Can Labour unlock the value of the OECD?

Rachel Reeves has been quick to tell us that UK public finances are in their worst state since World War Two. As she pores over the bank statements to identify a subscription or two to cancel she might pause at the £900,000¹ we send each month to the OECD and ask what are we getting for that money.²

I hope she and the Cabinet get a handle on that a bit more quickly than their predecessors. In the summer of 2023 the UK Foreign Secretary was in Paris, chairing the OECD’s annual meeting of ministers. He gave a speech that basically said “Before this week I didn’t appreciate the breadth and value of the OECD”. Arguably, he was just praising the organisation with niceties but then again, the ministerial musical chairs of the last decade means it’s not wholly surprising if the value and scope of the OECD got a bit lost.

It’s easily done.

OECD data does crop up from time to time but neither UK politicians or UK media seem to pay too much attention to its work. Just this week the OECD published the latest edition of its Trust Survey. In Ireland there was a ministerial press release and some press coverage but in the UK, nothing. And yet there’s a huge amount to unpack from what it says (and what it doesn’t) including the headline that only 2 of the surveyed countries have lower levels of trust in national government than the UK³.

It’s a curious thing how little the UK values these ‘outsourced brains’ that help us think collectively about cross-cutting policy issues or find common approaches to shared challenges. I doubt any manifestos were written with much reference to OECD analysis. That valuable function of the European Commission wasn’t interesting enough to make part of the Brexit debate, even though the UK held quite significant influence over many policy areas and certainly benefitted from the harmonisation it produced. And now we’ve had to insource all of that overhead and do it ourselves. Not very clever.

It’s also true that the OECD could be better at articulating its value and understanding the value it can add to its members. Ultimately it offers incredible value for money for its members.⁴ There isn’t a policy agenda that couldn’t draw on the insight and knowledge it offers. Nevertheless, it is a flawed organisation in need of reform. Perhaps something, maybe the US election, will be a prompt for a radical reimagining of the organisation as it looks to what it offers the world in the future. Or maybe that could be a role Labour plays in adopting a coordinated approach to its membership of the organisation. But in either case, let that agenda for reform be based on the possibilities and potential of the multi-lateral model, not simply a fixation on saving money.

If it’s going to do that then here are ten things I’d suggest they could usefully know early doors.

Ten things Labour (and you) should know about this ‘outsourced brain’

The OECD is a diplomatic Country Club. It has an important convening power that puts its members in the room together and gives space for difficult topics. However, those spaces more often than not lack accountability or challenge. It’s very much a friendly diplomatic environment and a cosy place to talk policy at its highest levels. In recent years different member countries have done things that warrant censure and depart from the values of the organisation. I personally think this is a massive structural issue that deeply undermines the ‘rules based international order’, let alone the quality of governance in those countries. This lack of moral authority is one reason why I decided to leave.

The OECD is an international network of brilliant minds. Beneath the high-level diplomacy are the practitioners. My work was in service to the Working Party of Senior Digital Government Officials, who in themselves work to support the Public Governance Committee. The OECD is a giant switchboard for forging connections between teams in governments around the world. There’s a lot of bureaucracy and it could do this job a lot better but the value of what can come from these connections is absolute gold. When I was developing the Good Practice Principles for Service Design and Delivery in the Digital Age, it was amazing to be able to effectively conduct an iterative, user research led approach, reflecting the expertise and insight of teams from across the globe.

The OECD measures all the things and this comparative data provides such incredible insight into what is happening between different countries. There is a big overhead for teams in departments to fill out the many surveys and provide those returns but the data it unlocks is so valuable for every policy domain. But these are the sort of things that get better the more countries participate so it would be great for the UK to commit to contributing data whenever the OECD requests it, even (especially) if it may not reflect well on the UK.

That in itself provides a new challenge for the new government – how will they respond when external voices are critical (like the findings of the Trust Survey)? Can they operate in a way that has the humility to learn about both the strengths, and weaknesses, of our country, or will the put their fingers in their ears and bury their head in the ground and try to spin and distort the criticism?

The OECD’s ‘laws’ might be optional but they’re well worth following. The members of the OECD are subject to 271 different legal instruments. None of them are enforced like an actual law; they rely entirely on members choosing to adopt them. And all of them reflect the careful and considered analysis and negotiation between members to try and establish the best ways of handling particular things. I’m really proud of how we approached developing the Recommendation on the Governance of Digital Identity and the foundations it offers to OECD members (including, and maybe especially, the UK) but it’s far from the only one with value.

