Developers don’t build communities, they build buildings – for a profit. The Labour Leader will need to make some very big changes to not only to the planning system but also the financial system underpinning it, the regulation and enforcement of building, and the public service governance structures that will be needed once the builders have left.
The BBC covered the story here following a series of local radio interviews.
Public policy is complex by its very nature, and town planning is one of the most heavily lobbied sectors in Whitehall – so Labour will need to ensure the civil service is not outgunned by big financial interests as the Grenfell Inquiry exposed regarding the lobbying of ministers and senior policy advisers
I declare an interest as a former policy adviser in housing and planning policy over 15 years ago – an experience at the time I said aged me a decade in the course of just under a year. That’s how intense it was. One of the things that made it worse – something that I didn’t realise at the time, was that I was displaying a host of symptoms that the health profession is now associating with ADHD (as this BBC series That ADHD Story explains). That’s not to excuse what I saw and still see as my own shortcomings in that policy area – I asked to move on because as I said to people up my chain of command, I struggled under that pressure. This was also at the time when Northern Rock imploded and the house building sector took a major hit. I remember at the time wondering why the civil service did not have the same level of resources that the lobbyists in the private sector could bring to bear. This was in the last few years of the Labour Government I was there. The prospect of having to do all of that with a massive headcount reduction was inevitably a grim prospect – something that former civil servants called to testify to the Grenfell Inquiry gave evidence on, stating that this was a reason why they left the civil service.
“Officials working on a review of building safety regulations following a deadly cladding fire were limited to a “light touch” approach because the government had squeezed the team’s resources, the Grenfell Inquiry has heard.”
Tom Lowe for Housing Today, 08 March 2022
One of the lessons that Labour needs to learn from the Grenfell Inquiry is that the civil service needs access to the same calibre of technical experts as the wealthy lobbyists had. That inevitably means being willing to compete with pay and conditions while at the same time emphasising the public service ethos of the work, and in the longer term investing in training and development to ease the massive skills shortages in the sector. If experience from the early days of the Government Digital Service under Mike Bracken is anything to go by, there are more than a few people who would jump at the prospect of working for the common good if it did not mean a massive pay cut, and gave the sort of job security and flexible working options that the private sector tends to refrain from. Over those years I was struck by the number of people – in particular women who said they turned down lucrative offers to work in the private sector because they did not want to work the long hours with no flexibility. It remains to be seen to what extent the corporate sector holds out for with such outdated ‘you must be in the office’ presentee-ism working practices.
Creating the sustainable built environment is one thing, creating the communities of people – where there is strength in its diversity, is quite another
Social history matters, and if there’s one thing that (with hindsight) was missing during my public policy days it was the interaction between policy advisers and the academic historians of their policy sectors. In one sense we compensated by having a critical mass of longstanding civil servants who had been in policy areas for decades and who carried the corporate memory. But the staff turnover in the civil service has been identified time and again as a weakness in public policy making in government.
“Excessive staff turnover in the civil service is costing the government up to £74 million a year in recruitment, training and lost productivity. The indirect costs of turnover are even higher, including disruptive leadership changes contributing to major projects like Universal Credit going awry and weakened institutional memory damaging policy development in key areas.”
Emma Norris, Institute for Government, 15 Jan 2019
Finding a minister who wants to be at the Cabinet Office in the longer term to strengthen the civil service
One of the big mistakes of the Blair/Brown years was to treat this very important ministerial post as a sort of ‘Cabinet Minister Training Post’ for future secretaries of state. When you look at the number of Cabinet Office Ministers between 1997-2010, there’s almost one minister for every year. That’s no way to ensure policy stability, let alone developing any ministerial policy expertise.
Adult education policy and lifelong learning will be essential to Labour’s plans
But this is a policy area that has been a ‘Cinderella area’ of the public sector: under-funded, over-worked, and unable to demonstrate its true potential because it has seldom had an influential ministerial champion for it. (Or ‘Fairy-deity-minister-parent’). See Learn Work which is one of the leading policy and research organisations in the field – albeit one with too much of a vocational focus for my liking. (I’m more positively disposed towards the philosophy of former Labour Minister Arthur Greenwood who wrote about the Education of the Citizen over a century ago here.)
Micromanaging ministers
The risk is that future ministers will try to micromanage which sectors get funding for what – a process that is woefully inefficient as the Institute for Government wrote here. One of the reasons it exists is Political. It gives junior ministers something to do while ensuring that the real big policy-making is hoarded further up the chain. The alternative is devolving more of the policy-making and the spending power to cities and towns, dissipating the concentration of power. The problem is that this sort of ‘internal overhaul of the state’ isn’t something anyone can easily sell to the public. Especially one that ministers have not made any provision for regarding education about politics and democracy.
For teachers and doctors – and also town planners and dentists (and lots of other professions too!) the challenge will be to increase the training/course places across the country because of the mobility of those highly-skilled professions. There’s something to be said for working with Commonwealth countries (that have similar structures – a legacy of Empire) to ensure that training capacity is raised in a co-ordinated manner to stop the problem of poaching each other’s skilled staff.
That means overhauling the UK’s Aid and Development policies to fund new educational establishments and partnerships (See Addenbrooke’s Abroad as an example) where the education and health services of Commonwealth countries are improved and strengthened. Again, that’s not something that can be imposed, but has to be a genuine partnership of equals.
“Didn’t Labour try something like devolving more things in early 2010?”
Yes – in Total Place.
Above – Total Place from March 2010
It barely got off the ground before the Coalition hit the public sector with austerity. As with regional spatial strategies, Labour’s party policy advisers (the ones employed by the party at present) would do well to familiarise themselves with what this previous generation did on all things social policy, and see what applies not just to the society of today, but the societies of tomorrow – mindful of how different things in so many fields. This ranges from technological through to educational through to cultural. What has changed? What has stayed the same? What challenges have been vanquished? What new challenges have emerged? Hence the importance of historians who specialise in the different policy fields.
There are many more questions that need looking at – ones that I’ll save for a future blogpost or three. These include:
- Where will these new towns go?
- How will these new towns be governed?
- How in the world will they build these new towns without releasing a single molecule of methane or carbon dioxide – while at the same time increasing biodiversity and reducing water stress on the hydrosphere?
(I have no idea how anyone will achieve that last one!)
Food for thought?
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The Cambridge Town Owl 