CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 756-i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION SELECT COMMITTEE

 

 

GOVERNING THE FUTURE

 

 

Thursday 8 December 2005

SIR MICHAEL BICHARD KCB and DR GEOFF MULGAN

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1-69

 

 

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Public Administration Select Committee

on Thursday 8 December 2005

Members present

Dr Tony Wright, in the Chair

Paul Flynn

David Heyes

Kelvin Hopkins

Mr Ian Liddell-Grainger

Julie Morgan

Mr Gordon Prentice

Grant Shapps

Jenny Willott

________________

Witnesses: Sir Michael Bichard KCB, Rector, University of the Arts, London and Dr Geoff Mulgan, Director, Institute for Community Studies, gave evidence.

Q1 Chairman: Let me welcome our witnesses this morning. It is a great pleasure having you along. You have both given evidence to the Committee on at least one other previous occasion and I know that you are people on whom we draw regularly and shamelessly. We are particularly glad to have you along relating to one or two inquiries that the Committee is beginning to do at the moment. Sir Michael Bichard, Rector of the University of Arts London, former permanent secretary and much else besides. Geoff Mulgan, now Director of the Young Foundation having been at the centre of government for a long time before that, and before that think-tanking and also much else. We are very glad to have you both together. Would it be best if we simply ask you some questions, or would you like to say anything by way of introduction? We have a number of areas on the go and I apologise if we move between them but we should like to extract as much value from you as we possibly can in this morning's session. I want to start, if I may, on this memoirs business, which is one of the things which is occupying a strand of the Committee's activity at the moment. I should just like to know what you both think about all this. I see Geoff that you said recently on the radio "There is almost nothing more corrosive to the quality of decision-making than a climate or culture in which every participant is secretly writing their diary under the table". Obviously, we are grappling with the fact that now memoir writing seems to be a contemporary preoccupation of people who were recently in government: former special advisers, former civil servants even, as well as ministers. If that is your view, tell us why it is your view and tell us whether you think anything can be done about it.

Dr Mulgan: I made one rather brief comment on this, prompted by the fact that diary writing by ministers is now being joined by rapid diary writing by civil servants, diplomats, special advisers, press officers. To my mind it is quite hard to see how you can have good government, if people who are being paid by the public purse and in public service have their minds on the £200,000 advance from the Daily Mail or indeed how they would write up a meeting to make it look more colourful or to portray them in a better light. If, in any meeting dealing with delicate issues within government, some of the participants are known to be writing diaries, that is bound to change the nature of those meetings and make them less effective in terms of reaching well-informed decisions where people can feel safe in airing difficult thoughts which might not look so good in the cold light of print. As to what can be done about it, I am less clear. In many respects, we do want people to write memoirs and diaries in due course as part of the historical record, as part of the way governments learn. What is most corrosive is when that happens within a few months or years of them leaving office. I am not sure how much role the law has to play in this, but it is possible to re-think employment contracts to establish some norms. The individuals concerned also have a moral duty themselves to take responsibility for this issue as much as the law and maybe this Committee should suggest some norms in terms of a time period between people leaving office and them being able to profit from writing about specific events they observed in confidence in government. There has been a lot of focus on Alastair Campbell in this respect. I actually think that he is one of the lesser offenders, partly because he was very honest that he was keeping a diary and he committed to not publishing it while the Prime Minister was still in office, whereas others have rushed into print in ways which have not done them any favours. The final point perhaps to make is that most of these diaries are not very good.

Q2 Chairman: They are riveting! Do you think it would be appropriate for Alastair Campbell to publish a diary while Gordon Brown was still in office?

Dr Mulgan: I am not going to comment on any particular case and, compared with other ministers and diplomats and others, at least he has attempted to offer some principles which should guide diary writing, whereas I have not heard anything similar from a number of special advisers, diplomats, civil servants and others who have gone very quickly into print.

Sir Michael Bichard: The word Geoff uses is "corrosive" and I think it is very corrosive. The relationship between secretaries of state, ministers and civil servants is based upon trust and confidence, particularly when policy advice is being given. It is absolutely wrong for a former civil servant or an official at any time to be writing memoirs of this sort; it damages the relationship which others are trying to develop and sustain with their ministers. I should go further and say that it is unfortunate when at a later date former civil servants criticise ministers with whom they worked or the way in which they operated. You try to establish a bond of trust and confidence with ministers and you have to sustain that; it is very, very important.

Q3 Chairman: Do you have any sense of how contractually we might do it in a culture where people are coming forward with these huge advances and it has become very tempting to do it?

Sir Michael Bichard: Civil servants often told me, as a mere incomer of course, that values and standards were very important and that it was something I had to learn. So I rather expected my elders and betters to know better. I rather hoped it was something which was absolutely central to the standards and values of the Civil Service. Maybe we need to make it now more explicit than we have in the past and if that is the case, then we should. We should not forget either, that there is a process for vetting memoirs which somehow seems to have gone wrong in this case. Whilst I abhor the fact that this has happened, I am also somewhat shocked and surprised that it was allowed to happen.

Q4 Chairman: I am sure colleagues will come back to this area amongst others. May I move on as I want to ask one question in the three areas we want to deal with? The second one is to do with ministers and civil servants. Have we broadly got the relationship right between the political side of government and the Civil Service side of government? We have these endless arguments about whether the system is being too politicised or whatever. Have we got the relationship right? If not, what kind of alterations do we need to make to it?

Sir Michael Bichard: The arguments around politicisation are usually focused on special advisers. There were 82 at the last count, and how many civil servants are there? I think there were 5,000 at the centre at the last count. It does not seem to me that the British system of government and the Civil Service is likely or should be undermined by 82 special advisers. The onus is actually on the Civil Service in particular to work with those special advisers. They have a particular role to play and in that sense they play a very useful role and obviously one of the useful things that they can do sometimes is ensure the Civil Service does not have to get involved in some of the more political aspects of the work which, before we had special advisers, was a problem. It was quite difficult sometimes to define the borderline; now they can help in that respect. They also bring a completely different perspective to policy making, a different approach and a different experience and we should be seeing that as a strength and trying to integrate it. You asked me whether the Civil Service itself has been politicised. I do not really see evidence of that. It was something which was obviously being said pre-1997 under a different government and one of the things that impressed me as an incomer in 1997-98 was the way in which the Civil Service had remained apolitical and showed that it could be apolitical at the time of a change of government. I have not seen anything as an observer on the outside which suggests that they have lost that important facet.

Q5 Chairman: Governments want to bring people in who are sympathetic to what they are doing, can-do people who are not brought up in the Civil Service tradition. Apart from this particular special adviser point, do you think we are doing enough to enable this to happen by bringing outsiders in, by all the different devices that we are putting in place now to try to get more circulation inside the system? Do you think it is proper for ministers to want to bring in people in that kind of numbers?

Sir Michael Bichard: There is a difference between bringing people in who are sympathetic, as you put it, and bringing people in with a can-do mentality. It is short-sighted of government merely to bring people in who they think are sympathetic. They desperately do need people in who have a can-do mentality and who can deliver results and outcomes and those should be the criteria on which you are basing your selection process. There is a view, of course, that people like Vernon Bogdanor sometimes still articulate that unless you were brought up and bred in the Civil Service, you could not possibly understand the values of the Civil Service and that anyone coming in from outside brings with them baggage which could be an embarrassment to the service and to government. I do not agree with that at all. People who have worked in local government in very politicised environments and tried to maintain an apolitical approach to their work are rather well-equipped to work in central government too. Whenever I say there should be more people coming in from outside, I am told that there are lots more coming in and it is true, there are more people coming in from outside. I still do not think there is the interchange which would be healthy. It is still the exception rather than the rule. I have to say that, if you look at the number of permanent-secretary posts which have just been filled and you look at how many of those were advertised, you will find that it is a very small percentage. I am not saying that the people who have been successful are not very able people; I know many of them and they are very able people. However, at that kind of level of government you should be advertising all posts to ensure that it is transparent and that you can be absolutely certain you have appointed the very best people to those posts.

Dr Mulgan: I cannot see any very strong argument for more politicisation of the Civil Service and in the past some people have argued you need more than 80, whatever it is, special advisers and to go down the route America or the other countries have taken. I can see no advantage in that. Equally I cannot see much advantage in reducing that number. Where special advisers are doing their job well, they generally oil the wheels, getting things done, or helping departments understand ministers' priorities and so on. I agree with Michael: two changes are needed. One which is already underway is being more transparent about what the rules are, who they are accountable to, what the norms and principles are and at times there have been some serious slippages in that respect. Secondly, perhaps we do need new categories for people who are not partisan appointments, but are experts who bring different knowledge to bear and who can contribute to the development and implementation of particular policies and strategies. At the moment, government finds it quite hard slotting people into valid roles for that, because you have to choose between the special adviser category, the permanent civil servant category or some consultancy categories, none of which fits what is needed in many areas of policy. Scotland has obviously gone for a slightly different route in respect of expert advisers. We do need several more categories in the Civil Service here as well, partly in order to achieve what Michael talked about, which is a norm where more civil servants through the course of their career expect to spend significant periods working elsewhere in business or the voluntary sector or local government and then to come back, but, equally, many more people in those other walks of life expect to spend a few years of their time serving in national government. Despite all the talk about interchange and so on, the numbers are pretty small and when it comes to key jobs they are often not even advertised.