The OECD analysis is often spot on (so long as it survives publication). As part of the core activity of the OECD they periodically publish reports about the situation in every country. The flagship of flagships is the OECD Economic Survey. They cover a lot of ground but are excellent at zeroing in on The Most Important Thing for governments to prioritise – you can look back over previous UK editions and see a Greatest Hits of neglected policy that may well have offset some of the issues Labour are inheriting if they’d been taken seriously.

Nevertheless, because of diplomacy, valuable observations that should be made public can disappear between draft and publication. That’s regrettable but it would be so positive for public discourse (and who knows, maybe even those levels of public trust) for Labour to welcome the OECD as an important independent voice, providing a warts and all assessment as a complement and challenge to their ideological and partisan policy agendas.

The OECD offers a lot of valuable consultancy for ‘free‘ (with the membership subs). Standing reports like the Economic Survey are a part of this in being tailored to the specifics of a particular country but there’s so much to gain from the fact that other countries are going through the same process or paying for more granular reviews. OECD member governments don’t need to care only about the material that’s published about their own country but should be alive to the insights available from seeing what’s going on elsewhere.

Equally, the volume of working papers that gets published may seem a little bit overwhelming (and arguably it is!) but the output is of such high quality, covers such a breadth of topic and offers global coverage, for free. There’s a lot of freely available knowledge that could be so valuable in breaking out of our parochial tendencies and policy silos.

The OECD should be the among your first choices of paid for consultancy (for some things). The OECD doesn’t do delivery, it does thinking. But that brilliant thinking can and should unlock delivery. Because the organisation is looking at over 30 countries and has been doing it for 60 years it has brilliant knowledge about what works and insightful frameworks about how to understand particular problems.

When the OECD is commissioned to do a review then it benefits from the opportunity of drawing in colleagues from different policy domains and seeing osmosis happen. If you commission the OECD you’ll pay less than you probably should considering the time that goes into it. You’ll get excellent work ethic and high quality outputs. And you’ll get a level of insight from the invitation to country peers to sit in and contribute that is unmatched. I’m so proud of every piece of work I contributed to at the OECD because we never phoned it in and we never cut corners and we always worked to understand the needs of the country we were working with and provide a fair and helpful assessment of the practical things they could and should be doing.

The OECD will thrive under the care of more interested members. It’s a form of neglect for OECD members to enjoy its trappings without prioritising the vitality of the organisation. The highest level of engagement seems to be when it comes to a budget setting process that counts the cost, but not the value. Country contributions are a rounding error on their overall budgets and engaging in penny-pinching habits does not serve the OECD well. There is perhaps a complacency about the expectation of members to engage beyond their financial contributions or enjoy its convening power. That neglect plays a part in limiting the accountability of members to the OECD but also, and perhaps more importantly, the accountability of the OECD to its members. The OECD occupies a privileged place in the world’s dynamics, and its members should be engaged and interested in its future, not just its bottom line.

The OECD has a problem with a toxic administrative and workplace culture. The OECD might be small but it is very similar to a nation-state government. It is right that the members look to the organisation to provide good value for money. However, the relentless expectation on the organisation delivering more for less is not helping to create the conditions for culture and practice to reflect the ideals the organisation espouses. This includes project funding being sought from questionable sources, a general lack of transparency and openness, and worrying failures to address bullying, harassment and bad behaviour of staff towards one another. The making of OECD materials freely available is a recent bright spot but, speaking frankly, this is many years overdue. Ultimately, and sadly, this is not an organisation that practices what it preaches and does need considered reform.

The OECD has a delivery timescale problem. While the quality of the work the OECD produces is generally very good, its delivery timeframes are a problem. A lot of that comes from internal culture and particularly the way in which the organisation is funded. Those internal mechanisms lead to behaviours that actively work against cross-organisation collaboration, leaving teams jostling for position and spending time seeking additional sources of income rather than focused on delivering what they’ve been commissioned to produce.

Let’s say that over the coming year Labour decided that they want to commission the OECD to carry out a Digital Government Review. By the time the negotiations are done, the Terms of Reference agreed, the country survey carried out, the peer review mission interviews conducted and then the writing (and internal approval) of the Review it is going to be late 2026, if not 2027, before the report gets published. Some of those steps can’t be avoided, some can be sped up, but if you’re coming to power then you need that Review on your desk on Day 1, not Day 1000.

