Survey reminds us that successful reform takes time

Privatisation, devolution, the minimum wage, the Northern Ireland peace process – these head a list which also includes trade union reform, council house sales and Bank of England independence, in a poll of 150 politics academics published by the Institute for Government yesterday. Analysing the successes, four key ingredients stand out. In each case, there was:

• an idea whose time had come
• turned into viable policy by careful preparation
• determined political leadership
• and, crucially, serious learning from previous mistakes and experience.

Learning and preparation Take privatisation. Margaret Thatcher’s first big privatisation, BT, did not come until late 1984, more than five years after she took office. However, it is not the case – as is often claimed – that she only dared venture into this territory in her second term. Small and medium scale privatisations started in the first term, including British Aerospace and Cable and Wireless, which prepared the way for the huge BT and British Gas sales to follow. The Post Office was also split up in the first term and its monopoly on telecommunications broken – crucial reforms making possible the BT sale.

With devolution to Scotland and Wales, success after 1997 followed a process of successful learning from abject failure in the 1970s. The 1970s devolution legislation was hedged with restrictions on the devolved assemblies, reflecting a half-hearted commitment to the principle of change. When referenda were then held in Scotland and Wales in 1978, they aroused little enthusiasm and became votes of no confidence in the unpopular Callaghan government. Learning from this, a constitutional convention was held in Scotland by the pro-devolution forces in the early 1990s, preparing the way for a bold and principled devolution settlement. Successful referenda in Scotland and Wales were held immediately after the 1997 election, neutering parliamentary opposition to the detailed legislation.

Successful trade union reform in the 1980s similarly followed an intense learning experience from the failure of the Heath government’s Industrial Relations Act a decade before. Jim Prior adopted an incremental strategy tackling abuses of union power – picketing, the closed shop, undemocratic decision-making – one by one, within the existing judicial system, learning from Heath’s failed "big bang" reform overseen by a special court. Thatcher was irritated by the incrementalism, but it achieved her ends.

Leadership and consensus

However, the best learning and preparation is no substitute for strong political leadership. Virtually every successful reform on the list was, when proposed, deeply controversial and opposed by the party out of power (and many within the governing party.) In every case, success bred a new consensus. Sometimes this consensus was disguised as continuing conflict – as in European policy, where the Major government’s successful (although painful) policy of keeping firmly within the EU but out of the Euro was sustained by both Blair and Brown, much to our benefit as the Euro lurches from crisis to crisis. Only in policy on Northern Ireland was consensus explicit and acknowledged from the start. Strong political leadership is easier to provide, and tends to have more impact, in the very first months of a government. Of the top 12 successful policies identified by the political scientists, nine were launched, or at least instigated, within months if not days of the government taking office. As I found with both the school academies programme and high-speed rail – the two biggest reforms I pioneered as a minister – it is a bigger challenge to generate momentum for change when the government is old and jaded.

Lessons for today's politicians

I see three lessons for today’s politicians.

First, for the coalition, you cannot start big reform too soon, where it is needed. But starting immediately does not necessarily mean a single “big bang” change, with all the risks which come from throwing the entire system in the air with no capacity for incremental learning. Radically expanding the provision of academies in education, and choice and contestability in health, builds on the success of Blair / Brown public service reforms. But entire reorganisations of the funding and administrative systems of the NHS and schools are far more problematic. Similarly, the principle of a single “universal credit” benefit is attractive, but it needs really careful consideration to see whether it can be attained incrementally, learning step by step.

Second, leadership is all. In the constitutional sphere, the single biggest reform on the coalition’s agenda – arguably more important than the modest change to the electoral system constituted by the Alternative Vote – is the proposal for elected mayors in the twelve largest cities outside London. This is a bold and necessary reform to empower England’s major cities, and promote economic and political regeneration outside the south-east. It is also sensibly incremental, building on the success of the Mayor of London and devolution in Scotland and Wales. But who is the ministerial champion for it? Without one, the forces of intense conservatism in local government will kill the mayoral reform dead.

The third lesson is for Labour. "The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies," said Lord Salisbury, the Tory prime minister who won three elections and held office for 13 years in effective coalition with Jo Chamberlain’s imperialist wing of the Liberal party. Examining the list of successful policies, from privatisation to council house sales under the Tories, the minimum wage to NHS investment under Labour, the opposition party only became electable when it grasped that these were ideas whose time had come, and stopped fighting yesterday’s battles. Labour needs to bury its carcasses as soon as possible.