Lives less ordinary: why government should embrace human complexity

Paul is a founding member of the Ordinary Hope project group.

Paul is the Group Chief Executive of Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) and Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust (JRHT). He worked as a Director General in a number of UK Government Departments including the Department for Education, Cabinet Office, Defra and the Department of Health and Social Care.  He also served as a Deputy Chief Executive in New Zealand’s Ministry for Children.

Ask a policy professional in Whitehall why they joined the civil service and the reply you are most likely to hear is: “to make a difference”.  It is a hopelessly vague answer really, but it undoubtedly speaks to a deep feeling held by so many people in central Government: a sense of wanting to make a positive contribution to society; the chance to work on something of real impact and importance.

It was for this same reason that I joined the civil service 25 years ago this autumn. (Well, that and the rejection letters I received from everyone else).  I was lucky in my time in the civil service. I worked on some important policy issues and served energetic and thoughtful Ministers from all parties.  I was fortunate to rise up the policy profession, spending nearly a decade at HM Treasury, a similar time working on social policy, and enjoyed fascinating periods in local government and the civil service in New Zealand.

Three years ago I left the service. There were many reasons for that - some personal, some professional. But perhaps my most important motivation for leaving was the same one that had brought me into the service in the first place: I wanted “to make a difference”.

Many years working in Whitehall had left me sceptical that it was the right place to have an impact on the issues I cared about most.  I felt increasingly distant from, and unable to change, the social conditions affecting people’s lives.  And any honest reflection on the state of the country, and the failure of economic and social policy to address so many long-term and chronic challenges, left me feeling complicit in a broader policymaking malaise.

Like many civil servants interested in social policy I spent a lot of my time in Whitehall focused on public services, and the pursuit of something we called ‘public service reform’.  Many policy professionals interested in social policy gravitate to the Departments overseeing big public services – health and social care, education, criminal justice – and I was no different.

Governments are obsessed with public service reform and it is where most political leadership can be found on social policy.  There is good reason for this.  Our public services are foundational to our social contract.  They are life-changing and life-saving and we spend many billions of pounds on them every year. Ensuring they are constantly improving is a critical role for any Government. Politicians, connecting with ordinary people in their constituency, will hear story after story of people’s experiences engaging – or trying to engage – with these services.

Working on public service reform can be deeply rewarding.  Even marginal improvements in services can lead to a meaningful social effect.  But, over time, I had an increasingly nagging worry about the dominance of the focus on public service reform.  Even if done well – successfully enabling frontline public service workers to do their best work and achieve more – there felt to me something narrowing about the work.  Partly that was about the limitations of its impact; and partly about the peculiar view it took about ordinary people’s lives.  

The limitations of public service reform

Public services were, of course, only meant to be one part of the Beveridge settlement put in place after the Second World War: but over time Whitehall has developed a growing tendency to see public services and the welfare state as one and the same.  “The welfare state has been reshaped as a service industry”, writes Hilary Cottam in Radical Help, a book which more than any other helped crystallise my anxieties as I sat at my Whitehall desk.   

We should always remember that, in many cases, the success of the welfare state does not constitute public services delivering more, but in them being needed less.  If 80% of health outcomes are determined by factors outside of health services, we need to focus much more on the social determinants of health. Similarly we cannot reasonably expect teachers to close educational attainment gaps if the homes in which children are growing up are so wildly different – with growing numbers living in damp, cold housing and coming to school with empty stomachs.  

With growing economic insecurity and rapidly rising destitution and hardship, too often it felt to me that we were pursuing marginal improvements in public service productivity in the face of ever growing failure demand caused by policy inadequacies elsewhere.  Services could never reasonably keep up; and it seemed increasingly unfair to expect public service workers to do so.  It seemed to me that, at some point, we would need to stop kidding ourselves we could just ‘public service reform’ our way to better lives: instead we would need to focus much more on the structural economic and social conditions in which people actually live. 

And there was a second problem which nagged away at me.  A dominating focus on ‘public service reform’ doesn’t just risk drawing attention away from the economic fundamentals which shape people’s social conditions, it also nurtures a rather distorting way of thinking about people’s social experience: narrowing in ways which became so ingrained in the Whitehall approach that we rarely stopped to question them.  