Q6 Chairman: Finally, to get us into the third area, the area we mainly asked you to come to talk about is the idea of strategic thinking and policy making within government. Perhaps I shall start with Geoff because this has been your trade for a long time, the business of the thinking strategically at the centre. We know why it is difficult to do this; we know about the political cycles, we know about the time horizons in which politicians operate. We have tried over the years in this country to set up special bits of machinery to do strategic thinking going right back to the central policy review staff in the 1970s, through the Strategy Unit and its different offshoots. What I want to know is whether we have got this system right yet. Is the Government well-equipped now to do strategic thinking? Can it do it all, should it do it all itself internally, should it be done at the strategic centre in government or is it properly done in departments? Do we need to contract some of this stuff out more than we do now? The question is: do we have the whole business of making strategy right, organisationally and in a policy sense, within government now?

Dr Mulgan: I do not think this is something where you ever get it right and then you have a system which is fixed. The reasons why in the past this has been so difficult include aspects of the external environment. In periods of political instability or economic instability, it is very hard for any government to be strategic and the years before this Government came in were ones where it was almost impossible for government to think far ahead because it had such a small majority and was fighting so many battles for survival. What has happened in the last eight years is some basic bits of machinery which make government more inherently long term. They include things like three-year spending cycles instead of one-year spending cycles. They include the reversal of the very damaging cuts in public capital investment, which were a very tangible expression of short-termism. They include the creation of strategic capacity, not just in the centre of government in the Cabinet Office and Number 10, but now every department has a strategy team and most of them have produced five-year strategies trying to set out long term what they are trying to achieve with money attached, legislative programmes, targets and so on. We have seen a big improvement in the methods being used to think about the future, ranging from scenarios and simulations and modelling and so on and some of that is reflected in a shift of spending and activity more towards prevention, rather than just cure, and the emphasis on issues like climate change, pensions even, which are inherently difficult and long term, and perhaps as well, the shift of culture on evaluation, evidence and so on. None of this is easy. It is bound to clash often with political priorities. It only works if the top politicians really want it to happen and to give it priority, and there are several areas where more could be done. Certainly Parliament has a bigger role to play and in other countries does play a bigger role in both scrutinising and in pushing government to think more responsibly about long term issues and a lot could be achieved there. The other thing is that the strategies which need to come out of government should not be set in stone; these should not say "This is exactly what we will do for the next five or ten years". Within every system, you also need some capacity to innovate, to adapt and change and one of my big disappointments with government here is that it is still the case that most of the big departments do not have a strategy for innovation. They may spend very large sums of money on scientific R&D, often funding individual companies which have inside tracks to government, but in terms of systematically ensuring the redevelopment of models in health or education or welfare, which may be key in ten or 15 years' time, that happens very, very ad hoc in an unprofessional way, without proper methods or funding or evaluation. That is one of the ways, one of the things, which I think needs to change alongside stronger strategic capability.

Sir Michael Bichard: I agree with nearly all of that and maybe, just to flesh out some of it, Parliament could have a more important role. In the scribbled note I sent to you, I suggested that maybe select committees could play a part in that or maybe, as is the case elsewhere, some kind of liaison committee which looked at the longer-term strategic issues for government of whatever colour. I should like to see Parliament playing a bigger role. There is certainly more room for the whole policy process as well as strategic thinking to be contracted out. We have some very innovative, excellent think-tanks in this country and I see no reason why they should not play a more formal part in the development of policy, long and medium term. You suggested there was an issue about the relationship between the work that is going on at the centre of government and departments. There will always be tensions between the centre of any organisation, particularly in government, and the departmental arms, but there is still work to do to achieve greater ownership across government within departments for strategic thinking and a better relationship between the centre and departments. In the old DfEE I set up one of the first strategy communication departments in government. I am not saying that in a self-serving sense, I was just surprised that it was one of the first really and that was in the late 1990s. There is some way to go and the history has been that people in departments felt they were having this strategy imposed upon them from the centre, from the CPRS and that cannot be healthy. I also said in the note that there is room for us to develop the relationship with the academic community a little more. There has been a problem on both sides there. Government still does not respect and value the academic research community sufficiently and the academic research community can be pretty precious about its independence, which it should be, but there is a meeting point and I am not sure we have got that absolutely right yet. In the whole time I was at the DfEE, we met with the academic researchers who were working in the education field maybe twice. I remember one meeting in particular, but it was not an ongoing dialogue. I am sure other departments were doing much better than we were and I keep being told that everything has been transformed since I left. I do think that there is still room for that relationship to be improved. I agree with what Geoff is saying, I agree absolutely and my note says that this is not easy, there is no magic wand here. If you are talking about strategic thinking in government, you are talking about a huge canvass and the way in which central policy thinking and changes can interact is sometimes very difficult to predict. This is pretty difficult stuff we are talking about here. We have had some good examples. The process surrounding the pensions, for example, has been quite a good example of strategic thinking and process, partly because it has involved a wide range of people and that is what we sometimes do lack. We have strategic thinking going on, but it is in a very introspective and self-contained way, whereas most of the strategic issues which now face any government are connected. Geoff wrote a book on connectivity and there is no strategic issue which is not the function of connectivity and yet, we in government still are very departmental, silo based and find it quite difficult to open up the debate to wider interests.

Q7 Chairman: Why did we have the pensions review conducted in the way that you described it, led by an outsider, not controlled by government? We have a review of nuclear energy controlled in a sense by government, chaired by a minister. Does it matter? We had a big review, in a sense akin to Turner, which was a Tomlinson review, again process very good, politically dumped. Why do some exercises in strategic thinking work seemingly, others do not politically? Can we tease any of that out?

Sir Michael Bichard: I am not going to break the rule I set for myself at the beginning by criticising former ministers for the way in which they have handled policy issues, so you will not draw me on the Tomlinson review in particular. I should not want there to be only one way in which you undertook strategic reviews of that sort. The way in which the Turner review was handled was really quite refreshing, because it enabled a wide range of people to be involved in that discussion and actually the public generally and the media to be involved in that debate over a period of time and that is what you need in issues which are that important. Whether or not the outcome has an impact in terms of action and policy change often depends upon the way in which the process is managed from within government. If you take a positive example, although not everyone in this Committee will regard it as a positive policy, take the Dearing review back in 1996, that was timed so that an incoming government, of whatever colour of course, would have an opportunity to take a decision on tuition fees. The only time I felt that you could have taken a positive decision on tuition fees would have been at the beginning of an administration, because it was clearly going to be hugely controversial. I am not commenting on the policy obviously, but that was important in managing that strategic review process. The decision that the Government took was that they did want to go for tuition fees and they did it; they would not have been able to do it two years before an election, or a year before an election. Even if the review is done outside, what the Civil Service, what the Government have to do is ensure that they manage the process in a way which gives the best opportunity for outcomes and conclusions to be implemented.

Q8 Chairman: Was the problem with Tomlinson not that it reported at the wrong time?

Sir Michael Bichard: I do not really want to comment on Tomlinson, except to say that it was extremely difficult to implement the kind of things that Mike Tomlinson had included in his report immediately before an election.

Q9 Paul Flynn: If we want to look at past governments who have achieved what we are hoping to do here, in a way to influence government to set up enduring institutions and make decisions that are good, not just for the next two or three years, but for the next 50 years or 100 years, we probably have to go back to the Labour Government of 1945-51, with the welfare state and the health service and so on, which have served generations well almost unchanged for a long time. The man who led that Government read the newspapers only to check the cricket scores. We now have prime ministers and Cabinets who seem to need a daily fix, a drip-feed of adulation from the press. Do you think government decisions of the last decades would have been better if prime ministers and Cabinet ministers had stopped taking the tabloids?

Sir Michael Bichard: I am a Manchester United fan, so I am not reading the papers this morning and I think there are good reasons for not reading the papers when actually you know what they are going to say and it is all negative. I must admit that when I was a permanent secretary, very often I did not read the papers for a period either. The serious answer to your question though is that there is a danger that short-termism and the pressures of politics and the media can make it more difficult to think strategically. I should have to say also though, and I do not blame everything on the media, that the media itself could play a part, and in some respects it does, in developing strategic discussions. Again, probably on pensions it has been done over a period of time. The politics of the issue became far too fascinating just before Adair published the report, but before that, in the responsible papers, we had seen a debate developing around pensions. The broadsheets in particular could play a greater part in prompting discussion about strategic issues and ensuring that that was responsibly done. If it were, that would make it easier for politicians.

Dr Mulgan: I should certainly agree that many of the best leaders from Attlee, Jefferson, going back, did not read the papers and that helped them be clear about what really mattered relative to the froth of day-to-day coverage. In some ways there is a bigger issue here: how do you create structures within government which are reasonably insulated from the very immediate pressures of the media and of politics, which often send misleading signals? It is a noise rather than information and in some ways that links to the previous discussion. What has been done with strategy teams and departments and the Strategy Unit was an attempt to construct a way of looking medium to long term at issues and not actually taking all that much notice of what happened to be in the comment columns week on week and then to provide options for ministers to decide on, which were therefore more likely to be robust against the future. The Strategy Unit processes took place within government and led to recommendations which were taken through Cabinet, so that they were published as conclusions of government, rather than recommendations to government. An alternative approach has been to use vehicles like the Wanless review, which was partly inside but partly about creating a climate of opinion, or, a more arms length process again on issues like pensions where it is incredibly important for there to be some fairly broad-based consensus amongst parties and also amongst the public for the policies to stick. In that latter respect, the media do have a big role to play and so potentially do some of the methods used in other countries to involve a much wider part of the public in thinking through future options, targets and so on. In places like Oregon in the States or Alberta in Canada and even countries like Singapore, they have been much more imaginative than any government in this country in involving large parts of the public in thinking about their future and in some ways exercising collective sovereignty. It is part of the democratic process, whether you can take these discussions beyond narrow circles of expert officials or politicians.

