Transformative ideas for disrupted times

Magazine

Introduction by Marc Stears, Director of the UCL Policy Lab

We have all just lived through an extraordinary summer and now for many it looks like a profoundly challenging winter looms ahead.

Even before the country heard the news of the passing of the Queen, and witnessed the moving outpouring of grief and gratitude, we had witnessed powerful shocks to the system in the last few months.

A Prime Minister who won a landslide majority only months ago lost office at the hands of his own MPs.

Inflation, which for years appeared to have been tamed, soared once again, pressing more and more people to the edge of poverty, with the promise of vastly increased energy bills threatening many more. 

Temperatures soared too, with Britain seeing its first 40 degree days as the reality of a changing climate visited this country in a way that it has already arrived in so many others around the world.

What each of these shocks had in common was they all were the immediate consequence of some very long-term trends. 

The fall of Boris Johnson emerged from the decline of faith in politics and politicians that has been growing since at least the expenses scandal of 2009 and probably for years before that too. 

Inflation and rising energy bills are the consequence both of the pandemic and its attendant restrictions not to mention the geopolitical instability that has accompanied significant shifts in the global order since the end of the cold war.

And the summer’s heat and drought are most likely only the beginnings of our local exposure to the global climate emergency that is the product of how we heat our homes and fuel our economies across the world.

What should be clear to all of us now, is that both the short term impact and the long term causes of these phenomena matter, and matter enormously. It is vital, therefore, for us to turn our minds to both. The task of public policy is to mitigate the worst of the immediate effects and tackle the long-term drivers of change.

And as policymakers seek to do that, they will need as well, to learn from different kinds of experience and different kinds of expertise. Drawing together the knowledge of those on the frontline of the challenges we face with those who study the background story, the historic trends and the macro-analysis. 

That is the idea at the heart of the UCL Policy Lab and you can see it at work in all of the articles that follow in this magazine, from the arguments of UCL’s experts on inflation, immigration and education to the practical wisdom of those arguing about the economy on our television screens or making change happen day-to-day in organisations like Citizens Advice.

I hope you will enjoy reading their ideas, see the contributions they are making and come away even just a little more hopeful than before

Marc Stears, Director, UCL Policy Lab