff and Command College—which was a private finance initiative project delivered on time, on budget—you begin to see how, at the very top level, we train very senior officers and do it well.
Q46 Philip Dunne: Ministers and prospective Ministers, and presumably senior civil servants, could be taught, through this school of government, some of the mechanics of government. But what about strategic thinking? How do we make that a core part of the curriculum?
Lord Robertson: You have to make that part of the curriculum. The Defence Academy has a joint Doctrine and Concepts Centre, inside the military. We created that out of my defence review in 1998. That was to be the little “brain” inside the body that would look at concepts and strategies as a whole. So it would be embedded inside the school of government—the idea of how you approach cross-cutting issues, how you handle them, how you deliver them. Delivery is all-important.
Q47 Liam Byrne: Your point about training is very well made. I remember, before I came into politics, spending several years in strategy consulting and merchant banking, and in any one year I never had less than four to eight weeks’ training. Yet, I have been trying to get project management training for one of my staff for two years, so it is a point very well made.
I wanted to ask you about incentives, culture and behaviours. I wanted to ask whether you think they are in the right place now and how they might be improved. I just wonder if you might also reflect on the importance of the strategic concept that NATO developed as a guiding star. Does that help strategic thinking? I also wonder if you might reflect, though, on moments where we have crystallised rules of the road for politicians. The Nolan principles, for example, were a reflection of a particular problem. But we did reflect on that problem, and we did then crystallise the seven principles for participation in public life. They don’t include acquiring some capability in strategic thinking, for example. But codes of conduct can be quite effective ways of changing behaviour and improving behaviour. What are your thoughts on incentives, culture, behaviour and how we improve them?
Lord Robertson: Incentives are important. There may have to be some degree of incentive for actually delivering on the job built into the way the civil service operates. We do not have that—you just move people around from Department to Department, which is the way we have too often done it. We have done it with politicians, where you get moved from Departments or, depending on how well the Prime Minister thinks you are doing, you get sacked very quickly. Chris Mullin talks about that in his diaries; the Prime Minister sees a “Question Time” on television where the person does not do terribly well, and then they are out. There is no performance management for Ministers, which there would be in any good company or organisation. These are the things that need to be there.
When I was at the Ministry of Defence, I tried to end the concept of huge procurement projects that simply drifted on through the years, with nobody in particular responsible to either take credit or take the blame. We produced integrated teams for that. My deputy at the Ministry of Defence was the legendary John Gilbert, who was better at asking questions on Committees than necessarily getting the answers to them. He came in as the deputy to the Secretary of State in 1997, into the same job he had had under Fred Mulley 18 years before, in the Callaghan Government, and the projects were still on the table. The Eurofighter Typhoon—
Mr Betts: And the costs had gone up!
Lord Robertson: Massively—just huge, like with the Merlin helicopter. We need to build in an incentive for that as well. Codes of conduct are all very well, but you should have to sign them every year. Could anybody around this table say what the Nolan principles are? I can’t remember. We are not asked to repeatedly sign them, as you do in many parts of industry, where you have to sign off certain elements every year. I think that is one way you would have to do it: you would have to read and sign off and that, I think, would ingrain it in your mind.
Q48 Liam Byrne: Incentives on politicians are becoming ever more short-term—I mean, they were always quite short-term, but with social media they are even more short-term than in the past. How do we guard against the risk of very short-term imperatives on politicians creating very short-term imperatives for civil servants? How do we try to craft and guard some space for civil servants to think and act strategically? So much of the pressure that we apply is about, “How do we respond to this? How do we respond to that? That’s just gone up on social media—I need a response to that.” We are in danger of crowding out the bandwidth, I think.
Lord Robertson: We are, and that is the serious problem. You have the problem of electoral cycles, which is one of the issues. You have the issue of procrastination; it’s easy to just pass the issue down the line. That is why I say departmentalism is one of the problems there. But there is no reason that a Prime Minister cannot say, “Here are the cross-cutting issues that I expect you to pay attention to, because they are big, big issues,” and get a Cabinet Committee structure that is designed to ensure that that happens, and then leave the other issues to tactics and politics—to the immediacy of the issues. You are not going to abolish the famous grid, where you have to have a story every day and you have to fill the Daily Mail. I met a Daily Mail reporter on the way over here today, and he said, “I hear you’re giving evidence to a Committee on strategy. Is that not bone-crushing boredom?” Well, it is not; it is the meat and drink. If we do not deal with these “too difficult” issues in a strategic way, they will overwhelm us.
