Evidence Based Policy Making
Wednesday, February 4th, 2004An interesting discussion about the policy process yesterday when Blair appeared before the House of Commons’ Liaison Committee. John Denman pressed the PM on why the government are forging ahead with their tuition fees policy, asking:
Was it the case that the Secretary of State for Education, who I think would have been Estelle Morris, came to you and said, “I have studied this, Prime Minister, and I’m convinced we need variable fees,” or did the policy emerge in a different way?
and, as a supplementary:
In the past in some policy areas like the rehabilitation of offenders the Performance and Innovation Unit has been commissioned to publish a very detailed and evidence-based assessment of what the best policy would be. Why was the decision taken not to commission any report of that sort to inform the White Paper?
Blair’s response was interesting in light of the rhetoric surrounding ‘evidence based policy making’ and underlined the political imperatives that will always hamper such movements:
You do not always do that. Obviously you have to take a decision as to whether that is necessary or not. I think part of the issue here was that no one disputed that the universities faced a funding crisis. So you did not need a study to tell you that that was a fact that everybody accepted. You then have a number of different ways you can raise the money. I am always a bit bemused when I read of the 40 different options we had, I never came across that. There were basically only two, you either got more money out of the taxpayer or the student pays more.
Could this even be described as evidence informed policy making? Blair seems to be implying that there’s no need to look at the evidence if you already know the answer… and that if you think you already know the answer then you can decide from the outset that a review of evidence is unnecessary! I’m not one to blow the trumpet of the evidence based policy making school - far from it - but the exchange seemed to me to expose the hollowness of the claim that New Labour have moved to a post-ideological era in which ‘what counts is what works’. Barry Sheerman didn’t let the PM off the hook on this one though:
Prime Minister, you have always believed, I know, in both a pragmatic approach to problems but also an evidence-based approach to policy. What is in a sense worrying about what you have just said is that it seems to gloss over that role of real policy scrutiny in Number 10. You have a lot of people employed in there to give you advice on policy but what seems to have emerged on a number of issues in which the Government has run into problems, like top-up fees and variable fees, is that either your policy people are not doing the work and getting the credit for it or they are just not publishing it. In terms of scrutiny, as you said, our select committee looked closely at the Higher Education White Paper. What we were astonished about later on is that Government ministers said that the foundation of this policy rested with Professor Barr in the London School of Economics. Given that you have a Policy Unit why was it not much more closely involved in trawling over possibilities, potentials, pitfalls?
Blair’s response was to point to the role departments outside of No 10 play in putting together policy and the pressure for change from outside lobbies, particularly service providers. In short, he confirmed the primacy of policy networks over policy evidence in the decision making process. Interestingly, in what might be seen as another sign of his becoming a ‘conviction politician’ - or at least one convinced of the need for leaders to make decisions based on their own subjective judgements rather than external validators of ‘best practice’ - he then argued:
I have got to tell you that my experience of this stuff is that process and debates about process become a substitute often for people making up their minds on the policy.
