You might not think it – and George Osborne and most ministers don’t behave as if it’s true – but Whitehall invests heavily in long term scanning and futurology.
Cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood has an advisory group of permanent secretaries looking forward; the Cabinet Office convenes an oversight group; there’s a heads of horizon scanning group, with panels focused on demographic change and emerging technologies; and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills runs a foresight programme.
That’s not all. The civil contingencies unit in the Cabinet Office is a few doors down from the joint intelligence committee, which together with the government chief scientific adviser pulls things together, contributing to the national risk register for civil emergencies – a narrower version of the secret overall risk assessment for the UK.
It sounds like an impressive body of work, but to what effect?
Mainstream civil servants, reflecting their ministers and system pressures, are fixated on the present, or at best the next election. Much of the scanning work is specific to individual departments – an old, old story – and does not get matched with what other bits of Whitehall are doing, or related to the money available.
The Office for Budget Responsibility takes the long view, projecting tax and spend into the 2030s and beyond. Very provocative, but where’s the tie in to the horizon scanning being done by health, communities or defence, which has its own “independent” internal thinktank on the future, the Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre? And, always forgotten, who’s thinking deeply about the future of local government? (If, of course, it has one. The Local Government Association has just put out a booklet on careers for young people which may be a triumph of hope over expectation.)
Bernard Jenkin has made Whitehall’s lack of strategic thinking a theme of his tenure as chair of the Commons’ public administration select committee so it wasn’t surprising that his session on 9 December with some of Whitehall’s leading horizon scanners was pretty tetchy. Jenkin’s colleagues on the committee wanted to know why Whitehall didn’t scan the future and predict the Ebola epidemic, or the rise of Isis, while Jenkin himself focused on the age-old question: why don’t civil servants and ministers a) lift their heads occasionally from the here and now and b) talk to one another.
All the Cabinet Office apparatus supposed to join departments and agencies together plus such ostensibly overarching schemes as the Government Office for Science fall apart when, as usual, permanent secretaries and ministers are consumed by the immediate policy agenda, political exigency or events.
And present in body but missing in mind on every Whitehall committee is the Treasury, which simply cannot or will not relate its spending control and medium run plans to others’ attempts to peer dimly through the darkness to what might be in ten or 20 years’ time.
But that may be no accident. Perhaps the Treasury doesn’t like what it thinks the future will bring. Infectious disease, terrorism, climate change, artificial intelligence, ageing, upskilling and productivity, fracking and energy supply, obesity and public health. The horizon is filled with problems that, in one way or another, are likely to demand more not less government activity, whether it’s councils, Whitehall or (flooding) arm’s length bodies.
At the Institute for Government the other day, talking about open data, Francis Maude – a passionate believer along with other Tory ministers in shrinking the state – came up with an example of the benefits of making data more widely available and cited real time information from the Environment Agency about river levels.
But allowing people to become more knowledgeable about flood risk doesn’t sound to me like a recipe for smaller government; aren’t people going to want more assurance, more flood barriers, more drainage schemes – like the expensive and ultimately useless river straightening exercise in Somerset following last winter’s inundations?
Horizon scanning in other words may have an indissoluble relationship with the public sector, with government big as well as clever to cope. That’s a politically charged message and may help to explain why forecasting and foresight are not exactly a central Whitehall activity.
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