Q49 Liam Byrne: If you think about when civil servants have done well for you in the past—you will have had good and bad experiences—did you notice anything about the kinds of incentives that foster the behaviour that you want to see? What do good incentives look like?
Lord Robertson: My first permanent secretary wanted to be Cabinet Secretary, so he moved to another Department, which was an interesting story—I’ll tell you about it sometime.
Would there be a financial incentive, based on delivery, as you have in industry and commerce? We can’t always rely on the movement that takes place to do this, or on a knighthood, a CB or any other of these things that are regarded as the extent of incentive that is there. I think we need to look at that. We touch on it in this paper as well. We think about whether execution and delivery should be something that is measured and rewarded.
Q50 Liam Byrne: We have learned a lot about project management structures, often in response to serious terrorism incidents. There is now a wider understanding of the virtues of gold, silver and bronze command. There are project management and crisis management structures that are better established across public services. Do you think those kinds of structures are widespread enough, or could they be used more imaginatively to try to create good ways of command?
Lord Robertson: I think we should try any of these things. Being imaginative is an imperative, because we do not tend to be very imaginative about the way in which we structure Government or the attitude to success and failure. We should try all these things. Building incentives in is crucial if you are going to change the culture both of the politicians and of the civil service, who deliver what the politicians dictate.
Q51 Chair: Is there anything crucial that you want to add? You have been very helpful.
Lord Robertson: No, I think that covers the ground. I am not an academic; I’m just somebody who is an ex-Minister, as we all one day will be.
Q52 Chair: Thank you for reminding me: I should have declared an interest; we are both part of a group that thinks about these matters. I don’t regard that as a conflict, but I had better put it on the public record.
Lord Robertson: We are just a thought process, but I recommend to members of this Committee the product of that, because I think you will find it quite interesting. It not only produces a diagnosis; it produces a few prescriptions as well.
Chair: Thank you very much indeed.
Witness: Lord Sedwill.
Chair: We are now joined by Lord Sedwill.
Lord Sedwill: Sorry, I’m on Zoom. I have today been at an event with the First Sea Lord and his senior team, as one of the things I continue to try to do to help strategic thinking, at least in some parts of Government.
Q53 Chair: We are very grateful to you for joining us, as we were grateful to you for coming to the private roundtable.
I will kick us off. How would you describe the Government’s capacity for strategic thinking during your time in Government?
Lord Sedwill: Patchy, I think. Good in some areas; weak in others. Valued in some; undervalued in others. I listened to that session with Lord Robertson. I remember, after doing my maiden speech following him, vowing I would never, ever follow him again on a parliamentary occasion, so I’ve broken that vow, but I agree with pretty much everything he said.
Q54 Chair: We feel that there should be a shared understanding in Government about what strategic thinking and strategy is. How would you describe that?
Lord Sedwill: The language you are thinking about looks pretty good to me. There are different ways of describing it. The military uses the language of ends, ways and means. In the national security capability review in 2018, we tried to use slightly different language but, again, thinking in those terms. You have to have an overall strategy. You then have to have strategic plans that look to turn that strategy into something concrete, and then strategic programmes that have milestones, resources and targets applied to them. Then you need a review mechanism to enable you to adjust. There are different ways of doing that but, fundamentally, as I think you have been talking about, it is fine to strategise. We often use the word “strategic” simply to mean “big” or even “senior”, and those things are not the same at all. A strategy is only worth trying to consider if you are going to turn it into a programme of activity. The delivery is the key part of it.
Q55 Chair: What would you say to people who insist that national strategy is something Victorian and not possible in the modern age?
Lord Sedwill: I do not think you necessarily need a national strategy. Some countries can have one, but those are usually countries facing an existential challenge, whether it is an economic or a security challenge. But you can have a series of national strategies on a range of different issues, and it seems to me that there should be a handful of those. Otherwise, you just proliferate and create as much complexity as we have already. If a Government were to say, at the beginning of their term, “Right, these are the three, four or five really big things. They’re cross-cutting. They’re really important. They’re the things against which we are going to be judged,” and the Prime Minister of the day puts a lot of heft behind them—we can talk more about how you might deliver that—that would be beneficial.
