“We must do something now!” the cry of many a politician.
There’s a famous scene in The Thick of It
where the Minister is on their way to a press conference and due to
unfolding events they have to announce a policy to “do something”. The Minister’s
car drives round a roundabout repeatedly while the Minister and her advisors come
up with something suitable. Has this approach to policy-making cursed the
Scottish Government?
Back in the day, the old Scottish Executives between
1999-2007 were criticised by the opposition and external critics for having a
severe case of initiativitis. Because of the limited powers of the devolution
settlement, a fairly easy way for the Executive to be seen to be doing
something was to ring-fence a small pot of money and send it the way of the
problem or group demanding attention. We can interpret this using bog-standard,
Dahl-esque, pluralism – various interests would coalesce around Ministers and the
resources would be dished-out accordingly.
The way the Scottish Executive’s budget grew during the
period helped this along. Because UK departments that had been devolved were
getting the lions-share*of the increases in public expenditure between 1999 and
2008, the devolved budgets grew at a faster rate than the equivalent entire
budget of the UK Government. This meant, once extra allocations to health and
education to match Westminster had been dished out, the extra could be spent on
the pet initiatives. My own area of doctoral research – the Community
Regeneration Fund (CRF) (and its precursor the Better Neighbourhood Services
Fund) – were classic examples of this. Labour MSPs felt pressure from
constituents living in deprived neighbourhoods to “do
something” about the problems in the neighbourhoods, so set aside an
impressive-sounding £354 million to be spent over three years. Alas, that was
actually just a third of one per cent of the Scottish Executive’s annual budget
of over £30 billion, so it didn’t amount to much at all.
As my colleague Paul
Cairney highlights, the reason for the SNP’s electoral success, especially in
2011, was they were seen as very
competent in government. One of the earliest policy decisions (that made my
doctoral research rather interesting as I was in the field as it happened) was
to roll-back many of the initiatives of the previous Scottish Executive (including
the CRF). Sectors of the public services were given un-ringfenced budgets in
return for meeting certain outcomes and also output targets (1,000 extra police
officers, class sizes, free schools meals etc.). This enabled the Scottish
Government to take credit for when things went well, and “devolve” blame when
things went wrong – a cunning example of the difficulties of accountability
in complex governance.
This strategy has generally worked very well. Until
recently, it seems. Scotland is suffering substantial reductions in public
expenditure like the rest of the UK. As in England, these are being made even
worse by the increases in expenditure on the health, leaving other services
increasingly stretched. Of course, demographic challenges mean health needs
more than the increases it is getting anyway. These problems need sorting. But
the Scottish Government no longer has the ever-increasing pot of money from
Westminster coming its way. So we see the return of initiatives, some big ones
like the Scottish
Attainment Challenge Fund (£750 million over five years; approx. 0.005 per
cent of the Scottish Government DEL over the period – based on £30 billion p.a.
DEL) and also small, odd ones that could
have been delivered by reconfiguring existing services: £4.2
million for a mental health intervention; £2
million on participatory budgeting (the oxymoron being here that PB should
negate the need for initiative funding); £200,000
to help get disabled people into politics – a laudable aim, but the right way
to achieve it?; £70,000
for a violence reduction project at Glasgow Royal Infirmary. And these are
mainly just the ones that have been announced since 1 July. This doesn’t
include all the agreements signed, and new strategies launched on rather small
matters.
What drew my attention to this issue, and why I write this
post, is today’s announcement of the First
Minister’s Reading Challenge. I was initially intrigued by the name – it seemed
very odd to name a policy in such a way. I joked on Twitter that we might now
expect “Theresa May’s Mathematics Fun Day”. Slightly more seriously, the
Literacy Hour in English schools, launched in 1997, was not known as Tony Blair’s
Literary Hour probably because, as a friend suggested, it “sounds like some
kind of dystopian nightmare”.
Education is currently a weak spot for the Scottish Government. Educational attainment across Scotland is slipping on most
international measures. The gap between attainment at schools in the most
deprived and least deprived neighbourhoods is growing in Scotland, yet it is
falling in England. Arguably this matters
in Scotland because of national pride – the reason Scotland is listed
separately in OECD education league tables is because of the different educational
system, but also because Scotland used to outperform England by some margin. So
Something Must Be Done.
And the Reading Challenge has all the hallmarks of
something. Pause now and have a look at the Scottish Book Trust’s web page for
it. It seems the challenge was announced back in March by the First Minister.
An advisory group was set up and has met twice in April and May this year
(minutes available on the website). The April minutes make for interesting reading for
two reasons – a minor reason was that the group seemed to want the initiative
to be seen to be independent of government (making the name choice even odder).
Secondly, the initiative seems to include a competition, even though the minutes
state that “The Group recommended that if possible these elements of the
Challenge be removed”.
The plot thickens, slightly, reading the BBC
news coverage. It states:
“The Scottish government said its list of 100 books had been
selected by a panel of academics, experts and teachers.
It includes Ms Sturgeon's favourite childhood book - Five On
A Treasure Island - from Enid Blyton's Famous Five series.”
Whereas the Scottish Book Trust website suggests that the
list is still
under development. This really does look like policy for the sake of doing
something, that has been implemented, even at a basic level, pretty poorly.
Now, you might say this doesn’t matter – we’re not talking
about wasting billions of pounds of budget like the much more shocking case of
the UK Government’s Troubled
Families project. But it is still a waste of resources, and policy
attention, towards something that will probably make no difference to the
appalling under-performance of children from the poorest households in Scotland’s
schools.
* apologies for the clichés, I don’t know what’s come over
me.
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