Q10 Paul Flynn: If we take up the example you have given of pensions, apart from the 1945 Government, the next great change in pensions was 1975 with Barbara Castle introducing SERPS with all-party support; there was a consensus there. Then in the 1980s, SERPS was half destroyed for all sorts of complicated reasons and then the element of private pensions was brought in utterly disastrously. We have not seen a government in that period since 1975 taking decisions which were really bold decisions; they were simply frightened of any major changes. We now have this Turner report and I greatly admire the report and what has come out of it. We have already seen attempts to trash it from all quarters, from the press, the vested interests in government and elsewhere. If we are looking forward to what my grandchildren are likely to get as their pensions, how do you think we, in a practical way as politicians, can influence it? What sort of institution do we need in Parliament? Do we need a Committee of the Future like they have in Finland or like a similar institution in Israel where a group of people outside the political fray, or who put themselves outside the political fray, adopt a perspective of people living in 25 to 50 years' time in order to get the right decisions, rather than having judgments distorted by the immediate interests of electoral comfort for us as working politicians?

Dr Mulgan: I tend to think it is a gap in the theory and practice of democracy that elected politicians serve current electors, are awarded to the extent that they do so and that there are no formal parts of governing machineries anywhere to represent future generations or indeed to represent the wider interests of the ecology on which life depends. Many past societies did create such roles for elders, and often senates were conceived as playing this role, as guardians of the future relative to the day-to-day pressures any elected politician is bound to face. In the British system, we lack that. The House of Lords is not really that; an elected House of Lords would certainly not be that, so the task is to try to design some different ways of creating bodies which are insulated from day to day pressures and precisely charged with taking responsibility for 30 to 50 years' time on issues like pensions, climate change but also many others.

Sir Michael Bichard: I was going to agree with all that except the issue about taking responsibility, which was the point I was going to make in response to your comment really. I agree absolutely that it would be really helpful to have that kind of forum. I talked about some kind of liaison committee or select committee earlier, whatever you call it. At the end of the day, the political decisions still have to be taken on some of these issues and you cannot guarantee that there is going to be the courage or that the right decision is going to be made. You can improve the chances that the long-term strategic issues are going to be addressed. Not just Parliament however; I think that at official level of government, there is more responsibility to be taken for this. I do not remember, as a permanent secretary, very often having a discussion with other permanent secretaries about the six most important strategic issues facing this country in the next 25 years and as the most senior level of the Civil Service I think that is a debate we should have been having more often. I know that the new Cabinet Secretary wants to have a more corporate sense at the centre of government, at the level of officials and he is absolutely right. I should like to see more corporate ownership at that level of the big issues facing this country.

Q11 Paul Flynn: If you take an issue that we have discussed, the strategic unit and so on, take the issue of illegal drugs, everybody who has looked at the way that we draw up our policies on illegal drugs over the last 30 years, the Wootton inquiry, the Police Federation, the select committees of this House and the House of Lords, every group that has thought about this objectively, scientifically, has come to the conclusion that the policies of prohibition being pursued by Britain and America are wrong, will actually make the problem worse and other policies are needed. We hear of a recent one by Lord Birt in the Strategy Unit which has been widely leaked, which says the same thing, that for 30 years the Government's actions have actually increased the deaths and the spread of the use of illegal drugs by creating an illegal market. That is the rational point of view. I do not know of any report which has said anything differently, but every Government for 30 years has pursued a policy which has made the problem worse. It is not working, so we do more of it, has been the line taken. If we take the recent policy by Lord Birt, the blue-skies thinker, which again repeated this, that there has to be a change of direction otherwise we continue the errors of 30 years with increasing deaths and use of illegal drugs, where does that stand in government? Every government is afraid of being told by the Daily Mail that they have gone to pot, if they take any intelligent view of drugs, rather than taking the knee-jerk reaction of trying to be tough on drugs. It is hard to believe that we as Parliament this year decided, with the support of every party, in the 2005 Drugs Act, to classify magic mushrooms in the same category as heroin. That is an act of insanity, but this Government, supported by all parties, took that decision because the decision was taken a matter of months before the General Election and none of them wanted sprawling headlines from the tabloid press. Is there hope?

Dr Mulgan: I was responsible for setting up and overseeing that review so, for the reasons I gave before, I shall not comment on the detail of that particular case. It does illustrate a broader point, which is about the involvement of the public in these discussions. As you say, there have been many expert commissions and reviews, but not ones which actually have involved large sections of the public who remain quite resistant to many reforms which otherwise rational people who study the issues in detail support and that therefore creates a blockage in terms of political possibilities and creates a rationale for the media often to take up very knee-jerk and in fact destructive positions on drugs. That is probably an example of the sort of issue where we need to think much more radically about ways of involving large sections of the public in the policy process and not just officials, ministers and experts.

Sir Michael Bichard: This is exactly the point I was going to make in a different way. We live in a democracy and however rational and informed and brilliant your strategic thinking is, at the end of the day generally you have to take the public - one cannot just say the media but the public - with you. There have been some examples in the last 50 years, very rare however, where a government has decided that it is going to do something in spite of public opinion. Going back further than the present administration you can think about capital punishment, for example, which was one of those issues where a stand on principle was made, although it was a cross-party vote. Generally, you have to take the public with you. On the issue you have raised, the public have not yet been persuaded and therefore the debate needs to be broadened and continued. I was getting a bit worried about the direction of the questioning here. I thought we were about to be asked whether we had inhaled, to which the answer is no. I do not want to comment on the particular policy issue you raised, but that is the answer.

Q12 Paul Flynn: We can look forward to an intelligent debate coming from the election of the new Tory leader yesterday on this policy. If we go back to the time of the 1945 Government, and not many of us in the room remember that, the reforms which were brought in then were howled at by the popular press and the derision from the comedians on the radio against Aneurin Bevan, whom we regard as a hero now, was constant and unremitting. Many of those reforms and the National Health Service itself were brought in in the teeth of a huge amount of public opposition. Many of the mistakes made by that Government were probably the popular ones. Is there not an erosion of the courage of politicians to take on unpopular areas? You mentioned capital punishment. The reform of the laws relating to homosexuality has been undertaken in the face of public opposition as well. There have been instances of courage. Has there not been a retreat from that when we have information that is objective and is rational and it is because of the timidity of our contemporary politicians?

Sir Michael Bichard: Whether or not you applaud courage depends upon whether you agree with the decision which has been taken. Some decisions have been taken in the recent past which one would have to say were courageous, but with which you would not necessarily agree.

Q13 Paul Flynn: Which are those?

Sir Michael Bichard: You might think that the decision taken about war in the last administration was one of those. My point exactly; I did not think that was a decision with which you agreed, but one has to be careful about just having a debate about the need for politicians to be more courageous. The debate here is about strategic thinking. What I am saying is that you can think about strategic issues, but at the end of the day ---

Q14 Paul Flynn: That was an example where two million people walked in London to express their objection to that decision.

Sir Michael Bichard: Absolutely; yes.

Dr Mulgan: I assume you want leaders to lead and not always follow. The question is: at what distance and on what issues? May I just say one thing about process which may be relevant to this? In some ways it is a question of how political leaders and official leaders can judge what issues they should invest their capital in, where they should be leading ahead of public opinion, challenging public opinion and so on. In the last two or three years there were some interesting changes to process at the heart of government, in particular trying to get Cabinet ministers and permanent secretaries spending more time in away-days, in discussions, in evening sessions, mixing up different departments, looking at future challenges and looking at what was happening in other countries, trying to get a more common cross-governmental view of what really did need to be done to be ready for the next five, ten or 15 years. We could find no evidence of that sort of exercise having been done at any point in the past, mixing up political and official leaderships and getting them to leave their departmental hats at the door and take responsibility for the nation as a whole. A fair amount of what came out in terms of the strategic plans, the last spending review and so on, was informed by that process of collective deliberation which a number of other governments around the world are now trying to copy, because they see that as best practice in terms of how you get over some of these blockages. The purpose of such exercises is to help people decide where it is worth investing the Government's necessarily limited political capital, whether it is in terms of challenging public opinion, or indeed spending scarce resources.

Q15 Paul Flynn: I am trying to get away from the idea of politicians who live in a world which is shaped like a saucer, that we are all in this saucer, we are concentrating across the other side of the saucer at our own affairs and the rim of the saucer is the horizon over which we cannot see and that is the date of the next General Election. This would be dealt with by political decision. Could you say in what practical way we can change the institutions in Parliament on this? You suggested this early on. You suggested leaving this to the select committees which have achieved a degree of detachment outside the political dog fight, but there is the silo argument there, that they might well be taking their own departmental interest. You suggested bringing in academics, which I think we would warmly welcome. Can you think how we could set up some institution, extra committee, extra body here which would do those things and which would bring us as far away as possible from the political fight and bring in people from outside, but also change the perspectives to those of the interests of our grandchildren and great grandchildren.