There are some areas where it can be done cross-party, and we do not explore those things enough. You heard about a few examples in Lord Robertson’s testimony—CONTEST; universal credit. We did that on some national security issues as well. But it does not have to be cross-party; it just has to be consistent.
Q56 Chair: As Cabinet Secretary, you implemented foresight and horizon scanning and came up with the fusion doctrine. What do you think those things have achieved, and what still needs to be done?
Lord Sedwill: The fusion approach was developed as part of the capability review. It was to try to achieve exactly what we were talking about: to impose some discipline from what were some very good strategic discussions in the National Security Council about our overall approach to China, dealing with Russia, dealing with a metastasising terrorist threat—Islamic State—and so on. But how did that turn into actual policy action and delivery in Departments? One of the frustrations that both David Cameron and Theresa May felt with the national security architecture was that those ministerial discussions with the NSC did not really turn into policy change, because policy change was essentially happening in the Department.
What I tried to do was build on the model Peter Ricketts developed at the beginning of the NSC to create a follow-through into policy programmes for which a range of Departments would be responsible. Each Department would be regarded as a member of a team, and it would have to play its part in what was a team endeavour and impose some programme structure around that in order turn those strategic decisions—how we balanced security and prosperity in terms of our relationship with China, for example, which is a tricky, entirely political decision—into actions that ensure that the Government’s approach is coherent and that you do not find yourself running two contradictory policies towards China. That was the effort we made. It was successful in some areas; it was less successful in others.
Q57 Philip Dunne: You mentioned earlier that the strategic thinking was patchy in Government. What were some of the examples of good that you came across during your time as Cabinet Secretary?
Lord Sedwill: Well, I think the ones that we have talked about. Inevitably, because I became Cabinet Secretary with a national security background, I probably had my own biases. I probably tried to take too much of that into the job of Cabinet Secretary. There were areas in national security where we got it right. I've just mentioned China. We did manage to create a coherent policy for the Government around China, whereas before we were, in effect, running contradictory ones. CONTEST, the counter-terrorism strategy, was one area. Universal credit, which is obviously not about national security, was another area. We were just starting to tackle the whole question around social care and trying to take a similar approach when we were hit by the pandemic. Inevitably, that was then crowded out.
Q58 Philip Dunne: What were the things we can learn from the examples that you cite? What are the things that make strategic thinking in Government successful?
Lord Sedwill: As you have already heard, you need longevity in personnel. So whether it is Ministers or civil servants, if everyone moves around too fast, there is a tendency to reset the clock and to have a sort of year zero, and say, “Everything that went before was nothing to do with me. Now I am going to have my own programme.” There is a huge pressure, partly because of the kind of grid phenomenon that George Robertson just mentioned, for Ministers to announce things and have initiatives and so on. Inevitably, those are not particularly strategic. They tend to be quite short term, and they are not always properly aligned with the existing policy agenda.
Of course, one cannot take the politics out of Government, and it would be naive to suggest that. But if a Government focused on a handful of big cross-cutting issues, and said, “Okay. We are going to apply the full toolkit to those,” and the Prime Minister was personally behind them, setting up the right governance mechanisms at ministerial level, with top officials on the hook for delivering them and expected to see a programme through—at least to a natural inflection point, if not all the way through to a conclusion, if it is a decade-long programme—then I think you would see better delivery.
Q59 Philip Dunne: Do you think Prime Ministers can be encouraged to insist on the longevity of their Ministers? It does not really work like that.
Lord Sedwill: It doesn’t, and in the end that is up to them. But if they want to have a Government that actually delivers big things, then they would be well advised to put Ministers in place, train them properly, as you have already heard, and leave them there for as long as they can. Sometimes, politics means they cannot. But generally, we rotate Ministers in this country much faster than they do elsewhere. We have more Ministers; we have a Cabinet that is roughly twice the size of the US Cabinet. We have more of them and we rotate them faster. They do not necessarily have expertise in their areas—it is quite rare for them to do so. To build that expertise up takes time. If you're just moving people around all the time, not only do they not have the capacity to do any real strategic planning and thinking, but they have none of the incentives to, because they know they are likely to be moved on. Therefore, they are inevitably going to be focused on the short term.
