Politicians should recognise the value of policy stability

At our Government 2023 conference this week, numerous speakers stressed the importance of finding solutions to the acute problems facing the UK. But politicians coming up with exciting new ideas ahead of the next election should also recognise the value of policy stability.

With the starting gun on the next general election fired by speeches from Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer at the start of January, all political parties are now working hard to develop the policies that will populate their forthcoming manifestos. The IfG has argued for Labour and the Conservatives to provide more detail of their key policy proposals.

Each party will be keen to differentiate their policy ideas – from each other’s as well as from what has gone before – placing a premium on novelty. As Penny Mordaunt MP put it in her keynote at our conference, “Competitive story telling goes into overdrive” in the run up to an election. Articulating alternative political narratives is a key part of our democracy – also speaking on Tuesday, Chloe Smith MP highlighted the value for politicians of using the pre-election period to expose their future plans to public scrutiny. But politicians should also recognise the value of policy stability in achieving the outcomes that citizens actually want to see. Sometimes identifying what you want to stay the same is at least as important as what you want to change.

2022 demonstrated the disastrous impact of political instability

It doesn’t take an election to generate policy instability. In recent years, a continuous cycle of crises – from the pandemic to Afghanistan to the predicament of the NHS – have driven reactive and short-term policy making. In opening the conference on Tuesday, I argued that 2022 - with its rapid succession of prime ministers and ministerial merry-go-round – had provided the least propitious circumstances possible for effective government, distracting ministers and limiting the civil service’s ability to progress policies as priorities lurched from one way and another.

Munira Mirza, former head of the No.10 policy unit, told the conference that in her view, the ‘political elite’ needed to take responsibility for setting priorities and determining where to invest government’s finite resources: “In my experience the civil service will execute and will deliver when there’s a clear set of priorities.”

Policy instability inhibits investment and growth

Absence of political direction, or frequent reversals caused by changes of political leadership, do not just create problems for government. Chris Skidmore’s report this week emphasised how green industries had been inhibited by changes of direction – for example, over onshore wind – and the failure of politicians to make the key decisions necessary to facilitate progress towards net zero – for example, on the shift to hydrogen. If big decisions requiring political courage are now delayed until after the next election, that will have a material impact on private investment in the technologies and implementation needed for government to achieve its net zero goal.

Much of the disquiet about the government’s Retained EU Law Bill is prompted by similar concerns. While supporters of Brexit emphasise the benefits to business of regulatory divergence from the EU, many industries have expressed alarm about the uncertainty for industry created by the government’s plan to ditch any EU-derived secondary legislation not actively preserved by ministers by the end of 2023. And the task itself also has enormous consequences for the wider work of government. As my colleague Jill Rutter wrote this week in the FT, “An obstructive permanent secretary would be hard pressed to find a better way to ensure that an entire ministerial policy agenda was put in the deep freeze for a year as the process gobbles up time and resources.” ⁴ Rutter J, Even Eurosceptics should be sceptical about the retained EU law bill, Financial Times, 18 January 2023, www.ft.com/content/53894a09-396c-4d25-afa0-4361d6107989

There is shared political analysis of regional inequality

One notable area of policy consensus at present seems to be regional inequality. Prescriptions of how to solve the problem may differ – indeed Lisa Nandy announced at our conference that a future Labour government would not retain the ’12 missions’ set out in the Conservative white paper on levelling up and said that Labour would track success differently – measuring a wider range of indicators like resilience, connectivity and sustainability. And it is clear from our own analysis that initiatives like the Levelling Up Fund do not go nearly far enough.

However, Nandy was also clear that tackling regional inequality requires political leaders to work broadly and cooperatively, from building partnerships with local leaders from different parties, to engaging with her opposite number Michael Gove on the challenges he has faced holding the Levelling Up brief. The panel discussion that followed also revealed a significant degree of cross-party consensus about the problems to be solved. This could create an opportunity for some policy and institutional stability, much needed in an area which has historically suffered from constant change and churn.

In a democracy, politicians competing to form the next government must identify their priorities and will wish to propose new ideas for tackling well-established problems. It is unrealistic and undesirable to suggest that the aim of politics should be to reach cross-party consensus on all issues. But nor is it desirable for politicians to needlessly shift course where parties substantially share an analysis of the problem facing the UK and the outcomes that would be desirable. Building on the progress made under a previous administration should be seen as a mark of success rather than a failure of political imagination.