Sir Michael Bichard: We are both suggesting some kind of futures committee or liaison committee. The only issue there is that you do not do what we were describing has happened in the Civil Service in the past, which is marginalise it. Select committees should have a strategic responsibility within their particular field; probably across government it would be good if there were some forum where we were encouraging MPs to think about the future in the way I know they do in other countries. That would be an entirely healthy development. The academic community could certainly be involved in that.

Dr Mulgan: To ensure it not becoming a silo, any such committee does need to represent the other committees. I should certainly advocate involving outsiders, though not only academics; academics are often not very well placed in terms of methods for thinking about the future and much of the best serious work on this is done outside universities nowadays. Any such committee needs a series of methods which is its own, which gives it purchase: for example, looking at the stock of national assets and whether that is being run down or increased, interpreted in the widest sense in terms of physical, natural, financial as well as human capital and so on, what is happening to inter-generational distributions as pensions' policy and other things change. That is what would give it purchase and perhaps a label which is something like the next generation rather than the future. Some people's eyes glaze over when they see the words "the future" and they think therefore it is not for real and it does not have the bite of day-to-day decisions. In November 2003 and then again in January this year the Government published a strategic audit, which was an attempt to take stock of long-term trends and challenges and what government needed to do differently. As far as I am aware, that was not discussed in Parliament and it is not quite clear where in Parliament it would have been discussed, which is perhaps another justification for some new bit of machinery.

Q16 Grant Shapps: Everything you are saying is very interesting, but I am not sure we are making huge amounts of progress, partly because neither of you is suggesting anything radically from what appears to happen today. I do want to challenge Sir Michael's comments, which did shock me, about the Turner report, if only to spice this up a little bit. You were saying that you thought the Turner report was very good and I agree that it is a good report. I am surprised I suppose by your lack of cynicism as to why we even have a Turner report. We have a Turner report because the Government have failed in their pension revision, lots of things we know about like £5 billion raids on pensions over a number of years and those sorts of things, which gets to the point where the pensions are depleted and a neat thing for the Government to do is to throw this out to somebody else to make it seem that this is a problem which is way beyond our shores and nothing to do with government and what we need to do is think about this for the sake of future generations. In shorthand, what I am trying to say to you is that the results of the Turner report were blooming obvious: we need to do three or four things to pensions to make them work, but the reasons behind the Turner report being commissioned in the first place were also extremely obvious and very political, would you not agree?

Sir Michael Bichard: It is a while since I was accused of not spicing things up enough but I do not want to be too provocative. I am not sure that it really matters why. Clearly there were issues around pensions. I am not saying they were not, but some of them could be as a result of political neglect in the past or the wrong policies, but in demographic terms there were clearly big issues around pensions and they needed to be addressed. All I am saying is that a process which involved externals and opened up a debate across a broad canvas is the kind of strategic debate which I should like to see more of in this country because it helps to develop, gradually at least, some consensus around the issues. At the end of the day someone has to take the decisions.

Q17 Grant Shapps: What we are trying to do here is blue-sky, future generation thinking, and you do not care whether it is driven by political necessity of the day in reality.

Sir Michael Bichard: That is right. Until we get an absolutely perfect government - which has not been the case any time during my life and probably never will be, will it? - there are always going to be issues which are perhaps the result of political neglect in the past. They have to be handled, they have to be grasped, that is what we are all here for, is it not? It is not really the motivation which worries me; it is that big issues are grappled with. The answer to your question, while it is not sufficiently spicy, is that if we did set up a futures committee, if we did have a more corporate Civil Service, those two things would quite significantly change the way in which government works in this country.

Q18 Grant Shapps: The only shift we have really seen in the way this stuff is handled is that a lot more is happening centrally because of the Prime Minister's unit. I think you were intimating in your earlier evidence that the fact that it now happens within Number 10 a lot more has generally been a good trend, though you did not say it directly.

Dr Mulgan: It is good that it happens, it is good that a lot of it happens very openly, it is good that many, many hundreds and thousands of people outside government are involved in the process, but it is also good that in the last two or three years there has been a deliberate attempt to scale down the volume of work done in the centre and build up capacity in departments. That was always the intention and that has now largely happened. I should just say that none of this takes the issues out of politics; whether it is pensions or nuclear power or anything else these are bound to have political origins, political conflicts, political arguments around them and when any conclusions or recommendations come out of task forces or commissions it will then be for elected politicians to make judgments, sometimes reject them out of hand, sometimes cherrypick and so on. That seems to me wholly appropriate in a democracy.

Q19 Grant Shapps: Me too; I am greatly in favour of there being a large political element; that is what we are elected for. Does it not frustrate both of you, who think about these issues a great deal, that ultimately, whatever is said by all these committees, and I am cynical about why some of them are set up in the first place, actually what is going to happen is that the Prime Minister is effectively going to do what he wants to do, little more?

Sir Michael Bichard: That is why we elected you and choose prime ministers.

Q20 Grant Shapps: I suppose what I am trying to do is tease out whether you think the power is too much centralised.

Dr Mulgan: The purpose of the processes we are talking about today is to make sure elected politicians have a better menu of options. The problem in many of these fields is that they are having to make decisions without a sufficiently grounded strategic option to consider and therefore are more likely to go for short-term fixes or second best and so on.

Q21 Grant Shapps: I suppose what I am trying to get to here is that if in fact it is the case that most of this then comes down to the decision made by probably one man rather than even the Cabinet, does it not deflate the entire purpose of this blue-sky thinking in the first place? His timescale is only going to be his timescale.

Dr Mulgan: I was trying to describe earlier the process in which the Cabinet, and indeed the top echelon of the Civil Service, did start thinking much more collectively and collaboratively than perhaps was the case five years ago, let alone 15 years ago under Margaret Thatcher. Any process which is established will have to reflect political realities, the balance of power between ministers. To some extent though, in any government, a prime minister is likely to expect to be involved in a particular policy field longer than individual ministers and to some extent, in that respect it is appropriate for the centre, by which I mean Number 10, the Cabinet Office and the Treasury, to have a particular responsibility for the future. The average tenure of junior ministers may be 18 months - I cannot remember - of secretaries of state is probably not much more than two or three years. It is still the case that the average tenure for ministers is rather longer than that, and of chancellors too, therefore it is appropriate that they should be more reliable guardians of the long term than individual ministers and departments. Just to reiterate the point, these processes work best in other countries - Finland has been mentioned, Singapore and others - where there is quite a wide corporate sense of ownership of strategic thinking and decision making.

Q22 Grant Shapps: These are very difficult issues to grapple with. You say that it has improved in the last few years, but do you think that is the public's perception? I know that is not directly what we are tackling today, but I wonder whether the public does not actually feel that at all.

Dr Mulgan: The public are given almost no information on this topic by the media, who are wholly uninterested in strategic thinking, long-termism of any kind. To be honest, politicians have not done that good a job in explaining any of this either. It has been almost a hidden change within government, which has not had enough public airing, despite, I may say, attempts by some ministers and the Prime Minister, to get the public engaged. When five-year strategies were published last year by most of the departments, you would have had to be a pretty attentive reader of newspapers to know what was going on.

Sir Michael Bichard: I do not think either of us was saying it has been transformed in the last five years; we are just saying that we could detect some improvements. One of the reasons I welcome the fact that you are having this debate and you are looking at this issue is that it is rarely considered. When did the NAO, for example - as people know I always love to criticise them now - actually produce a report on the strategic planning and thinking within departments? Actually the NAO tend to say it is a policy issue and they cannot possibly be involved in policy. I always argued, even when I was in the department, that they ought to be producing reports on the policy process, not individual policies, but how departments were going about developing, formulating policy and how good they were at strategic thinking and planning. I have never seen a report from the NAO on those issues.

Q23 Mr Prentice: I want to ask about Turkey. The British Government's position is to see Turkey in the European Union. If Turkey does in fact join the European Union, that will have huge ramifications. I just wonder how much discussion took place at the centre of government on the implications of Turkish membership for the EU. You told us that each department has its own strategy unit. Would each department have considered the implications of Turkish membership of the EU?

Dr Mulgan: I do not know the specific answer to that. What I do know is that the Foreign Office in the past has been one of the better departments in terms of having a professional capacity for thinking through the long-term implications of issues like Turkish accession to the EU. The policy planning staff in the Foreign Office have existed for decades, and perhaps more, and often used methods of scenario thinking. The appropriate way of thinking through a question like that is to work systematically through the likely implications of a number of different scenarios which could follow from Turkish accession.

Q24 Mr Prentice: Have you seen such a document? Does such a document exist?

Dr Mulgan: I do not know; you would have to ask the Foreign Office not me.

Sir Michael Bichard: This reinforces a point I was making earlier. In my time there would probably have been a comment made at a meeting of permanent secretaries by the Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office about Turkey. It was never picked up as an issue of corporate priority for government which the Permanent Secretary was then going to come back to and gnaw away at until there was some corporate advice which could be offered. It was very much a Foreign Office issue.

Q25 Mr Prentice: I should certainly put money on such a document not existing on the implications of Turkish membership of the EU.

Sir Michael Bichard: Neither of us is a betting man.

