In defence of everythingism

Why it's a necessary part of governing well

In March I spent a week in Washington DC and New York, inhaling everything bagels at every opportunity. When I lived in New York I could never understand how their bread could be so bad, but their bagels so good, and why the reverse was true in London. Surely globalisation should mean that recipes for decent bread, double cream and Worcester sauce should travel across the pond?

Intellectual tastes however are more mobile. The everything bagel has become an unexpected metaphor for policy failure on both sides of the Atlantic. Ezra Klein has lamented the rise of ‘everything bagel liberalism’, while Joe Hill wrote an essay recently on the problem with everythingism that has been picked up by journalists, including Peter Foster and Stephen Bush.

From Everythingism to ‘focus’ policymaking (from Everythingism, An Essay - by Joe Hill, Reform)

The critique of Everythingism is a helpful corrective. In international development, it is not uncommon for projects to grow in complexity as they respond to all the problems facing particular people or places. This might be attractive in theory, but in practice it makes scaling a program complicated to implement well and expensive.

In foreign policy, war aims shift and grow and often succumb to everythingism. While the initial rationale for war in Afghanistan was to eradicate Al Qaeda, it expanded into a battle to purge the Taleban and establish women’s rights and democracy. The Iraq war was a case of justifying an intervention based on several bad reasons, rather than one good one: we should go along with it because we should stay in lock step with America; they will do it anyway without us, so let’s at least shape the campaign; even if Iraq was not the worst regime, it was clearly a very bad one, so let’s take the opportunity to remove Saddam while there is a political coalition prepared to do it.

But while there are plenty of examples of bad forms of everythingism, where decision-makers have failed to make the necessary trade-offs, overall I’m more of the view that everythingism is a necessary part of governing well, and can be made to work.

Everythingism is often necessary

When business people enter government, they often struggle to comprehend the complexity of the trade-offs involved. You cannot easily divest yourself of responsibilities and focus on core competencies or markets. Indeed, when Stuart Rose, former M&S boss, criticised NHS management for lacking ‘common sense’, Simon Stevens pointed out that running the NHS ‘more than rivals selling underwear’ for complexity.

Joe Hill argues in his paper that the answer is to focus on a single goal: “policies that try to combine even two goals often add up to less than the sum of their parts.” But just think how that might be applied in practice.

Sentencing and criminal justice

The Government is reviewing sentencing within the criminal justice system. One goal is to punish offenders and protect the public in the very short term, often implying locking up more people or the same people for longer. Another goal is to protect the public in the long term by reducing the likelihood of reoffending, where evidence suggests fewer people having custodial sentences is the best route. There are, of course, other objectives or constraints, including saving money and limited capacity in the prison estate - but even just the two primary goals of short and long term protection of the public are typically in direct competition. If Keir Starmer picked just one goal and was unprepared to consider bending his approach for the other - would it be celebrated as good policy?

Energy

Or let’s take energy regulation. Should Ofgem contain increases in consumer bills by limiting the costs of new grid infrastructure? Or should it focus on aggressive investment in networks to accommodate the new data centres that many think are important to economic growth? These are trade-offs within the economic domain, between the interests of consumers and business, never mind environmental obligations, or energy security and national security concerns.

Immigration

What about the government’s forthcoming immigration white paper? If the government focuses on the manifesto commitment to reduce net migration, the government could make it harder to get a work visa, reduce the number of students coming or close the health and social route. But if the government was focused on growth above all else and improving the public finances, it would do the opposite. Migration is one of the few easy, low-cost supply side reforms with the potential for a quick translation into GDP forecasts. And reducing international students and care workers will mean bigger costs for taxpayers or UK citizens.

Joined up government

Despite the inevitable need to balance competing goals and constraints, governments have attempted in the past to push back on everythingism. In 1982, when Michael Heseltine was setting up Urban Development Corporations, he said he wanted them to be ‘single-minded’ and ‘focused like a laser beam’ on the problem they were charged with. Next Steps agencies that separated policy from delivery and the growth of quangos and arms length bodies were also part of this effort.

But agencies with a singular focus often create externalities, dumping costs onto other departments. They are usually defined by a particular function, when the reality of people’s lives is that they interact with multiple professions and needs. The fragmentation of services created by ‘new public management’ led to the push for ‘joined up government’ in the 1990s. At the forefront of this was the Social Exclusion Unit where I spent my first years in government. There are several examples from the SEU, and beyond, which show what is possible.

Joining up around client groups

In the Social Exclusion Unit, we would often focus on a single client group or problem - teenage pregnancy, rough sleeping, children truanting or excluded from school. And almost always we’d find that, when looking at the problem through that lens, there was no-one in charge, at any-level, for making policies or services cohere. Solving those single problems involved corralling multiple services: getting someone off the streets for good requires housing, access to drug and alcohol support, mental health services and help getting a job. But the cumulative effect of the state’s efforts were poor, because no-one was accountable for doing the corralling. What worked in rough sleeping was putting a person and unit in charge, with a target, a dedicated budget, a remit to address cross-departmental barriers, and a direct line to ‘contact and assessment teams’ on the frontline.

The most ambitious, and challenging forms of joining up are where you are trying to meet multiple outcomes, through a wide range of policies.

