Public Policy Media
Richard Vize
LATEST ARTICLES
Mandarins face select
committees trial
25 June 2019
Four decades after its creation, the modern select committee
system has become the most public test of civil service skill.
Live broadcasts of these inquisitions by MPs and peers can
build or wreck reputations and expose departments to
relentless political and media assault.
According to the House of Commons Liaison Committee of
select committee chairs, they are there “to require ministers
and civil servants to explain and justify their actions and
policies, to subject them to robust challenge, and to expose
government – both ministerial decision-making and
departmental administration – to the public gaze”.
This means scrutinising how they take decisions, spend public
money and run their operations, and what they achieve.
Since 1980 the approach of successive governments to the
relationship between civil servants and select committees has
been framed by the Osmotherly Rules, named after the civil
servant who wrote them.
Alice Lilly, senior researcher at the Institute for Government,
says the key principle behind the rules is that “ministers are
directly accountable to parliament, and governments over
time have taken that to mean that civil servants, when they
appear before committees, do so under the direction and
instruction of their ministers.”
Read the full article at Civil Service World
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Getting to the root causes of
inequality
19 June 2019
Media coverage of the relentless advice to eat less, eat better,
and do more gives the impression that the growing problem
of health inequalities could largely be solved simply by
badgering enough people into laying off fried chicken.
The excitement around the Henry programme (Health,
Exercise, Nutrition for the Really Young) in Leeds, which
claimed to have reduced childhood obesity by helping parents
give children choices while maintaining boundaries, shows
how seductive this narrative can be (and it should be noted
that there is a lively debate in the British Medical Journal
about exactly what the programme achieved).
Now the Centre for Progressive Policy (CPP) has published a
major study, Beyond the NHS - addressing the root causes of
poor health, which examines how everything from crime to
education lie at the heart of our serious and growing health
inequalities. Launched at the House of Commons with public
health expert Sir Michael Marmot a decade after his landmark
review, its analysis indicates that the current population of
England will lose around 80 million life years through socio-
economic inequality, which will also take another 170 million
years of healthy life.
Read the full article at Guardian Society
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Connecting the NHS and social
policy
29 May 2019
The NHS England chief executive, Simon Stevens, has been
remarkably successful in prising more money for the health
service out of the government, but short-term ministerial
thinking about the service and its resources has resulted in an
unedifying, dysfunctional scramble for cash in austerity
Britain. Finally, though, ideas are emerging that could change
all that.
Trying to meet rising expectations without the money to do it
has driven the NHS to run every part of the system hot. As
fissures open up in budgets and services, the army of
healthcare special interest groups such as the BMA trade
union, NHS Confederation and the medical royal colleges –
which collectively far outgun the rest of the public sector for
political influence – portray every difficulty as a lethal crisis.
When Treasury resistance is finally overcome, unrealistic
promises have to be made to provide political cover for the
capitulation. Then the dance begins again as the NHS pursues
another set of unrealistic goals with too little money and too
few staff.
Crucially, this political battle is largely disconnected from any
debate around wider social policy goals, save for the fact that
everyone is scrapping over taxpayers’ money.
Read the full article at Guardian Society
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We don’t need identikit, soulless
boxes
13 May 2019
A glance through the window of virtually any long-distance
train reveals how much countryside is being gobbled up by
identikit, soulless, mediocre housing designed around cars.
Earlier this month, the housing minister, Kit Malthouse,
predicted that many of the boxes being thrown up on the
outskirts of towns would soon be “ripped down and
bulldozed” as unsuitable.
The evidence for his claim is simple. As Malthouse observed,
housing is the one thing that virtually everyone likes to buy
secondhand – and that means the issue of housing quality is
now critical, particularly given the government’s aim to get
300,000 new homes built every year by the mid-2020s. But
despite new planning guidance, billions being poured into
financial support for housebuilding and land supply and
growing political and public pressure over the shameful
growth in homelessness, this government is no nearer to
working out how to build enough good quality, affordable
homes that will adapt to people’s changing needs.
Ipsos Mori research for the Royal Institute of British Architects
found that people prefer Victorian and Georgian homes that
feel more spacious, light and flexible, while Riba’s Future
Homes Commission pointed out how poky many British
homes are by European standards.
Read the full article at Guardian Society
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Austerity’s pitiless, remorseless
logic
26 April 2019
New analysis of council spending in England has exposed a
cruel twist in the homelessness scandal: single homeless
people are paying the price for the growing number of
families in desperate need of shelter.
The true scale of homelessness is obscured thanks to the
official figures being inherently unreliable. But as an
investigation by WPI Economics for the charities St Mungo’s
and Homeless Link makes clear, even by the government’s
own reckoning, more than 4,500 people were sleeping rough
in England last year while more than 80,000 households were
in temporary accommodation.
According to 2017 figures from the charity Crisis, the number
of households in England, Scotland and Wales defined as
suffering “core” homelessness – which includes all forms of
temporary shelter such as rough sleeping, sofa surfing,
squatting and hostels as well as temporary housing – is likely
to be about 160,000. It rose by 33% between 2011 and 2016.
In 2017, almost 600 people died sleeping rough in England
and Wales, aged, on average, just 47.
Read the full article at Guardian Society
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Onagawa rises from tsunami
wreckage
17 April 2019
On the shore of eastern Japan a wrecked police station lies on
its side, ripped from the ground by the tsunami that
devastated the country in 2011.
“We are going to keep that building as a reminder of the
disaster,” says Yoshinori Taura, assistant director of the town
of Onagawa’s recovery promotion division. “To make sure the
memories are passed to the next generation.”
This is about more than sentiment. Onagawa was obliterated
by the tsunami; as it builds a new future, the ruined police
station will be a daily reminder to run to high ground
whenever the tsunami siren sounds.
But the reconstruction is about more than keeping the town
safe from natural disasters. The municipality is also trying to
find a way to build a thriving, bustling community despite
massive population decline. The tsunami only accelerated
Onagawa’s precipitous shrinking, which is now the fastest of
any of the country’s municipalities: between 1965 and 2011,
the population halved, to 10,000. It has now dropped to
around 6,500.
How could the town not merely rebuild after the worst
disaster in Japan since the atomic bombings, but somehow
also stay active and bustling?
Read the full article at the Guardian
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