Dr Mulgan: There was a fair bit of work on the implications for all departments of enlargement and a lot of pretty complicated ramifications in terms of migration, trade and industry, housing and so on. Whether they were accurate in terms of what then subsequently happened is another matter, but there were some processes of that kind. Because one is looking at least ten years ahead in the case of Turkey, this is one of those issues where most departments tend to be anxious about looking at anything quite so far ahead with quite so many variables.

Q26 Mr Prentice: No, I am talking about strategic thinking. What a classic example. I am just a Member of Parliament and sometimes I do not know where policies come from. I just wonder, when you were at the heart of government in the Strategy Unit, whether you were ever wrong-footed, whether you ever thought "Goodness me, I didn't know that was government policy".

Dr Mulgan: I should be surprised if any minister or senior official did not sometimes have that experience when opening a newspaper.

Q27 Mr Prentice: But you were at the centre of the spider's web. Let me give you a specific example. When the Government came forward with its policy on faith schools, I thought that it had not been in the manifesto and I had never heard any of my colleagues pushing for it and all of a sudden it became government policy. Were you aware that this policy on faith schools was going to be announced?

Dr Mulgan: In principle, when I was head of policy at Number 10 and running the Strategy Unit I did get a huge flow over my desk of what was in the pipeline for white papers and legislation and media announcements and so on. For any modern governments the sheer volume of decision making taking place in departments and in bits of departments means that no human being can ever be completely on top of every detail of every issue and they do sometimes experience surprise when they come across things happening.

Q28 Mr Prentice: Surely the Prime Minister is.

Dr Mulgan: It would probably be quite destructive to have such a centralised policing function that there was one place which really knew everything which was going on. Obviously this was the dream of Joseph Stalin and various others and they certainly never achieved it and I do not think any British Government has ever achieved it either. Are you saying it would be a good thing if the centre were omniscient?

Q29 Mr Prentice: I am asking whether, when policies are announced which I, as a Member of Parliament, am unaware of, you are unaware of them as well. Are you aware of these policies?

Dr Mulgan: It depends. For that particular policy I honestly cannot remember the precise sequence.

Q30 Mr Prentice: Fair enough. How did you decide which studies to embark on in the Strategy Unit?

Dr Mulgan: The Strategy Unit had a fairly open process of deciding on topics, partly through consulting departments and ministers, partly through asking the Prime Minister what he thought was important, partly an internal process of members of staff and advisers and networks flagging up issues which they thought were important. We also encouraged a wider public input and a number of the projects which were done were prompted by outside suggestions. I am not sure there is any ideal mechanism for determining priorities. The ultimate decision on which things went forward to review was made by a committee which linked together Number 10, Cabinet Office and Treasury, making recommendations to the Prime Minister in terms of formal mechanisms, but we were quite keen to have a much more open process of flagging up what might be upcoming, cost-cutting priorities.

Q31 Mr Prentice: Have these reports actually changed things rather than just being an academic treatise which is read and then put on the shelf and forgotten about? Did they actually change things?

Dr Mulgan: The main critique of the central policy review staff in the 1970s and 1980s was that they did produce reports, but often without much traction on decision making. The majority of reports produced by the Strategy Unit and the Social Exclusion Unit and others like that were taken through Cabinet to be decisions of government with implementation plans, timescales, aide, official and ministerial responsibilities, targets and so on. Broadly, so far as these things ever happen in quite the way planned, they have been implemented.

Q32 Mr Prentice: You published a report on ethnic minorities and employment opportunities. In my constituency we have 78 per cent of Muslim women economically inactive which is just absolutely staggering. Since the publication of your report, have you seen any major changes in the specific area of getting Muslim women into employment? I know it was touched on in that report.

Dr Mulgan: In that particular case that report was taken through Cabinet and was published as a statement of government policy. A task force was set up to oversee its implementation, involving a lot of people from outside government. A new official structure was set up to focus attention in DWP on the set of issues which had not been taken all that seriously in the past by governments and many fairly detailed policies have been implemented by JobCentre Plus and others. There are now annual reports on what has or has not been achieved. I know there was certainly quite rapid change in terms of employment levels in specific Muslim communities at different age groups. As to what has happened in your constituency, I do not know. There is now a part of government to which you can address that question and they will have a far greater focus on it and expertise in it than would have been the case three or four years ago.

Q33 Mr Prentice: May I ask about outsourcing policy development? You speak about this in a paper which we have before us: you want to break the monopoly which the Civil Service has on policy advice. Can you give us any examples overseas where governments actually contract out policy making?

Sir Michael Bichard: I cannot; I am not basing what I am saying on what has happened elsewhere.

Q34 Mr Prentice: I was just interested.

Sir Michael Bichard: I just think that it is healthy to have a policy-making process which is a pluralist process. There are some hugely talented people working outside the Civil Service; indeed if you look at some of the things which happened, particularly post-1997, whatever you think of the policies, quite a lot of the preparatory work was done before the Labour Government was elected. It is not fashionable now to say that the literacy/numeracy strategy was rather impressive of its sort, but I think it was and a lot of work, I am happy to admit, was done before the Civil Service got its hands on it. It was done looking at what was going on around the world, so in that sense had an international perspective, which is sometimes missing in our policy making, and it was done in academic institutions.

Q35 Mr Prentice: That is kind of different, is it not? Oppositions scratching around for policy ideas, oppositions consulting people in think tanks is one thing but when you have a government contracting out policy to policy institutions it is quite different, is it not?

Sir Michael Bichard: I am not sure it is in principle that different, in that if it works for an incoming government it could have some beneficial effect on the policy making.

Q36 Mr Prentice: So the Government may give a contract to, say, the Adam Smith Institute.

Sir Michael Bichard: It is up to the Government to whom they give contracts. It would need to be constrained to deal with issues of confidentiality and the rest, but quite a lot of work is going on in places like the Young Foundation, of which I am also a trustee. I do not see any reason why there should not be greater freedom here. When I was in the Civil Service I used to say to the civil servants in that department that one of the things they had to prove was that in five years' time they would still be the policy developers of choice, that ministers would be so impressed by what they did that they would not look for alternatives. Actually I do think there should be some alternatives in the system, particularly if you are thinking about strategic planning. Once you get very close to political decisions and the pressures we talked about from the media, the political cut and thrust of debate, clearly a minister might have some reservation about putting that out, but when you are talking about longer-term thinking about policy issues, I see absolutely no reason why that should not be put out. May I make a point which we have not picked up yet? One of the reasons for that is that I am not sure we yet have within the Civil Service the levels of creativity that I should like to see and which are necessary for really effective long-term strategic thinking.

Dr Mulgan: To give one example, and there have been some past examples in British history of contracting out, the privatisation policy in the 1980s is either a good one or a bad one, depending on what you think of the policy. What we are always talking about here is not full contracting out, it is involving a wider pool of contributors to decisions which still have to be made by ministers in a normal way. You cannot truly contract out the decision-making process without all sorts of problems ensuing. Done right, it does enrich the process. Perhaps I could give one contemporary example which we are working on at the Young Foundation, which is policy on neighbourhoods. We have brought together a consortium of cities, of community organisations and government departments. It is a mixture of very practical work on how to give more power to neighbourhoods with some policy advice to ODPM and the Home Office in this case. They are entirely free to ignore everything we say, but we are bringing a much wider pool of participants into the process, hopefully new insights grounded in practical experiences in cities like Sheffield, Liverpool and Birmingham. I hope that will lead to a better end result. That is the way to go in the future and it involves not only think tanks and academics, but always - we tried to do this in the Strategy Unit - involving practitioners, people with on-the-ground frontline experience who knew the difference between something which worked on paper and something which worked in practice. If you can get that done, that is definitely in the public interest.

Q37 Jenny Willott: May I go back first of all to the role of the Treasury in strategic thinking and strategic planning? With the situation last week on the pensions report, even before it had been published the Treasury had undermined some of the main outcomes of the report. Given that control of the purse strings gives the Treasury a significant amount of power in these decisions, how do you make sure that he who controls the purse strings does not have undue influence on strategic thinking and strategic planning within government?

Sir Michael Bichard: Sometimes it can be positive rather than negative. I am not suggesting it was, but if that is what you are saying. I say that because it grieves me to say, as a previous departmental permanent secretary, that the Treasury in the recent past have been a very constructive influence on policy and inter-departmental policy and strategic thinking, not least through things like the cost-cutting reviews which I applaud. I chair one or two voluntary sector organisations and I spent some time chairing the contacts between government and the voluntary sector and the cost-cutting review before the last CSR of the long-term future of the not-for-profit voluntary sector in this country, which resulted in the future builders' fund and the capacity building support, were rather good pieces of work. That really was an example of the Treasury using the clout of the budgetary process to ensure that some of these issues were addressed. It is not just the negative influence: the money behind it can help strategic thinking quite a lot.

Dr Mulgan: I agree with that. In any government you need to ensure there are ways of setting the overall strategy, what you are trying to achieve, why and what is a priority and what is not. A lot of things then need to follow that, including allocation of money, legislation, political capital and so on. There have been times in the past when the money bit has got in the way of the strategy bit. When this administration came to power, the Treasury's capacity to be strategic had been greatly cut back, which therefore forced it into the much more classic, just-say-no position on money. The Treasury has become a lot more constructive and strategic over the last few years; it has more people thinking creatively, thinking strategically and sometimes taking the lead on particular policy issues. In all the strategy processes I have described we tried to tie the Treasury in very closely and often the challenge which they provided to departments, and indeed to Number 10, probably led to better decisions in the long run. There are questions still as to whether the Treasury needs to go even further in terms of its strategic mechanisms and methods and the sort of people who are brought in, but it is a world away from what it was eight years ago in that respect.