Imagine a 10 year old with severe behavioural issues. They might end up with a statement of Special Educational Needs; treated for a conduct disorder by the NHS; in the criminal justice system for youth offending; or in touch with social services. Often kids end up in some or all. But for them and their parents, there’s a mix of blurred, overlapping services. And for the state there’s many services spending a bit, but no single agency spending a lot.

That’s what Every Child Matters, which I led, and the subsequent Children Act 2004, tried to fix. It was bold because it challenged fundamentally how government and public services are organised. It replaced a functional way of organising services - education, health, social care - with one based around a broad, age-based client group.

A single database for all children was set up - Contact Point. There was a common assessment framework across education, health and social care, with the aim of having a lead professional and multi-disciplinary teams guiding children through the system. We merged services under a Children’s Director, and there was a single children's inspectorate. DfE established a Children’s Minister, and eventually became the Department for Children, Schools and Families.

Appraising the successes and failures of Every Child Matters probably deserves it’s own newsletter, but for sure - a lot got done. Sam Freedman, who was an advisor Michael Gove, regretted Gove’s decision to roll back the reforms.

Joining up around places

Another way of joining up is to strengthen the ability of different tiers of government services. In recent years, most of the focus has been on expanding devolution to either the four nations or cities through Mayors and Combined Authorities. For example, by expanding the role that mayors have over transport, skills, and energy, they can potentially coordinate investment behind a clearer vision for their area and contribute more to economic development and industrial policy.

A more neglected area for joining up is the hyperlocal - single wards or neighbourhood containing 5 to 10,000 people. When turning around a poor area, there are lots of interdependencies that suggest it is worth sequencing what problems you solve first. If you repair housing, while crime is rife, the spending soon goes to waste. Similarly if you help people get into work, or better jobs, they will quickly leave if the basic fabric and safety of the area is degraded.

Coordination is often simpler at the hyperlocal level. For example, local authorities have always struggled to partner effectively with the NHS. But when the conversation is between a GP and primary school head, or a children’s centre within a given neighbourhood, practical solutions and change are easier to implement than when you get a horde of senior managers in local government and the NHS onto a partnership board of an Integrated Care System. I’m hopeful the new Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods, created by Local Trust, and chaired by Hilary Armstrong, will be able to revive interest in neighbourhood based solutions.

Joining up one policy to multiple outcomes

Some forms of joining up do not add services but subtract them, creating much greater simplicity. In international development and humanitarian interventions, there has been a growing focus over the last twenty years on conditional and unconditional cash transfers. Randomised trials have shown that cash transfers are not only more cost-effective than providing aid recipients with food, clothing or shelter, they also increase enrollment at school, children’s nutritional status, and reduce intimate partner violence. There is a good case for donors and aid organisations with single mandates - such as the World Food Programme - to pool their efforts to create effective cash safety nets and meet multiple outcomes together much more cost-effectively than they can do alone.

Domestic policies often have multiple dividends, too. But Whitehall can be particularly bad at prioritising policies where the dividends fall to other departments, rather than the one responsible for it. Housing has been a good example. It is so integral to multiple outcomes, but hasn’t had the priority afforded to health, education, policing and criminal justice, welfare or transport. Child poverty might be another example, where choices on how much to spend on it will have implications for crime, health and educational achievement.

How to do everythingism well

So what are my quick takeaways on how to do everythingism well? We need less of the everythingism that creates hundred million pound bat tunnels, and more of the everythingism that creates dynamic Mayors shaping places, or the Social Exclusion Unit tackling complex social problems.

First, take strategy seriously. To govern is to choose, but we do not invest in supporting effective decision-making. Too many trade-offs are made based on adjectives rather than clear numbers, implicitly rather than explicitly. There is nowhere near enough strategic capacity at the centre of departments or at the centre of government. A weak centre does not empower departments, it just creates logjam and treasury dominance.

Second, design institutions so that decision rights are allocated clearly. There are good reasons for quangos and ALBs, but it is helpful to clarify who has the decision-rights, and how disputes are resolved and on what basis. Hierarchy helps. It is not a problem that a body has to factor in multiple objectives; it is only problematic when it is not clear who is then able and empowered to make the trade-off.

Third, if you are a minister or civil servant and you hear yourself defending how well joined up you are by pointing to a mission board or committee, you probably haven’t even got to first base. Effective integration happens at a more operational level. Be prepared to organise budgets, people and accountability around client groups and territories, rather than making professional functions the dominant logic.

What I’m reading

On a long flight back from the US, I listened to podcasts on the Spring Statement, and Liverpool Football Clubs finances ahead of a busy transfer window. Both featured Richard Hughes, who is apparently both head of the Office of Budget Responsibility, as well as Liverpool’s Sporting Director. Perhaps Gary Lineker can give him his own podcast: the rest is…fiscal?

My first reaction to this John Burn Murdoch piece (Trump chaos is alienating Republicans) was to feel optimistic that Trump may be a lame duck sooner rather than later. Less optimistically, I wonder if their lack of concern for even their own popularity suggests an appetite for an even deeper slide into authoritarianism.

Finally, an excellent piece by Tom Calver on who pays tax by income decile. I would never have guessed how much less tax the average worker pays through income tax now than they did 30 years ago, or compared with other countries.