Q60 Chair: Some of that applies to the civil service as well, does it not?
Lord Sedwill: Yes, absolutely. I will give you an example from my time at the Home Office, which is not particularly about people moving around too fast, but about incentives. We would have an immigration Bill just about every year—Liam Byrne will remember that from his time. You would have a Bill team. The Bill would be done and people would have made concessions to whatever pressures were coming from the Commons or the Lords, and then it would go to a different group to implement it. That different group would often have people who had the real operational expertise in the immigration system. They would say, “Well, actually clause X and clause Y cannot both be done. They're incompatible.”
While of course you have people who are good at the parliamentary handling, one of the changes I made was to actually treat the Bill team like a programme. The person in charge of the legislation is going to be in charge of the implementation, and they are going to see at least the initial phases of the implementation through, in order to try to align the incentives, if you like, of the people developing the legislation into its delivery. Quite simple changes like that could be made and would improve the coherence of some of the work the Government does.
Q61 Iain Stewart: I would like to dig a little further into your comments about the role of the centre of Government—No. 10 and the Cabinet Office—in overseeing these important cross-cutting strategic issues. To what extent are those offices directing activity in other Departments, and to what extent are they more of a guiding mind—letting Departments come up with the end product in a more laissez-faire way? What is the balance between those two?
Lord Sedwill: I do not think that we have always got that right. Even when I tried to develop this concept in the national security area, I probably tried to do it in too many places at once. Inevitably, therefore, bandwidth—which is part of the point you are driving at, Mr Stewart—became a constraint. If there are a handful of big strategic issues, whether national security or broader Government policies, that the Prime Minister personally cares about and that require the involvement of several Departments, just because of the nature of the issue, then the centre needs to take quite a directive approach. Otherwise, Departments tend to favour the things that they are in charge of, rather than the things for which they are a member of a team and someone else is in charge. Only the centre can really drive Departments to do that and use the Prime Minister’s authority to drive Departments to do that.
If you try to construct some of these mechanisms for too many things—and I think I might have fallen into that trap—then that effort just becomes dissipated. I think the role of the centre is to drive and lead on the really big cross-cutting priorities for which there is no natural departmental home. It should be much lighter touch. There should obviously be stocktakes, reviews of performance and that kind of thing, but it should be much lighter touch and hands-off. For the vast majority of policy areas that should sit in the Department, it should be more of an assurance function. As I say, I am not sure that, when I was at the centre, I got that balance right. That is something that is well worth reflecting on further.
Q62 Liam Byrne: I have two questions. Thinking about ends, ways and means, when you look across the landscape of some of the things you were involved in in No. 10, do you think that the centre was better at any one of those three dimensions than others?
Lord Sedwill: Ends, ways and means are essentially goals, plans and programmes of activity, and the centre is much better at goals. In fact, Government is generally much better at goals. With the new fusion approach that we took in the capability review, we said you need a structure that essentially connects all that. You start with goals—ministerial decision—and you then need to be clear about, and get expert advice on, what the genuine situation and outlook are: not happy talk or fantasy, but thinking about the actual situation. What is the situation? What is the outlook? What are the scenarios that might play out—your target scenario, your reasonable worst case and your minimum acceptable?
Then you need to think about a comprehensive plan. Government are only ever one actor, and certainly the UK is only ever one actor internationally. Even domestically, Government are only one actor in this. We tend to ask ourselves, “What are Government going to do about it?” Actually, a much more intelligent way of thinking about it would be, “What are Government going to catalyse the rest of society to do about it?” Then you need to ask, “Given all of those other actors, what is the Government’s catalytic set of interventions?” Finally, what resources do you need to apply? The question that we do not ask enough, although we did in the national security area, is, what is the ministerial risk appetite? If the risk appetite and the resources are not commensurate with the goals, you are setting yourself up for failure.