Q38 Jenny Willott: The other side of it is the fact that for something to be successful the Treasury does need to buy into it. Either it is being driven by the Treasury and is coming from them in the first place, in which case clearly they are going to be supportive of it. Or, if it is something which is more difficult and might have some long-term financial implications, how do you ensure that the Treasury is able to be involved in that process and buy into that as an idea rather than sniping on the sidelines or undermining it? How do you make sure that is part of the fundamental process?

Dr Mulgan: Crudely, in the design stage of those strategic reviews of the last few years the Treasury has been a participant at several levels, either through having officials sitting on teams, sitting on steering groups, ministers sitting on appropriate Cabinet committees. The Treasury is not usually short of routes into these sorts of processes to have its say and that is entirely appropriate if they have substantial cost implications. It should be said that there are many areas of public policy which do not actually have very much to do with money and we can over-emphasise the extent to which the whole thing is driven by cash.

Q39 Jenny Willott: We have been talking about a number of different areas of strategic thinking. We have had the blue-sky stuff, which is 30 to 50 years, a very long time frame when you are not necessarily talking about the practicalities of how you implement, you are talking bigger scale stuff. Against that you have a long-term vision as to where you are trying to go with a particular department or particular area of work. Then you have the shorter term, the medium term, for planning over a period of a certain number of years. One of the things you said was that within government the strategic planning framework, the three-year spending reviews, departments are looking at five-year plans, to me five years is not actually that long a period of time when you are talking about implementing the policies because, particularly in government departments, it can take an incredibly long time for something to be put into place. With the Strategy Unit, what time frames were you looking at in the work you were doing then, the reviews of work and so on? Were you looking at longer time frames than that; rather than the blue-sky stuff, the more practical implementation and the longer-term planning? What time frames were you looking at there?

Dr Mulgan: First of all, I have never been comfortable with the phrase "blue sky" because it appears to be something way out there. Even on the issues which have to be thought about in a 30- or 40- or 50-year time horizon like pensions or climate change, the crunch is things which have to change right away. Every important long-term issue is also an important short-term issue and it is quite dangerous if the language implies otherwise. In terms of different policy areas, different timescales applied, partly in terms of the speed of action, something like Crossrail or major infrastructure by their very nature take a long time to design, to build and then to have economic effects. A curriculum change, like the proposals of the Tomlinson review, is fairly long. In many other fields such as policing practice or even drugs you can make changes fairly quickly if you want to. Given the uncertainties over efficacy, it would be unwise to tie everything down in a ten-year strategy; rather you want a broad direction and some ways to learn quickly in the light of experience. Part of the challenge in this whole area is that we are talking about lots of things changing on very different timescales and government needs to be smart about what the timescale of any particular issue is. One thing which has not been mentioned, which is another change for the machinery, is trying to ensure that there are better horizon-scanning mechanisms for spotting big new threats, things which could be very disruptive, whether it is a terrorist attack or an outbreak of SARS or something like that. One of the surprises for me, coming into government, was that those machineries were almost non-existent in the 1990s, which is why things like the BSE crisis were experienced as so traumatic. Since 2000 we do now have much better machineries in place, which are cross-departmental, which better scan for potentially disruptive threats and ensure that government as a whole is putting in place preventive, anticipatory, mitigating strategies to deal with them.

Q40 Jenny Willott: May I go back to the issue of blue-sky thinking? You and I clearly have different views on this. As far as I am concerned, there are issues which have to be dealt with now because they have extremely long-term implications, such as climate change and pensions. Then there are issues like education planning, health care and what long-term vision you might have and how you want the system to be in 30 years, 40 years, 50 years' time, which is not the same and you do not need to do something now to make that happen in 30 or 40 years' time. Are you saying that element of work, really out of the box, all sorts of weird ideas about what you might want to see in the long-term future, is not being done?

Dr Mulgan: In relation to the NHS, say, or secondary schools, it is certainly possible to have a vision of where things should be in 30 years' time. It is more useful to have a vision of where things should be in 10 or 15 years' time because newcomers are going to come along with their own priorities.

Q41 Jenny Willott: Not contradictory.

Dr Mulgan: The point I tried to emphasise right at the beginning - and this is where there is a gap - is that the public sector as a whole, government as a whole, even if it does not try to have a precise vision of the NHS in 30 years' time, does need to ensure that, somewhere in the system, innovation is happening to develop new models in fields like management of chronic diseases, use of genetic information, which mean that when we get there, we are ready with a wide range of options. I still think this is in some senses the glaring gap of how public administration is organised, that we do not have proper innovation strategies and those are the ways in which you ensure the right mix between those medium- to long-term visions of the kind you described and practical action today. If you do not have that innovation happening, you will not be able to achieve that long-term vision.

Sir Michael Bichard: I agree with that. Sometimes the first step is to start some of the research, the thinking which is necessary before you can produce your vision of the future. Take education as an example. I found it quite difficult as a permanent secretary to find persuasive research on the subject of how people learn. It seemed to me quite important that we knew how people learned. One of the reasons why we spent so much time in this country over the last 40 years talking about the structure of our education system rather than the content and the substance is because we do not know much about those sorts of issues. If you want to start planning your education system for 30 years' time, one of the most important things is to be thinking about how people are going to learn in 30 years' time in an information society which may be completely different to the situation we have today. It is not for me to say whether that thinking is going on. I am sure someone is giving some thought to it, but I wonder whether we are giving enough time to that. I know you are not suggesting this, but if you just start blue-sky thinking about what education system you want in 30 years' time, what will happen is that you will start talking about the structure again rather than what is really going to go on inside that structure which is going to improve knowledge transference.

Dr Mulgan: My predecessor Michael Young had, 30 or 40 years' ago, a very clear vision of where education, health, might be in 30 or 40 years' time, but he felt the best thing he could do was to create in practice the embryos of what that future system could be which were things like the Open University, National Extension College, extended schools, helplines, colleges of health, all things which did take 20 or 30 years to come to fruition, but he had to do that outside government. No bit of the public sector or central government thought it was their job to ensure that there were the practicalities, the innovation which in a few decades' time would be useful. This year the Open University was judged by students the most satisfactory university in the country.

Q42 Jenny Willott: May I ask about the relationship between strategy and long-term planning and the actual delivery? My sister works in the NHS; she works in human resources in a primary care trust. This is just from me listening to her whingeing as my sister. She leads on Improving Working Lives and the Agenda for Change, both of which are long-term projects planned by the Government, which end up being dumped on the same people with the same deadlines and very little coordinated thinking centrally. At the same time as they are trying to achieve those, suddenly the Government announced that they are changing the role of PCTs completely and they are removing the delivery element and making them into commissioners, which could potentially undermine a significant amount of the work they have been doing on the other two projects over the last two or three years. There seems to be a bit of a clash between the long-term planning, which might be being done in government, and the realisation of the practical implications for delivery which that then has in the public services. How do you think that can be resolved? If you are looking within the machinery of government, how do you ensure that does not happen? Often, how do you prevent short-term political expediency interfering with the long-term vision? There is a knee-jerk reaction, something happens, something must be done and politicians come out with another idea without thinking about the people involved in delivering who might be in the middle of doing something which was decided four or five years ago and the politicians have forgotten about? How do you ensure that it does remain coordinated and you do not have those sorts of blockages and those problems?

Dr Mulgan: On that last point, it is for you the politicians to judge how politicians can become better at serving the public with fewer knee-jerk actions. Two answers to the rest of the question. First, in all strategy work I would certainly encourage the close involvement of frontline staff, the people who will have to live with it and a major wrong turn was taken in the 1980s when it became fashionable to believe that you should have completely separate teams of people doing policy and others delivering implementation. That was the whole fashion of the late 1980s and the 1990s and it had lots of damaging effects of which the experiences you describe are one. The second is that I hope we shall see Whitehall departments moving to a different sense of their role, which is more strategic, by which I mean more about setting broad direction, providing funding support and so on and much less meddling, much less micro-management, much less red tape, much less regular restructuring. There is far too regular restructuring of systems and there should be simple rules on how often you can or cannot do that. Part of the intention of shrinking Whitehall head offices was to try to encourage a shift to a more strategic, less meddling micro-managerial approach to systems. It is quite difficult to do that when political media and other pressures are that if something goes wrong you need an immediate reaction. This is perhaps where you all have a bigger role to play in changing our overall culture, our expectations and not pretending that a secretary of state is responsible for every detail of what happens on the ground but has a more strategic responsibility for overall outcomes for the system of health or education or welfare.

