The Do's and Don'ts of conducting a policy review
4 min read
Imagine you are a paid-up member of the great and the good – a business leader, a former minister, a distinguished academic. You get a call (or a WhatsApp).
It’s a minister’s special adviser telling you that you are just the person to lead a review into how to solve a particularly difficult policy problem that has eluded their predecessors, the Civil Service is sucking its teeth, and the think tank ecosystem has little to offer.
Do you say yes? You are unlikely to get paid for your time – but it is a chance to give back and put your expertise and experience to good use. You can look at past examples where policy reviews have broken new policy ground. You might look to Jonathan Adair Turner’s review of pensions, which transformed the nation’s saving habits through the introduction of automatic enrolment, and is now regarded inside government as the gold standard of rational policymaking. Nick Stern’s study of the economics of climate change influenced policymakers on how to think about the costs of mitigation at home and abroad. Josh MacAlister – now a Labour MP – did a review for the Conservative government on children’s social care, which is now being taken up by Bridget Phillipson.
But you might also note that Andrew Dilnot has been banging the drum for his proposed cap on private fees for adult social care for over a decade, while other reviews simply sit on the discard pile. You might look somewhere for advice on whether to accept what is presented as an unmissable opportunity to shape public policy. But you will be hard pressed to find it.
A new report from the Institute for Government (IfG), Reviewing Reviews, fills some of that gap on how to approach independent policy reviews.
There are many reasons governments commission reviews. In the best cases they are because ministers genuinely want to engage outsiders who have the expertise and insight to spend the time needed to get to grips with a problem that a minister needs resolved, but just has no bandwidth to focus on. In other cases, they are used as a tactic to lay the ground or build consensus in advance of changes the government knows it wants to make anyway – the big name is there simply to add a layer of credibility. Within government, Gordon Brown as chancellor was well-known for resorting to this technique. David Gauke’s sentencing review will no doubt contain useful findings in the summer – but it’s no accident that a Labour government attempting to land potentially difficult reforms has chosen a former Conservative justice minister to lead it.
Other times they are simply a way of filling a policy vacuum – or kicking an inconvenient problem down the road. Howard Davies’ Airports Commission was asked not to report until after the 2015 election; Baroness Casey has been given a long timetable to come up with likely expensive recommendations on how to fix adult social care. So, as a starting point, any reviewer needs to be clear eyed on the motivation behind the commission. But base motives need not scupper a review: the Pensions Commission was established to resolve a policy disagreement between Tony Blair and Brown, but redefined the UK’s approach to workplace pensions (and broke the taboo on raising the state pension age).
Reviewers – however independent – need to be savvy Whitehall players too. Departments wanting to frustrate reviews may offer staff without the right skills or with insufficient seniority to support the review – and reviewers should fight to get good people. They need strategies both to manage the many external stakeholders, but also to ensure that their recommendations land internally. Ed Balls, who commissioned many of the Treasury reviews, suggests that reviewers demand the right to check progress six to 12 months after the report.
There is more advice for reviewers and commissioners in the IfG report.
Keir Starmer now seems to be regretting his government’s initial enthusiasm for making policy by review. But independent policy reviews, run and managed well, can help ministers make better policy – and government should invest more in understanding how and when to use them.
Jill Rutter is a senior fellow at the Institute for Government