Hope or fantasy delivery cannot be the balancing item. There needs to be a discipline that says if we are only able to apply these resources to this question, we either have to increase our risk appetite or we have to reduce our goals if the resources are limited. But you have to align those things. It is that kind of discipline, which is essentially an ends, ways and means discipline, but it is thinking of it in a slightly more political and broader governmental way. Risk appetite is rarely explicit, but it should be. Certainly resources and the alignment between resources and goals need to be explicit.
Q63 Liam Byrne: That takes us to the Treasury. You came up through a national security background rather than a Treasury background into the role that you played with great distinction in No. 10. How would you characterise the style of Treasury input into that means piece of the equation? How does it improve in the future?
Lord Sedwill: If set out in those terms, I did not find the Treasury to be the obstacle that some others have described. What the Treasury really dislikes is highly ambitious goals for which there isn’t proper funding, and then, of course, pressure to find more money to achieve the goals. They would also want to add in a load of questions around delivery confidence. You cannot just throw more money at something, because it might get wasted. You have got to think about all of those things and the effectiveness in terms of delivery. They would want those things as well.
I must admit that when I was dealing with this, I did not find a conversation, at least at the conceptual level, with the Treasury that said, “Are the goals aligned with the resources we are applying?” and, “Let’s be explicit about the risk appetite.” They are quite comfortable with that kind of language because it has a concreteness to it that appeals to the Treasury culture.
Q64 Liam Byrne: If you take that to and fro that you have to have between ends, means and goals, did you find Treasury input into helping goal setting and ways setting useful? Or was it not there? Did it vary?
Lord Sedwill: It varied depending on whether they felt they had a Treasury interest in it. I think where my kind of approach really ran up against Treasury institutional resistance, if you think of these big cross-cutting priorities that we have been discussing, was in asking, “Would you apply a single budget to that? And would you give someone control of that budget rather than the budgets all continuing to be held essentially in bilateral negotiations between the Treasury and the Departments?” They were never keen to hand a budget for significant national security elements to someone else.
The Treasury's approach to spending is, as you know—I think everyone around the table has dealt with it in one way or another—very bilateral. That is challenging because they always want to know where the money is going to come from, and it is a zero-sum game for them. I think there are questions around whether it is possible to apply budgets, essentially cross-cutting budgets—horizontal budgets rather than vertical budgets, if you like—to some of these really big questions. Gordon Brown tried it with his cross-cutting PSA—public service agreement—targets. But even that in the end came back to the siloisation of Departments, and even he could not land that component of it.
Q65 Liam Byrne: If we agree that there is virtue in creating stronger integrating forces between Departments to deliver on a particular task, and it is hard to deliver pooled budgets in order to enable it, the role of No. 10 as the force for integration becomes really important. Tony Blair had a particular way of doing that with the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. Actually, the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit stocktakes were quite good in getting the right people around the table. It took Gordon Brown some time to figure out a model that connected energy between No. 10 and Departments. The domestic policy council, the proto-national security council and political renewal council was his preferred model, and that was informed by the national economic council. Do we not have to accept that different Prime Ministers have different characters and therefore they are always going to have different models for how to drive integration and delivery? Do we not just have to accept that it will take a bit of time to figure out a gearbox that works for a particular style of Prime Minister?
Lord Sedwill: That is absolutely right, but if you look at those examples, and at David Cameron’s Government—subsequent to that, Brexit and other crises tended to crowd out that more considered approach—the reason why they came up with those different ways of approach is that they were dissatisfied with the gearing mechanisms that they inherited. I don’t think they said that they wanted gearing mechanism A or B because it worked for them; I think they just felt that the gearing mechanisms didn’t work and they wanted to try something different. If the professionals—people in my job or others like you on this Committee—were able to develop a better gearbox, I don’t think the Prime Minister would change that just because it didn’t work for their particular personality. I think they would be pleased that a gearing mechanism between strategy and delivery was there.
Of course, you have to reflect on the way the Prime Minister wants to do it, but the fundamental mechanisms should be there. Let’s say a Prime Minister says, “Right. I really want to crack growth and productivity. The following six Departments are going to be the ones that are really on this. There is going to be a Cabinet Committee that I will chair every week, like I chair the National Security Council.” There is going to be a delivery mechanism behind it. You put in the right civil service machine, and you ensure that budgets are allocated according to that and so on. Different Prime Ministers will chair that in very different ways, but I think they would be perfectly happy if that mechanism actually turned their intent into policy delivery.
