Securing public support for smart policy with Rachel Wolf

This article originally appeared in the UCL Policy Lab Magazine.

Understanding how ideas go from the abstract to the practical is a key feature of Rachel Wolf’s career, balancing the need for smart solutions with the very real constraints placed on policy by public opinion.

This balancing act is a difficult one, but it’s one Wolf and her co-founding partner, James Frayne, aimed to bind into Public First’s DNA.

“Both James and I had worked in government,” she says. “Him on the kind of comms opinion research side, and I did policy, and I think we both felt in different ways that we weren’t necessarily getting from the outside what we needed.”

Driven by a desire to do work that could be both effective and practical, they set up Public First to bridge the competing demands of governing by making use of the lessons they had learnt from their time in politics.

Wolf’s career has taken her from the Conservative Research Department in opposition under David Cameron to advising on education policy at Number 10 and, most recently, helping to write the 2019 Conservative manifesto.

All of these roles have meant balancing what worked with what was popular– and as a devote of good ideas and good policy, Wolf acknowledges that this didn’t always come easy. Still, she is clear about the need for policy to recognise the importance of understanding public opinion.

“I think there are a lot of people who think it is somehow ‘dirtying’ policy to reflect public opinion, but I think they need to recognise it’s reality,” she said. “You are in a democracy, and that’s one of the consequences of a democracy.”

Speaking to Wolf, you get the sense of someone who understands the often- cautious and other-worldly nature of policy research and academia. In many ways, researchers are her people, but, perhaps because of this, she knows the traps they can fall into.

Most of all, she recognises the risk that good ideas will go unused because of a lack of understanding of how the political world works. This is why she is so passionate about working with academia and helping to bring good ideas from theory to delivery.

“The barrier for university research is usually that the language and the care of expression required for a research paper is wholly impossible for most people in politics and policy to conceive,” she says.

Her most recent work on reform of the National Health Service was done in collaboration with Sam Freedman for the Institute For Government, once again working with academic partners, placing cutting-edge research knowledge alongside highly charged current debate and practical political insights.

“With the NHS report, we are trying to address a pressing and current problem,” she explains. “Namely, why, after even more funding for the NHS have outcomes continued to fall? And to answer that question, we needed a deep academic knowledge base informed by long-term studies alongside a more agile responsive understanding of current political challenges.

And that again takes us back to her essential balancing act.

“I’ve always had a good record of finding interesting people in universities willing to adapt how they work to respond to pressing questions. And I think it’s essential that researchers remain open to this dynamic way of working.”

The report, The NHS Productivity Puzzle, sets out a series of recommendations for tackling the problems in the NHS, including removing the bureaucratic blockages that might stop capital investment that could pay for additional beds and new systems to help bring down waiting lists.

Wolf also points to its recommendations to allow hospital management to operate more autonomously, a theme which chimes with many of the recent research ideas of UCL’s academics in public service reform.

“Working with academic colleagues, we could see from all of the management literature - including quite a lot of work on the health service - that generally, when you increase the number of managers, both clinician and non-clinician, you get better outcomes.”

But doing that means not just hiring, but also empowering managers.And yet this does not seem to be happening in the current NHS

Wolf points back to the last Labour government: “In my view, a return in some ways to something more like that Blairite system of autonomous hospitals with a very simple target framework could improve activity.”

Having been in party politics, Wolf does not shy away from borrowing and building on other parties’ ideas. Instead, she thinks it is central to how you secure change in the long term. “There’s a difference between cross-party consensus in the sense of bringing together people from different parties and coming up with a solution that everyone implements. That’s implausible,” she says. “But I think there are quite a few cases of public policy where parties have built upon each other.”

This understanding of the machinery of change is key to Wolf’s works and provides a lesson in how we can all make change. Fundamentally, she recognises the need to be truly open to hearing from a range of voices and skill sets.

It is why her advice to researchers and academics - that they must remain open to responding in ways which do not come naturally - rings true. Wolf’s work and impact is testament to this very idea.