Sir Michael Bichard: It is not just a government issue; it is an issue in any organisation. In the university I run at the moment, where we draw up a long-term strategy, in the past staff had not really been involved in that at all and therefore felt no ownership for it. Over the last 12 months we have tried to involve huge numbers of staff in thinking about the future and the ownership for that is now much greater. Clearly on a bigger canvas it is very much more difficult, but I do think that there are things in government which still could be done to improve that. I remember having a wonderful conversation with a permanent secretary of Treasury once, having spent two weeks running around trying to deal with a harebrained idea which had come out of the Treasury. I said to him that it would be a good idea to have someone in the Treasury who had actually had some practical experience of delivering in a school on the ground. He said "No, not at all. I don't want people who are informed by practicalities. I want people who are blue-sky thinkers". My jaw dropped and I thought that there had to be a balance here which we could strike. You do need people who have some understanding of delivery involved in the longer-term thinking so that they can just bring that experience to bear. You also need the people who are out there delivering at the moment involved if you are going to get any ownership. One of the concerns I have, for example about the introduction of e-government within the health service, is that people have not been involved sufficiently in developing it. It is not sufficiently business led and a lot of people do not feel any real ownership for it and are not even quite sure what the business need is that it is addressing. That is the worst situation to get in with a strategy or a major investment policy like IT in health.

Q43 Kelvin Hopkins: Very smooth, articulate, clever, but I do not buy it. You talked briefly about politics and democracy, but my impression is that they are inconveniences and inside your magic circle you are very comfortable together; one clearly a political activist and one ostensibly a civil servant but both inside the magic circle, having made the same decision about the direction of our country, and democracy and politics get in the way. Is that not fair?

Dr Mulgan: I am way outside the magic circle now. I run a small organisation in East London and every now and again get invited in to grand places like this. I hope what I was saying was not describing a closed, technocratic, apolitical process. I hope we were both giving a more realistic account of the necessarily messy processes in which there are strong passions and interests and political argument and that they are none the worse for that. There is probably always a temptation in the processes which happen within large central governments for them to forget the sort of things you describe and become a bit technocratic and a bit cut-off. The French Commissariat de Plan, whose head is in London today looking at what can be learned from Britain, did often become very detached from public passions and probably therefore was less helpful as a result. I shall take your comment more as a comment than a question.

Q44 Kelvin Hopkins: I am trying to prove and find out whether my suspicion, my understanding, my observation is correct, that the direction of politics has been decided by yourselves and other colleagues and you have guarded that very jealously over a long time. The rest is making sure it all happens according to your particular view of what our political objectives and ideology should be.

Sir Michael Bichard: I am tempted to say that I did not come here to be insulted. One, I have never been called smooth before and I presume that related to Geoff not to me. Secondly, I have based the whole of my career on a belief in the political process and democracy and the belief that as a public servant my task is to try to produce the best advice I can and the best material I can to enable people to take decisions and to formulate policies. That is my central belief. What we have been talking about today is not how the decisions can be taken aside from the political process, but how we can assist the politicians in our society, whether locally or centrally, to be more involved in longer-term strategic thinking. I think that is possible. It also requires the politicians themselves to be more assertive in this respect and to demand a role in which they have sometimes been prepared not to become involved at all.

Q45 Kelvin Hopkins: You did rather give the game away earlier on in our discussion when you talked about securing a positive decision on tuition fees. That was a particular view.

Sir Michael Bichard: No; no; I am sorry.

Q46 Kelvin Hopkins: I voted against it.

Sir Michael Bichard: If you look back at what I said; I specifically said that whatever you think of the policy, the point was to enable that to be addressed. It could not even have been addressed a year or two years before an election. It was a matter for the parties to decide, in the light of the Dearing report, what they wanted to do. It did seem to me to be one of those policy issues which should not just be swept under the carpet for ever. The important point I was making there, and it has come up once or twice and I have thought about coming in once or twice on this issue, is that the way in which the strategic thinking is managed, the process is managed, to enable decisions to be taken is almost as important as the thinking itself.

Q47 Kelvin Hopkins: Even there you are giving it away. We could perfectly well have had a discussion about tuition fees and grants; I would have voted for keeping grants and no charging for tuition fees. The great majority of my party would have said they believed in free state education. That was not what was going to be put forward.

Sir Michael Bichard: It would not have been a very informed debate, would it, without being disrespectful? Lots of people do not know as much about the system as you do. What you had with the Dearing report was a piece of research, a piece of thinking which enabled that debate to be more informed. That is all I am saying.

Kelvin Hopkins: They could have chosen to have free state education and higher taxes to pay for it; that could have been part of the debate, but it was not part of the debate.

Chairman: I do not think we can get much further on this. I think we know what you are saying.

Q48 Kelvin Hopkins: The same theme really. Politics is about discussing real alternatives not just getting everybody in line behind a particular view.

Dr Mulgan: Many of the examples which have been raised this morning, like pensions and perhaps energy policy, are ones where there is not someone hidden away in central government who has the blueprint and is simply trying to secure consent for it. They are difficult choices, where most people who know a lot about it are quite uncertain about some of the dimensions of these choices. What we need are better processes for clarifying what those choices are, precisely so that within political parties there can be well-informed debate which will stand the test of time.

Sir Michael Bichard: Surely politics in a democratic society are about passion in debate, about issues but preferably informed.

Kelvin Hopkins: I have said enough. I could pursue those themes, but I shall not now.

Q49 David Heyes: I want to get into the same territory as Kelvin, perhaps because I was a product of the Open University 25 years ago when it was accused of being a Marxist hotbed, so maybe that shapes my view of some of these things. I wonder whether the thing which is missing here is active political parties of the kind in the 1945 Labour Government. You said that the task of strategic thinkers, planners, was to provide a menu of options for politicians. It should be the other way round, should it not? That strategic thinking should be taking place in a political party context and you should be being presented with a menu of options which you work up in detail and work on delivery. Is that the missing thing? Is that what is wrong at the moment?

Sir Michael Bichard: You make a very important point, which we have not really covered. I should say that what we are saying is that some strategic thinking - horrible phrase - needs to be going on across the democratic process, which of course involves political parties, involves Parliament and, in terms of them giving advice, involves the Civil Service too. In each of those levels or places there is room for improvement. I agree with you; it is a well-made point.

Dr Mulgan: There have been times when the parties have played that role. The Labour research department under Michael Young in the 1940s was very good at generating lots of ideas and options. The Conservative research department under Chris Patten in the 1970s was also pretty dynamic. The problem is that it is not clear that today's parties have the resources to play this role. Labour tried it two or three years ago and created a future oriented think tank which has now been closed down. It is not obvious that they can pull in a wide enough spectrum of people and they also have the problem of deniability. It is quite hard for a political party to toy with more difficult and dangerous issues and in some respects the virtue of arm's-length task forces like Adair Turner's is that they can be criticised by ministers. You have the option of disagreeing with them, but if it is coming out under a party label, it creates a whole series of problems for you, the politicians.

Q50 David Heyes: My suspicion is that it is stopped by political parties' obsession with short-termism, media responses, pragmatism and so on. You might suggest that more outsourcing of policy making was the answer but the risk in that surely is that you are exchanging one form of producer interest, which in the Labour Party would be the trade unions' role in policy making, for another form of producer interest dominating policy making, the market oriented view of the world.

Sir Michael Bichard: It always depends upon how assertive and clear the client is, in other words the person who is specifying the work. If the political parties are clear about what they want, it does not matter so much where they are having the work done. Sometimes it has not been clear. Let us be clear: we do know that political parties have used think tanks on both sides over the last ten years in particular to develop some of their thinking or at least have known that work was going on which they were sympathetic towards and were awaiting the outcome of, probably because it was easier to do it that way than it was to be seen doing it within the tent.

Q51 David Heyes: My feeling is that this issue of political parties failing to have a clear visionary agenda which determines policy making is at the heart of the disillusionment of the public with politics and politicians, but that is just an observation.

Dr Mulgan: That is something for you the politicians to sort out not us.

Sir Michael Bichard: We could not possibly comment, but we may not disagree.

Q52 Chairman: Was it not the performance and innovation unit which was the precursor to the Strategy Unit?

Dr Mulgan: Yes.

Q53 Chairman: It produced a very interesting report on social mobility, if I am right.

Dr Mulgan: Yes.

Q54 Chairman: I thought it was devastatingly good, but it just showed how difficult and politically difficult any serious commitment to a social mobility strategy was. Is the effect of that not to both illuminate the issue but guarantee that it should be parked somewhere by politicians?

Dr Mulgan: Publishing that report was something of a gamble. I thought it was a very important issue. I thought many of the facts were not widely known, for example, the fact that the USA is not a more mobile society than Britain and that many other European countries were more mobile than we were and how difficult in some ways some of the issues of mobility were. Despite it being quite a challenging report, over the succeeding four or five years, more and more ministers and Cabinet ministers have started talking openly and honestly about social mobility, including the current Secretary of State for Education, and have tried to look again at their policies in the light of that analysis. That could easily have come from an outside think tank of academics; instead it happened to come from an organisation within government. That is the right sort of creative tension you need in thinking about the future and ideas. Some people have to put up challenging facts and analyses and it is then for politicians to choose whether they want to ignore it, bury it or actually engage. On that particular issue politicians have engaged much more constructively than I thought was going to happen in fact.

Q55 Mr Liddell-Grainger: I am intrigued about this. One of your big problems with governing for the future is that departments themselves do not get on. There are turf wars; there are always turf wars. We have had permanent secretaries sitting in here and we can see the cracks. You cannot tell me that the departments all get on together. They want to make their little point, they want to control their whatever, under that secretary of state, whatever. You made the point that the average life of a permanent secretary is somewhere over 18 months. They are going to continue to guard their territory. One of the reasons that the Strategy Unit was set up was to try to coordinate, over and above the departments, some form of lateral thinking, was it not?