Q66 Chair: What incentives could be put in place to encourage individual civil servants to invest their careers in cross-departmental workings?
Lord Sedwill: When I tried this, civil servants loved doing it. I put teams together as a pilot and told them to work cross-Department. They enjoyed it because, frankly, civil servants are mostly team players. If they aren’t, they choose a different kind of career because it is such a big and complex organisation. They like the idea of working together and having some agency on a collective problem. You have talked to a lot of civil servants over the years. You know that the frustration is often, “I know what needs to be done, but the levers exist somewhere else and I can’t find a way of helping to pull them.”
If you create the right structures, civil servants will mostly work really well within them. Then what you have to do, which we did with the SROs we appointed in the national security area, is say, “Your cross-Government responsibilities are a big part of your job. Your annual performance reviews and all the rest of it will depend on them as well as your normal responsibilities. Your responsibilities as a cross-Government SRO will be as important, or maybe even more important in some cases.” That was immature but it was beginning to bite a bit in my case. If I think of Philip Barton, now permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, his profile within Whitehall rose partly because he was a very effective cross-Government SRO on the Government’s Russia strategy as a director general in the Foreign Office. That kind of example is one that we should be pursuing.
Q67 Philip Dunne: So it is about that persistence of SRO responsibility, both within and across Government. In the defence acquisition reform announcement last week, the Defence Procurement Minister said that they are looking at extending SRO tenure from two terms, which I introduced when I had that role, to potentially three terms, to allow them to take responsibility and hold it through changes in ministerial appointment. I presume you would support that. Did you think of doing that? Did that happen under your watch?
Lord Sedwill: Not on fixed terms. What we did try to do was leave people in jobs for longer, but to be honest I did not achieve as much on that as I would have wanted. One of the issues there is that you can sometimes do it at the most senior levels because, frankly, there are fewer places for people to go and therefore the churn can slow down a bit. What you have to do is create the right career incentives for people to stay in a job, because if they are going to get better pay, promotion, more recognition, broader experience and a better chance at big jobs elsewhere by moving around, the strong incentive for the really good people is to move around.
We have to try to create as strong a set of incentives for someone to see something through, so that they do not find that when they go to a promotion board, they say, “Well, they’re just a bit of a one-trick pony. They did a great job on that, but they don’t have the breadth we need for a job at the next level up.” There is a tension in that. We need to resolve that tension if we are going to encourage the really good people to stick at things for longer. I remember being told by a very senior permanent secretary in my own career, “Look, you need to stick at some things for a while, and then you can be a bit of a dilettante. You can move around quickly again, but then you need to stick at something else for a while.” I think that is right.
Q68 Philip Dunne: How do we encourage those incentives for strategic thinking among senior civil servants?
Lord Sedwill: First, as you discussed with other witnesses, you need to teach it to people. Not many people really understand what strategic thinking and good strategy look like. Like I said, the language is sometimes misused to mean big or senior. Someone will say, “Oh, this is a strategic question”. Actually, it isn’t; it’s just a really big and complex one. They say, “We’re going to operate this at the strategic level”. No, we are going to operate this at a very senior level. I think it needs to be trained and, to go back to the exchange I was having with Liam Byrne, you need people to see things through, from formulation of strategy with Ministers right the way through to the strategic programme, its reviews and so on. The agreement will be that you are responsible for that as an SRO, programme director or whatever—a policy programme director, just as we have people who are procurement programme directors—until there is at least a natural inflection point or big milestone when it would make sense for someone else to take up the baton.
Q69 Philip Dunne: How do we encourage Ministers and potential Ministers to see that it is in their interests to develop strategic thinking skills?
Lord Sedwill: Tell them they will be in jobs for longer, and also help to teach it to them. As you heard from George Robertson, we do not really teach Ministers or potential Ministers about government—they are expected to sink or swim. Political skills are critically important in a Minister, but they are not the only skills that a really effective Minister needs. They also need governance skills. Those things do not arise naturally; you have to teach them. We do not really train Ministers at all, but, to be frank, if you really want them to be strategic, you have to give them time to be strategic.