Civil servants working on public service reform invariably focus on people as isolated individual service users. They tend to take a deficit lens: assessing the ‘needs’ of those individuals, against ‘thresholds’.  They often then develop an episodic response: a set of time-limited ‘evidence-based interventions’ – based on ‘what works’ to fix the problem.  And generally we see the role of services as ‘delivering’ these interventions to the service users.  This is welfare policy as “assess me, refer me, manage me”, in Hilary Cottam’s phrase.

That is a bit of an unfair caricature, of course, and isn’t true of all services (education tends to be different in some important regards).  Nor is it all bad: after all, public services really do achieve extraordinary things through this model, responding to meet people’s needs.   But too many years working in this way and the policymaker risks being left with an impoverished view of the citizen and the rich complexity of ordinary lives.  It is the social policymaker’s equivalent of the homo economicus view of the citizen which too often dominates economic policymaking.

In reality of course, people live in complex networks of social connections – centred around families and communities.  Both as individuals and through those collectives they have a range of strengths, assets and capabilities.  The challenges they face are often chronic, not one-off, requiring ongoing and relational forms of support and connection, not episodic interventions.  And people very often want to be part of resolving these challenges for themselves, focused not just on fixing problems but on thriving and meeting their aspirations.

Every so often in Whitehall policy conversations someone would begin to talk about these concepts.  They might mention the importance of social connectedness or relationships.  They might possibly mention the importance of something called family (though in the Department for Education I found people were more comfortable referring to the ‘home learning environment’ – an input into educational attainment).  I even once heard someone mention a concept called ‘love’, though I never heard him do it twice, and I didn’t hear of it again in policymaking until I went to New Zealand where it is written into statute.

I knew these concepts mattered.  So many of the public services we were working on were clearly trying to patch up tears in the social fabric.  We were building services where relationships should be.  We might struggle to define ‘social connectedness’ with precision, but we knew it mattered profoundly.  Nobody working seriously on children’s social care policy could be blind to the deeper need to nurture loving, stable relationships in secure family environments as the true bedrock of children’s wellbeing, rather than relying on a set of over-stretched public services.

And they were concepts that mattered for ordinary people.  Despite national caricatures, most Britons don’t struggle to talk about family and relationships, loneliness and connectedness.  They are meaningful, visceral, facts of life.  They are what make people’s lives purposeful – or unbearable – and provide the platform for their sense of identity, security and aspiration.

But they are concepts that tend to stand in the wings, rather than centre stage, in Whitehall policy debates.  Like others in the civil service, I saw them as nebulous, ungraspable, unmeasurable.  I tended to disengage when they were raised.  Instead, I wanted to get stuff done.  And it was much easier to retreat to my familiar public service reforms – writing guidance, tweaking thresholds, funding innovations, building the evidence-base on ‘what works’, regulating for better standards: inputs and outputs I could measure.

And so, over time, I had a growing sense that the work of ‘public service reform’ – for all its importance – was crowding out a fuller approach to social policy that needed to be both more structural (focused on underlying economic and social conditions people live in) and more relational (focused on the networks that give people’s lives meaning and resilience).

A broader approach to social policy

Of these two challenges, the first – focusing on the underlying economic and social conditions of people’s lives – is the easier to respond to in terms of traditional central Government policy know-how.  Doing so is often not so much a technological policy challenge – being unsure how to make a difference – as a matter of politics or the absence of policy consensus.  Many of the means of improving the economic security of families in Britain already lie in the hands of central Government policymakers, with powers to improve security of income and wealth, housing and work.  Indeed central Government has more and better tools and technology available today than ever before to affect the lives of millions of families for good.

Witness, for example, the speed with which furlough schemes and poverty-reducing measures were put in place during the early stages of the pandemic: using the extraordinary power of the central state, equipped with modern technology, to improve the social conditions of millions of people almost overnight.

Whitehall civil servants love this kind of work, and they’re good at it.  This is, after all, the “making a difference” they joined the service for.  The work engenders a sense of energy and pride and creativity as they put the welfare systems they know so well to good and creative use.  

A mission-oriented Government with an ambition to improve economic security or reduce poverty and hardship wouldn’t struggle for policy levers to pull.  An approach to rebuilding our social security system, for example, so that every family could afford the essentials would be a piece of social policy work any Whitehall civil servant would relish – and constitute the best possible investment in the social conditions of millions of British families.   

