This interview with {ROBERT EDE} is part of the {GETTING POLICY UNSTUCK} series. Robert is the former Special Adviser to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care.
#15: A political adviser reflects – Robert Ede
Pressing issues were like little piranha bites out of my day, and with each one the amount of time I had to think about the long term eroded. When I came into government, I remember talking to another special adviser who had worked in government before. I said that I wanted to spend about a third of my time thinking about longer term stuff. He laughed, shook his head, and said ‘you are completely naive’. You quickly realise that if you try and grip everything, you grip nothing. I came in thinking ministers need to have more control and oversight. Over time though, I realised that there is only so much you can oversee; you have to focus on where the politics adds most value.
We always talk about how difficult it is to get anything done and how slow Whitehall moves, so let’s do something about it. There are lots of ways in which you can improve it, but it requires buy-in from officials to say, ‘normally we are used to discussing among ourselves first, but we have to accept that the minister will have much more of an involved role earlier on’. In return, you’ll buy maybe two months at the other end of the process through a consolidated business case approval. It will mean we get our hospitals built, or digital technologies rolled out more quickly, or whatever it is. It requires a leap of faith from officials as well as the political class to say ‘we’re in this together’. Everyone finds it demotivating when things move too slowly. We need to be honest about how it can be improved rather than hiding behind the process.
I thought I’d have more time to read reports, but I barely read anything beyond the executive summary from an external organisation. If the report was longer than 10 or 15 pages, there was no way I was reading more than two or three pages. That’s not because I didn’t want to, quite the opposite. I wanted to engage more broadly with think tanks because we didn’t have time to do as much longer term thinking as we’d have liked. Think tanks offer a really good mechanism for pinching great ideas. That said, when we did find the time to engage, the spread of the quality of those ideas was too wide.
There’s no point coming up with amazing policy proposals if you haven’t planned how they will fly in the real world. If we want to do something that’s politically difficult, you need to spend much more time thinking about how you get legislation through Parliament, thinking about how to corral Party colleagues, how you handle the left- or right-leaning press to manage media fallout of the difficult decisions, etc. And too often all of that came after the development of the policy idea, when it should be baked right into the start because that’s how you actually get stuff done.
Good policy proposals were sadly rare from external organisations. Still far too many organisations are in the diagnosis space rather than the solutions space. If they are in the solutions space, they’re often wildly unrealistic in that they haven’t properly costed their proposals, and haven’t tested the implementation potential. I would say the majority of stuff that crossed my desk from external organisations fell into that category. The best policy proposals had strong underlying evidence and clinical backing that meant you wouldn’t get massive pushback from different stakeholder groups. Or at least if you did, you had a good handling plan for it, where the political trade-offs associated with the change were really bottomed out. Politicians want to drive change and recognise where there are moments to really stand up to producer interests to make that happen, but the policy needs to be bulletproof before they will stick their head above the parapet.
Newspaper coverage of interesting ideas is still valuable. Interesting new policy proposals would get read over the weekend if they were in one of the major newspapers. And then it would get talked about on the special advisor and secretary of state WhatsApp groups. Despite changes in media consumption, traditional media is still a good way of getting your ideas seen by decision makers.
When a chief executive of a prominent business would go public with critical comments of the government’s direction on policy, that often had an impact. It would encourage people to think again, in part because he or she was willing to front up to it and it wasn’t a corporate viewpoint. It meant that you could have a follow-on conversation with them. If you can use your figureheads and get them to tell a really simple story, but make sure that they’re individually fronting up to that, that can have an impact. If you’re a third sector organisation, you expect them to say ‘we need our area to be a priority, we need x amount of money, and we get less money than some competitor’. It was the exceptionalism of business leaders stepping out and saying ‘this is really bad for our entire sector’ that made it impactful.
It really wound me up when organisations went public before communicating with us first. It also frustrated me when I was discussing something with an organisation and then they decided to launch a big campaign the day after that discussion without having flagged it. That kind of thing made me want to distance myself from the relationship. Everyone understands that we need to play this dance externally of them holding our feet to the fire, but behind closed doors you need to communicate when you’re going to do something, and why you’re going to do it. Otherwise you risk ending up in a polarised debate with a dug-in politician who feels like this campaign is personally against him or her.
My advice to new advisers is to work out who the officials and externals are who you can really trust. You need to identify the people who get what the secretary of state’s priorities are and won’t put anything forward that is ill thought-through. Then you can let their submissions go through with a little less scrutiny, and use that time to focus on the things that are high on the worry list. If you try and do it all the risk is you burn out far too quickly. Trust and relationships are a shortcut to doing slightly less while getting more done.