Q70 Philip Dunne: On teaching, when you appeared before us in private, you referred to re-establishing a school, and Lord Robertson was saying the same thing earlier. We have moved away from a physical campus to online learning. Much of it is up to the individual as to whether they apply, because they have to pay for it. Do you support what he was saying about getting back to a dedicated, and physical, school of government?
Lord Sedwill: Yes. I think you need a physical campus. Particularly if we are going to put together Ministers, potential Ministers, rising stars in the civil service and Parliament, and local government leaders, both political and official, the network effect you get from those people just being in the same room, having coffee and getting to know each other, is really beneficial, because then you understand the different tensions and cultures. Quite often, in conversations like these, you have Ministers complaining that civil servants are not political enough and civil servants complaining that politicians are too political, and vice versa. People have got to understand each other’s imperatives and cultures, and you cannot do that online. Of course there is a role for online, but fundamentally it is better that people have the chance to do this kind of thing in particular. Strategic thinking is largely a creative process, and the creative process works best in an organic environment where people can kick ideas around. In my view, you have to do that in person.
Q71 Philip Dunne: Final question: are there any other things that you would like to bring to our attention that you think need to be done to change the culture of the civil service to make it more strategic?
Lord Sedwill: I think we have touched on the main ones: longevity and prizing strategic thinking, but also really making sure that people understand that it is about delivery of policy. I think those are some of the key elements, but some of these things require structural reform. It is not just about individual civil servants and the culture, and so on; it requires structural reform as well, and I do not think we should duck that.
Q72 Philip Dunne: On structural reform, we have touched on putting Britain’s net zero ambition into legislation as an example of where a strategic approach was taken to a major issue. We arrived at our nationally determined contribution ahead of COP26 as a result of a structural change to Government that required a Cabinet Sub-Committee, and then an implementation committee of senior civil servants, to come up with a number. I cannot remember whether you were in post when that was put together, but as soon as we finished COP26, the structure of Government was changed and that committee structure disappeared, which would appear to make it hard to create the same impetus across Departments to deliver something that is now a national ambition. Do you think that was a mistake? Would you go back to that kind of structure?
Lord Sedwill: Yes, I think this is the point that we have all really been wrestling with. If something is a really big, long-term strategic question that will inevitably involve Governments of different political complexions, just because of the longevity of the goal, then creating machinery that is responsive to changes of Government and different political priorities as they arise—but which essentially has the same machinery, which new Ministers and long-term Ministers can be confident will deliver—will create that gearing mechanism that Liam Byrne and I were talking about.
I think those things should be retained, and it makes sense to do so. For example, one of the things I was wrestling with when I was Cabinet Secretary was: could I bring together the net zero community with the climate change adaptation community—those who are having to think about what we do, given that at least some effects of climate change are essentially locked in, no matter whether we hit 1.5°, 2°, 2.5° or whatever? The impacts on the industries and sectors affected are the same, whether it’s transport infrastructure, land use or whatever else. It was very hard to do that, partly because the two communities had such different preoccupations. I put a lot of effort into just trying to get them together to do common presentations to the wider civil service and so on, and eventually we managed to get them to do that.
Personally, I would want to create a common structure that looked at both sides of that coin and that, again, endured between different Governments. That allows Ministers to come in and turn the dial up or down—move the graphic equaliser, if you like—according to their immediate priorities. But you don’t have to redesign the graphic equaliser every time to allow Ministers the flexibility to make judgments about what they want to prioritise and where the trade-offs are.
Q73 Liam Byrne: In our search of the world for the best strategic mechanisms, we came across the Finnish idea of a report on the future, made annually to Parliament. Do you think something like that could help to focus minds in Government and present something that was holistic, useful and forward looking? Would that be a good mechanism for us to adopt here?
Lord Sedwill: Yes, I think that is a good idea. The other one I looked at was the New Zealand model, which is essentially a national performance framework. Something has been tried along those lines by the devolved Administrations, although obviously in a more constrained way. We can measure the economy—it is always argued about, but we can measure it. But you could have a national performance framework that measures a whole range of outcomes—on which there is loads of data, so you would need some independence around it—and an annual report to Parliament that looks at trends and so on. Combining that with the sort of thing you are talking about, which is more future-focused, would be well worth doing.