Outside acute moments like the pandemic or a ‘cost of living crisis’, however, the state all too often retreats back to its learned helplessness: core elements of the policy machine are turned back onto ‘stand by’, and once again public services are asked to do just a little bit more to pick up the pieces – with a little extra ‘reform’.

However, if the structural element of social policy is largely a matter of political will, the relational aspect is much more challenging for central Government policymakers.  How, from the distance of Whitehall, can a policymaker possibly hope to nurture relationships or foster social connectedness or strengthen families – those things which are often most important in life? 

Of course, part of the answer may lie in the same policy responses to the challenge of economic security.  After all, families and communities thrive in contexts of greater economic security, and perhaps there is no greater impact the Whitehall policymaker could have on family stability, relationships and connectedness than ensuring every household is able to live free from the fear of hardship.

But it is surely at least worth thinking about what it might mean to put these difficult but human concepts at the centre of policymaking.  

This is not what the civil service has been set up to do.  It was built to run or steward large industrial-scale welfare machines.  Concepts like social connectedness are left homeless in Whitehall, things best avoided.  There is no ‘Relationships Unit’ in Whitehall.  Ask which Government Department leads on ‘family policy’ or ‘social fabric’ – as some incoming Prime Ministers like to do – and watch the Departmental bunfight begin.  

Policymakers assemble 

The good news is that there are plenty of people and groups out there who are not waiting for a cavalry to arrive from SW1.  Instead they have decided they are the cavalry, cracking on with the hard and messy work of social and economic experimentation in local neighbourhoods: social and economic policymaking as an active process at a human scale.  

Invariably these pioneers have a much more instinctive feel for the very concepts which feel so alien to the central state: putting questions of social connection, relationships and community at the heart of their work.  At the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, for example, we are inspired by the work of a growing ecosystem of pathfinder organisations, many rooted in their local communities, prototyping routes to achieve deep, transformative change across multiple interlocking challenges.  A similar spirit – putting strengthened community relationships and connectedness at the heart of social policy – can be found amongst pioneering councils with new approaches to public services. It is evident too in the wider movement of those building more democratic forms of wealth ownership at a local level.  

It is easy to sit in SW1 and know very little about this sort of work: it is often happening a long way away, and it rarely fits into the specialism of any single Government Department.  It is just as easy to find out about it and then treat it with scepticism and even cynicism – seeing it either as quaintly naïve and small-scale, or dangerously radical and utopian.  The ability to arch a cynical eyebrow when confronted with genuine creativity was, in my experience, a common tool in the armoury of the upwardly mobile Whitehall policy professional, and not a healthy one.  

Of course, that runs in both directions.  Local pioneers shaping radical change can be just as disparaging of the civil service.  A little while ago a charity CEO, reflecting on the state of the country, said to me he had “given up on Whitehall”.  That is a hopeless approach – in a literal sense.  We may wish Whitehall to act differently sometimes, but there are some things which can only be enabled by the central state, and we must always remember that Whitehall is full of talented, dedicated (and overworked) people who tend to get more right than they get wrong, and are much better at delivering things than is often recognised.

In any case, the stakes are much too high for that kind of division.  Faced with ever growing challenges and a lengthening track record of policy failure, we need to be building bridges, not walls – bringing together a wider and more diverse pool of policymakers and pioneers, not forming smaller exclusive tribes with their own language or new pockets of groupthink.  

A more participative approach

But we also need to go further than joining up more traditional policymakers with pioneers.   Without a doubt we need many more centres of democratic discourse and policymaking.  Perhaps one of the biggest but most exciting challenges in the years ahead will be to turn the political consensus for devolution into genuine change – moving beyond the often rather anaemic ‘deals’ to meaningful economic and fiscal devolution, creating more spaces for policymaking at regional and local levels.  Some will continue to worry that radical devolution is too risky, but I think they are under-pricing the risk of carrying on as we are.

And we need this to fuel a radical widening of our concept of the community of policymakers.  “In contemporary politics, ideas and policy programmes take shape in loose assemblages of sympathetic think-tanks, journalists, public intellectuals, party activists and civil society organisations” wrote two seasoned Whitehall actors in a recent paper.  It is hard to disagree with this.  But it doesn’t fill me hope.  