Taking a greater interest in the vitality of the OECD

The reason that I finish on these more critical points is because I think they’re the prompt Labour could use to help the OECD rethink its value for the decades ahead.

The new government must take a more active role in its membership of the OECD and how it operates. This involves not just engaging with its intellectual outputs (which would be an important start) but also ensuring that the organisation lives up to its own principles. Labour should advocate for:

1. Enhanced Accountability and Transparency: The UK should push for greater transparency in how the OECD conducts its business. This includes publicising funding sources and ensuring that the decision-making processes within the OECD are always open to full public scrutiny.
2. Improving Internal Culture: The UK should care about how the OECD is improving its internal culture. This means addressing the toxic culture that undermines staff well-being and productivity. How can the UK under the new government champion initiatives that promote a healthier work environment, equitable treatment, and professional development opportunities for OECD staff?
3. Ensuring Consistency with OECD Principles: The UK should hold the OECD accountable to its own standards and create the expectation for the organisation to put the values it espouses into the practice of its operation.
4. Promoting Efficient Use of Resources: Labour should advocate for streamlined processes within the OECD to help reports and reviews get published in a timely manner. This includes taking an interest in the internal transformation of the organisation, in line with user-centred design and agile practices, to reduce delays and focus on delivering value to the organisation’s users and staff.

What’s the one thing that could unlock the value of the OECD for the UK government?

There’s a role for the UK in shaping a better future for the OECD but there’s also a need for the UK to get more value from the OECD itself.

Labour can slot nicely into supporting the status quo and enjoying the diplomatic niceties. They can take a passing interest in the brilliant material that gets published and use the OECD to advance its diplomatic agenda.

They can go a bit further and recognise that there are opportunities to learn and grow and apply the OECD’s knowledge into the day to day work of its policymaking agenda and the activity of civil service (and now the paywall has gone this is so much easier).

But can it go even further? Can Labour help the OECD unlock the value of its knowledge at the critical moment in the electoral cycle?

At the moment the OECD is dependent on the political mood music within the incumbent governments of its members. This makes it an academic institute unable to truly analyse and assess the situations it observes unless, and until, it is given permission to do so. And that creates a huge problem in commissioning new work. If you’re coming to power you need the insight and analysis of the OECD on your desk on Day 1, not Day 1000.

So here’s the one thing I’d suggest Labour should do: place the OECD on a more formal, if not, statutory footing that recognises it as the go-to independent actor with a mandate to provide a full, warts and all, analysis and assessment of the country by every OECD policy department within the first 100 days of the next newly elected Parliament, to provide a whole of government policy assessment for the incoming administration to build on.

It’s not too late to set the wheels in motion for the OECD to do similar for 2024 but realistically this is something to build towards. New governments have so much on their agenda but the beauty of having an ‘outsourced brain’ on retainer is being able to delegate to brilliant minds with confidence. Right now the OECD is full of teams of people who have done lots of insightful work on the UK and its approach to policy area after policy area over the last 14 years. Their knowledge and insight into what went well and what did not is a huge resource that should be tapped into as soon as possible, not in 18 months’ time.

Ultimately, the OECD is an absolute trove of information for any government, especially one that’s newly elected. I’m not really sure why this isn’t something the OECD already does to be honest but where the UK could lead, maybe other members will follow, and perhaps that could go some way to helping the OECD recast its vision and value in supporting the future of government around the world.

1. This is a rounding error on the UK’s budget. Just like your monthly subscription to whichever service grumpy commentators suggest is preventing you from being able to save for a deposit on a house ↩︎
2. The OECD budget is split into two parts. Part 1 is the core funding to which every member contributes. In 2024 that stood at €229.9m, 5.5% of which is paid by the UK. Part 2 funding reflects thematic interests and is based on optional payments as and when countries find a project they wish to support. In 2024 that stood at €122.1m but there is no breakdown of how much individual countries contributed to that. ↩︎
3. The table presents the within-country distributions of responses to the question “On a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is not at all and 10 is completely, how much do you trust the national government?” A 0-4 response corresponds to “low or no trust“, a 5 to “neutral“ and a 6-10 to “high or moderately high trust“. “OECD” presents the unweighted average across countries. Source: OECD Trust Survey 2023. ↩︎
4. The US contributes €3.5m per month and Iceland €115,000. These are rounding errors for both countries. ↩︎