All Governments, of whatever political complexion, worry about inflation and unemployment. Those statistics are pretty clear. They should be thinking, “Wouldn’t it be a good idea if we had equally objective datasets that look at the whole range of Government activity?” Then again, Governments make their choices and Parliament decides what it is preoccupied with, but at least we would know how we were doing and where we stood in the league tables and so on.
Q74 Liam Byrne: There is obviously a galaxy of brilliant minds on Select Committees such as this one. Do you think there is a way we can conquer some of the adversarial culture and character of Select Committee-departmental engagement? Is there a way for us to create and guard a space where we can have a more constructive dialogue? Would that be a useful thing for the civil service and Ministers?
Lord Sedwill: Yes, is the short answer—but then, having been on the receiving end of quite a lot of fairly punchy Select Committees in my time, you might expect me to say that a more inquisitorial, less adversarial approach would be good. There is clearly a role for the tough and adversarial lines of questioning—and just to reassure you, as senior Select Committee members, it does impose a significant pressure on the civil service and Ministers. It means they know they have one coming up at some point and they need to be able to address the concerns. I do think that being able to flex more between the inquisitorial and the adversarial would be helpful. Sometimes there is a benefit in private sessions, but I don’t think one should overdo that. If it is inquisitorial in private and then adversarial in public, it becomes too much of a game, really. That turns people off governance and politics, because they feel that it is all just theatre.
Some of this is essentially down to building a set of relationships, where you know there are going to be times when you’ll get a really hard time, but most of the time it is going to be a more inquisitorial process. Some of this sits with Select Committees. There is some knockabout stuff, such as a senior civil servant being asked how much they get paid, before someone then asks them a question about how they are completely useless. That’s a parliamentarian trying to get something on to their own social media accounts and into the newspapers. That is inevitably just going to create a very defensive set of reactions. There is something here for Select Committee Chairs, probably collectively, to think about; it might be to say, “There are certain things we’re not going to permit, and we’re going to try to raise the focus on to issues of substance, perhaps by being harder on some of our colleagues who are looking for their next social media post.”
Q75 Liam Byrne: The last one from me is about how we structure input more systematically from young people. I visit a primary school every fortnight. I am always incredibly impressed by the youth councils and eco councils that I meet. Last year I ran a Generation Earthshot competition with 16 schools and was completely taken aback by the quality of input from some quite small children in the most income-deprived constituency in the country. Do you think there is a virtue in potentially improving input from young people into some of this longer-wave policy thinking, and is there a method by which we can do that?
Lord Sedwill: Yes, not least because they are craving it. They think that this is what politics and Government is, or should be, about—the really big things. Most young people are very focused on climate change, but they are also focused on some other really big questions, such as demographics, other environmental issues, geopolitics and so on. Probably more than I used to, I now do quite a lot of engagement with schools and groups, and I did a podcast at a local school the other day with a bunch of sixth-formers. One of the things that really struck me, as it must strike you, is that you get questions and the filter is just off. Even with the tougher interviews on the “Today” programme or in Select Committees, everyone understands the rules of the game, but when you are dealing with young people, there are no rules to the game. They just want you to answer the question that they have put to you and there is no filter to it. I find that challenging but really energising.
I think it would be good for getting young people more engaged in politics. We know that people are highly engaged in issues but are not engaged in formal politics—voting rates and all the rest of it are really poor. I do not have an easy answer to it, but maybe we could create something that somehow really engaged young people in it, so that they could see other young people being engaged, being taken seriously and holding a Cabinet Secretary to account by asking them questions. Maybe that would contribute to engaging young people more with the formal political system, rather than resting on campaigns and other issues alone. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it would be good if they were more engaged with the formal political system as well. Could you have a youth version of some of these Committees? Of course, there are lots of complications about who you choose, how you do it and all the rest of it, but could you do that? If you have a hearing coming up, are there youth groups that you could ask for questions? I don’t know. This is probably your business more than mine, but I think it is well worth the effort.
Chair: Thank you very much, Lord Sedwill. It has been an excellent session and you have given us plenty to think about. We are very grateful that you managed to fit us into your schedule.
Lord Sedwill: Thank you. Sorry I could not be there in person today. Thank you for the session and the questions.