It is not just the lack of diversity in that loose assemblage (of which I consider myself a part).  It is also that almost everyone in it is – to use Polly Mackenzie's typology – either a ‘technocrat’ or a ‘partisan’, or both.   And that means that, by definition, we are not ‘ordinary people’: most people simply do not think or identify in that way. Nor do we necessarily aspire to be ordinary: instead, we set ourselves up as policy heroes, seeking to identify the ‘correct’ answers – ideologically or technically – to complex questions to bestow on a grateful populous. This is, after all, how we try to “make a difference”.

But this heroic approach to policymaking could hardly be described as bearing fruit when it comes to the myriad chronic challenges we are facing today.  Which, as Polly compellingly sets out, is why we need a much more humble, post-heroic approach, centred on greater participative policymaking, finding new ways to put ordinary people in the driving seat.

Not only would such an approach present an opportunity to bring new insights or forge more lasting consensus on complex areas of policy where there might not be a ‘correct’ answer, but the very process of this work would itself be a source of restoring democratic trust and developing societal resilience and community capacity to resolve problems.  Critically too – it presents the chance to connect to those troublesome human concepts which in Whitehall I could never work out: “by involving people directly, we bring information into the policy process about the feelings, relationships and complexity that bureaucracies find it impossible to perceive”.

“Devolution; public participation; citizen empowerment; developing societal resilience and community capacity to resolve problems: these are the key ingredients of the policy revolution we need”, Polly concludes.  Maybe this sounds naïve, it certainly sounds hard to achieve, but surely it is a prize worth aiming for.  It gives me hope. 

Imagination and hope

And we need hope.  There is one thing that seems to unite many Government policymakers with ordinary citizens across Britain, when confronted with our biggest social and economic challenges – a sense of fatalism.  We are at risk of living in Robert Unger’s “dictatorship of no alternatives” where all creative ideas are dismissed as either too small to make a difference, or too radical to be achievable.  It is why the local pioneers working in small pockets to skewer fatalism and offer glimmers of hope can feel so distinct from the mainstream of policy.  

We are not going to rise to the social policy challenges we face today unless we infuse much more of our work with a new spirit of imagination and hope.  It seems much easier today to imagine dystopian futures than futures of human flourishing.  And those are not the creative conditions in which social policymakers do their best work.  If the dominant social policy question in my period in Whitehall was ‘What Works?’ perhaps the most important question for policymakers over the next period needs to be ‘What If?’  

This isn’t a plea for empty boosterism, or a lack of discipline in examining the evidence base.  Instead, it is to take seriously the importance of nurturing social imagination. As Geoff Mulgan sets out in Another World is Possible, social imagination is necessary to widen the range of possible futures open to us; it is the ground on which we fight against determinism and fatalism.

Collective imagination has to be worked at, with discipline, combining creativity with deep knowledge, supported by infrastructure and practices.  And one of those practices must surely be to open policymaking to many more extraordinary and ordinary people.  As Geoff notes, “a healthier, happier world depends on opening the space for social imagination to multiple voices and experiences”. There are organisations out there already nurturing this collective imagination.  We need policymaking to tap into it that spirit.

Pushing and prodding

In some respects we’ve been here before.  I have written elsewhere comparing the moment we are in today with the period 100 years ago, when we felt our way to a new social settlement.  Such periods – as old assumptions lose ground and new challenges are faced – are times of worry and fear.  We see that today.  But they can also be times of renewed energy and hope, opportunities to lead with a spirit of enquiry and openness – a humility about not knowing what the future holds, but a determination to shape it anew.

The architects of that previous settlement were varied and diverse – national and local, analysts and campaigners, pioneers and policymakers, extraordinary people and ordinary folk.  They puzzled their way forward, fuelled by imagination and a sense of belief in their ability to address the great social challenges they faced. As Geoff Mulgan reminds us: “it is only through working on the world, pushing, prodding and testing its plasticity, that we begin to discover which worlds are possible”.  

That is again the task before us today. I feel hopeful.  I believe the next 25 years of social policymaking in Britain are going to be much more adventurous, creative, and more human, than the last 25.  They need to be.  The scale of the challenge demands that of us.

Paul is a founding member of the Ordinary Hope project group. 

Paul is the Group Chief Executive of Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) and Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust (JRHT). He worked as a Director General in a number of UK Government Departments including the Department for Education, Cabinet Office, Defra and the Department of Health and Social Care.  He also served as a Deputy Chief Executive in New Zealand’s Ministry for Children.