Policy Disasters: Acts of god, or political projects?
Wonk Watch's read-of-the-month for May asks whether we really all agree on what good outcomes look like
Read of the Month aims to signpost the most interesting think-tank reports. The idea is to highlight output that tells us something about what is going on in the policy world, and to think about what the downstream effects might be.
What’s the report?
Neighbourhood Services Under Strain – from the Institute for Government (IFG).
What does it say?
This report explores the impact of spending cuts coupled with rising demand on local authority service provision.
It finds that cuts were deeper in more deprived areas and that service accessibility and quality have suffered across the board. Through a decade of austerity, the number of bus routes fell, and a third of all libraries closed. Councils are now stripped back to their statutory functions – with social care and children’s services making up three quarters of all local authority spending.
The report concludes by arguing that government needs to go about collecting better data on council services, so it can better track and respond to what’s going on at a local level.
What to make of it?
From a ‘what’s-happening-in-the British-policy-world’ perspective, the most interesting thing about this report is that even middle-ground, non-partisan think-tanks like the IFG feel absolutely no obligation to defend austerity anymore.
It is no longer controversial to say local government has been, in the reports words, “hollowed out” or to point out that “even though the government acknowledges that deprived areas have higher needs for” for public services, they are the areas that have experienced the deepest cuts.
These banal statements of fact may seem unremarkable, but it’s important to remember just how far the debate on public spending has come, and just how quickly. As recently as during the 2017 General Election, Conservatives and their supporters were saying that “there was no such thing as austerity”, and extreme position of that kind were successfully shifting the policy discourse rightward.
The fact that that isn’t happening today tells us that the Government are going to have a much harder time politically if they attempt to respond to our current economic crises through a similarly cost-cutting approach. This is to be welcomed.
The report does an excellent job of mapping the extent of the damage caused by austerity at the local level. It paints a stark picture of how councils, in many cases, have been transformed from organisations capable of creating bespoke offers for the specific situations of their residents - to shells of their former selves, reduced to scraping money together simply to deliver base-line, statutory services.
However, what is still lacking in reports of this kind is any kind of analysis of why this has happened. A problem is acknowledged, and austerity is identified as the cause. But what caused austerity? In the telling of the IFG, a very deliberate series of policy choices – taken over a period of years – is presented alternately as either a mistake, or as a kind of act of god. Indeed, in this report, austerity is treated in a near identical way to the other causal factor they explore – rising demand. In other words, a highly complex, exogenous force running through the policy landscape.
Of course though, the austerity of the 2010s was none of these things. It was a political project. And the people who enacted it do not regard it as a mistake. The Cameron/Osborn project was very clear. They did not attempt to hide it. They thought the state had got too large, that the people who had come to rely on it needed to be weaned off, and that any gaps created by retreating public services could be filled by a revitalised voluntary sector.
If we are serious about rebuking austerity then… we need to go beyond pointing out the bad outcomes that have occurred. It’s not good enough to say “this project intended to reduce state capacity has reduced state capacity”. That’s not a criticism, that’s a tautology.
We are going to have to do something that I worry the policy world is increasingly uncomfortable doing. We are going to have to engage in a battle of ideas. We are going to have to make a case for why reducing state capacity is a bad idea. And that case is going to have to be made, at least in part, on a theoretical, philosophical and moral level.
Being “evidence based” is not going to cut it here because we are not arguing about the evidence. We are arguing about what ‘good outcomes’ even means. The question of ‘good’ is not settled.
Policy revolutions are not going to be brought about through charts and analysis of ONS data. Sometimes, we need to step outside our comfort zones and get a bit political.
I just hope we all remember how.
*I’m going on holiday for the next few weeks, so there’ll be no more WW until mid June. Bye for now!