At the start of June, James Plunkett wrote a piece called The oddness of the political moment. It is amazing just quite how quickly the atmosphere has changed since the election (I’d attribute a lot of how I feel myself to having prayed through Croydon and then for all 650 MPs in the last week) but the post remains very timely and insightful.
I left a couple of comments around accountability. One on the accountability of those elected to serve, and the other about GOV.UK and the policymaking process. David Durant said one needed to be a blog post, but I’ve done both.
1. Accountability of politicians
“…it seems increasingly clear we need people whose day job it is to care about the infrastructure that underpins accountability and the associated discourse…”
The oddness of the political moment, James Plunkett (07/06/2024)
When I decided to leave the OECD, a major factor was the stark disconnect between its stated mission of ‘better policies for better lives’ and the practical reality that means the organisation has to prioritise diplomatic niceties over accountability. I accept that my expectations are perhaps unreasonable. After all, the OECD isn’t an organisation designed, set up or mandated to provide accountability when a member mis-steps. However, you can’t have a ‘rules based international order’ if there’s no accountability against those rules.
This gap in the context of multilateral relationships is also present in domestic settings. The UK has definitely been in a particularly bad place on this and I fully expect the new edition of the OECD’s Trust Survey to evidence that. But we are far from alone on this. The OECD’s initiative to ‘reinforce democracy’ comes from a global concern but it misses the foundational issue of personal (and partisan) integrity and accountability.
Like James I view political service as a noble pursuit. I want to encourage and be encouraged by those who lead us (as evidenced by my new obsession for prayer marathons as election results come in). However, we’ve just gone through an election campaign that has given us myriad reasons to slip into disappointment and cynicism. It has been all too easy to lose faith in the people behind the politics. (Since I left this comment I really have had a wonderful shift in perspective about this).
If we’re interested in seeing our political leaders being well equipped then this raises an important question: what support exists for those we elect? Plenty of energy is spent on building the capability of public servants but how do MPs (in any country) access safe, non-partisan, spaces where they can learn new things, show weakness and ignorance, and be held accountable? Maybe it already exists but what does an OECD-like entity look like whose focus is on contributing positive insight into the discourse but is also absolutely fierce in calling out bullshit?
It’s a challenge that puts me in mind of the role ‘discipleship’ plays as a Christian. The idea of trusted relationships which are totally committed to investing in your growth but where the depth and strength of the relationship is rooted in non-negotiable accountability. It’s difficult to strike the balance but so impactful when you can. Can we build similar structures in our political landscape that help support personal growth, personal integrity, and true interpersonal accountability?
2. The role of GOV.UK in communicating policy
“Having a page on GOV.UK listing policies in development, perhaps grouped by mission, with a page for each one including that information would at least start to temper the idea that everything is purely the Minister’s idea…”
David Durant, in response to James’ Post (07/06/2024)
There’s a lot to like about David’s suggestion here in trying to take practical steps towards depoliticising the art of policymaking. This is the sort of transparency that doesn’t feel controversial for an apolitical civil service, and would likely have upsides in terms of wider public trust as well. Of course, it is also true that such a step in itself is something of a political act. Over the last decade this approach would have surfaced the clear pitfalls in the ideology over viability school of government and no doubt further enhanced fringe views about ‘the deep state’.
Speaking of fringe views, I think I may now hold the somewhat heretical perspective that says separation of services and separation of policy is not only useful but necessary.
I can’t speak to the conversations about presenting the structure and substance of government on GOV.UK since 2015 but I don’t feel like there’s been a vision for surfacing the world of policy in a way that works for accountability and insight in the same way as energy has been put into the mainstream experience of government. It is of course heresy to question the single government domain but we can learn those, such as Slovenia, where eUprava and GOV.SI can offer up their experience of having a clear separation into two spheres.
When GOV.UK launched there was vocal criticism from the policy community who found the new approach made their jobs harder. At the time there was absolutely a genuine commitment to making it better. The work Janet Hughes led to make sense of all the disparate policy threads from across the government web estate was amazing. But what we found in 2015 when we came to prepare GOV.UK for its first general election was that they had largely withered without focus and political capital behind them.
It is possible to find all of those original policy pages because we turned them all into HTML before we removed them.1 Our team did the work to try and understand what would be a better way of surfacing the information that didn’t wither and go out of date. We prototyped tools that would make things more coherent and helpful for all those interested in policy. Those needs are varied – some people are taking an active role in shaping it, many people need to understand it to comply and respond to it, some people need visibility of it for the purposes of accountability, others need to report it.
Even in the small detail that ‘history mode’ was never applied to the 2015-17 or 2017-19 periods of government it feels like nobody has picked up that mantle.2 I personally feel like there was a tacit and implied understanding in those early years that policymaking was a discipline that needed to be understood and served. I can’t imagine any of the people who were loudly annoyed in 2012 feel like GOV.UK has iterated towards better meeting their needs in the intervening 12 years.
The loss of the Performance Platform without a suitable replacement is also indicative of this being more than just an oversight and more like a chasm at the heart of the practice of government. Just like the new approach to policy content the Performance Platform was born from great optimism. But, just like that approach to policy, it ultimately came to reflect the extent of individual commitment and not something baked into the core culture and practice of ‘government done well’.
There’s a reason that “Make things open, it makes them better” is one of the original design principles. And for all the failings of the period 2010-2015 there’s an argument to be made that the coalition (or certainly parts of it) modelled that approach to government. It’s certainly very hard to suggest that those principles held sway from 2015-2024. Obviously I am an original acolyte but I do think that it would be very healthy indeed that whatever comes next for Digital Government in the UK sees all of those principles given a good dusting off.
This is not a problem of technology
It is obvious but bears stating that while the product side of open government has demonstrably been neglected, incoherent policy and lack of accountability are not the fault of GOV.UK or civil servants working on digital transformation (or anything else) across government. Even with a dedicated set of policy pages or shiny dashboards all the issues we found in 2015 would have been on steroids with the chopping and changing of ministerial responsibility in almost every domain.
I think it’s an important question for a government coming to power with the scale of majority they now enjoy to be deliberate and committed to doing things that might limit their capacity to simply do what they want without accountability. Open Government was a characteristic of the discourse when GOV.UK was born, it’s very much something that has been trampled into the mud over the last decade. I would very much like to hear Labour put forward a positive case for some of these boring but fundamentally important bits of the foundations for governing effectively.
For me it comes down to a sadness that the transformational power of the practice and culture that birthed GDS and GOV.UK hasn’t translated into a renewal of the art of governing. In recent years the UK has become satisfied with the Digital, Data and Technology profession as a replacement for the IT function and the ambition limited to what goes on the Internet and not the conversations that wrap around the needs of our nation. Call me naïve but that was the mission and the movement it felt like we belonged to until the fateful 2015 election, the departure of Francis Maude, and the start of 12 Ministers for the Cabinet Office3 in 9 years.
- For all their flaws they speak of a coherence to the 2010-2015 period of government in the UK that is pretty much absent compared to 2015-2024. ↩︎
- Following the 2024 general election ‘history mode’ has been applied retrospectively to the different phases of the Conservative government but unfortunately (and problematically) not in a way that reflects the original principle. The point was to model the life of a parliament (so general election to general election), not the span of a Prime Minister. ↩︎
- Minister for the Cabinet Office – some of whom took responsibility for digital, many of whom did not and delegated it on to someone else. This level of ministerial musical chairs was not unique to GDS and its brief and, for me, is the single biggest failure of the 2015-2024 period of government across every policy domain. ↩︎