Dr Mulgan: Very much so and the vice of the departmental silo model, which Britain adopted for its government and most other governments adopted, is that you get lots of turf fighting, lots more energy going into stopping other departments doing things than you do into pursuing the national interest or the role of government interest. Many of the machineries we are talking about here like strategy units, social exclusion units, cost-cutting spending reviews, are attempts to try to counteract that and to get government to think more corporately. There are quite a few other things you could do in relation to both our ministers' work and senior officials' work and interchange and so on to go further down that road. One model for a committee of the future exists in the Finnish Parliament; the Finnish Government has largely restructured itself to escape from departmentalism with a small number of overarching strategic priorities which then drive the organisational and functional departments. It could be that is where, medium term, the British structure should go to reduce the phenomena you describe.

Q56 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Is that your think tank suggestion?

Dr Mulgan: I have long been in favour of moving away from what I see as essentially a century old approach to departments, which is no longer efficient or necessary in the era of information technology.

Q57 Mr Liddell-Grainger: So the permanent secretaries go, it becomes top heavy, controlled by the Cabinet Office straight down.

Dr Mulgan: Not at all. The pioneering work has been done by local government in this country which has been much more innovative than central government and in a number of different authorities has created overall leads on broad issues which could be children or ageing or climate change and then they ensure that the functional delivery departments are a tier lower in terms of the seniority of both the officials and the ministers.

Sir Michael Bichard: This is the problem we have which is that we do organise around functions still. I absolutely agree with you; one of my great criticisms of the Civil Service and government of this country is that there is very little joined-up thinking, partly because all the pressures are against it, you build up your empire and you defend your empire and you are regarded as a good secretary of state or a good permanent secretary as your empire gets bigger so you try to take over other empires. It is all on a functional grid and it is right that local government in particular has started organising a bit more around issues. If you want real strategic thinking, it is around the issues you are getting not around departmental functions.

Q58 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Do you feel the power of local government has been stripped by Whitehall? More and more seems to come from Whitehall; it is a very direct control. I can give you an example. We got the Cabinet Office departmental book. You have seen it. In it there is a chart of all these different units. In fact we had John Hutton here and there was one he did not know about. The only reason we knew about it was because the guy had gone to Geneva to pick up an award. Are there too many units within the centre controlling ---

Sir Michael Bichard: I take a different view. I do not believe that you change government by setting up central units. You change the behaviour of different departments by focusing on how they are valued, structured and behave. What you have at the centre are what I should call centres of excellence which are stimulating, supporting, sometimes challenging. I have never felt that you could change the behaviour of departments by setting up, for example, a delivery unit. I think delivery units do some excellent work, but if you want to get departments focused on results and outcomes, you have to change the way in which you train, develop civil servants, the way they are rewarded and recognised and all the rest of it. You do not do it from the centre.

Q59 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Which neatly brings me on to 21 November. You attended a meeting which was sponsored by Public Finance and Deloitte.

Sir Michael Bichard: That sounds pretty threatening.

Q60 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Nothing like that; it is quite safe. You were not seen in a dodgy restaurant or anything like that; you are perfectly safe. The headline is "The professionals are coming". Is that not the whole crux of this? I look down the list of people who attended. To be honest this is a highly impressive meeting of incredibly capable people. Is that not the whole crux of it, that it now has to stop being a sort of Sir Humphrey and become a highly professional organisation, external people being brought in, strategic thinkers, a really radical, complete break-up of the Civil Service and a rebuild?

Sir Michael Bichard: It needs to be significantly reformed. I kept saying that while I was there and I have said it since I left. I agree with you. The worry I have about this term "professionalisation" is that every time I come across professionalisation it is used as a way of excluding people rather than including them. It is an odd thing for the Civil Service suddenly to start talking about professionalisation when the rest of the world is trying to deal with the negative impact of professionalisation. One of the serious concerns I have and Gus O'Donnell is well aware of this as a danger, is that if you professionalise the delivery arm, then you professionalise the policy arm, then you professionalise the expert arm, it is going to become more difficult to have movement between them and more difficult to ensure that you end up with people at the senior levels who have real experience of delivery and policy. That is what worries me. The policy elite within the Civil Service are cunning people and they are very good at protecting their position and keeping those who are regarded as managers or deliverers away from the most senior posts. I want to see a Civil Service which has got people at the top with a real mix of skills: policy, strategy, creativity and delivery and operational management.

Dr Mulgan: I agree with that and I oppose going too far towards a professionalised strategy cadre for exactly the reasons Sir Michael gave. Around the management of information technology, money and people, there are very strong arguments for professionalisation and reliance on amateurs running these very important functions was bad for the Civil Service and bad for the country and it is right to try to professionalise that. To over-professionalise implementation and policy and therefore to exclude practitioners and the wider public has been tried many times in the past in other governments and big companies and it nearly always goes wrong.

Q61 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Are we not seeing it go wrong now? Number 10 is desperately trying to keep everything here so there are all these units, Lord Birt hiding up a staircase in a room and we cannot get at him. We are being closed down. You say that Parliament should have a wider role but we cannot get at the people. Is this not the problem, that it is a black art, it is being held up? A guy called Mike Turley is the Deloitte partner in charge of local government and he says "You have to break the organisation down into manageable units...being able to manage your human capital on the basis of a common currency is very valuable capital". Does that not sum it up? You actually have to break it down so that people are accountable at a much higher level, so you create government which is open and if you want long-termism, that is the only way you can do it, is it not?

Sir Michael Bichard: I have this quaint idea that if you work in the public sector you should be accountable.

Q62 Mr Liddell-Grainger: We all love that.

Sir Michael Bichard: I hold that view as strongly as I hold the views about memoirs that you put to me earlier. On the other point you make, it is very dangerous if the sort of thing we have been talking about this morning, strategic thinking, is seen as a black art. What we have both been saying is that strategic thinking happens when you involve a wide range of people with different experiences and approaches, because every strategic issue is a function of connectivity and it should not be a black art and it should not be done behind closed doors and public servants should be accountable.

Dr Mulgan: On your point on units, in my view the centre of government, Number 10, Cabinet Office and Treasury, certainly does need some people who are taking an overview on strategic direction, management of money, IT, communications and the limited number of functions you have to have in the centre of any government. Beyond that I would have very little in there. You do not necessarily need those to be organised in units, there are lots of different ways it could be done and the Cabinet Office in the past, over the last 20 years, has repeatedly proliferated units which often were quite useful for a short period of time to get some change underway, but then proved hard to close down.

Q63 Mr Liddell-Grainger: I think you hit the nail on the head when you mentioned Chris Patten in the 1970s. I do not know who the Labour thinker was in the 1970s who ran their unit but they were very predominant, they were the thinkers within and then it went into the Civil Service. These are controlled Civil Service units within Number 10 which are not accountable, which we cannot get at. You did come to us and so did Barber and I think it was Thompson, but it was very tough to get the information we required. Surely we should get back to the days of free political thinking.

Dr Mulgan: We would both generally say that if someone is serving the public they should be accountable for what they do.

Q64 Mr Liddell-Grainger: One last very small question. When you were in delivery did you ever come across a project called True North?

Dr Mulgan: No.

Mr Liddell-Grainger: That is all I wanted to know.

Q65 Mr Prentice: Are there issues which are suitable for public consultation, learning from the public? You mentioned your neighbourhood policy. Are there some issues which are just a bit too difficult where the public may not be that well informed? I am thinking here about GM crops, I am thinking about stem cells. Are there categories where both of you would consider that it would be inappropriate to involve the public and let the public determine the way in which policy was put together?

Sir Michael Bichard: Ultimately the public elects people to take difficult decisions, so it is not ultimately determining. My view is that, outside of maybe some security issues, the public should be involved and informed in debate. Take GM: it is really important. They all have views, whether you involve and inform them or not. The more we can develop a society where people understand the issues the better. The role of people like me when I was a permanent secretary or the government scientist is really to try to articulate these complex issues in a way that more and more people can play a part. That is what good professionals do, that is what good civil servants should do: take a complicated issue and present it and communicate it in a way which enables as many people as possible to play a part in that debate.

Dr Mulgan: All these processes are simply about advice to ministers so they have a better understanding of how to make decisions. There is a question around what sort of issues are good for referendums and generally issues like stem cells are not very well suited to having referendums for all sorts of reasons. You could say the euro is not a very good issue on which to have a referendum because the number of people who really understand the issues around the euro is arguably quite small, but that is a matter of debate. What the GM exercise showed was that even on pretty complex issues involving lots of ambiguous views of the science or the ethics and the economics, if members of the public are taken through a process which gives them the time, the chance to think and deliberate, they come to pretty sensible conclusions on almost any issue. This has been the experience with a lot of issues around bio-science as well, not only in this country. My bias would be towards having more processes of that kind because public opinion is going to be a material fact in political decisions whether or not these things happen. The more we can do to ensure that public opinion is well informed and has had a chance to deliberate rather than being influenced by tabloid headlines, the better.

Q66 Chairman: Why do you think we have stopped having royal commissions? That was the traditional British mechanism for thinking about future issues.

Dr Mulgan: There have been some royal commissions: care, and the one on environmental pollution is still going. In some ways they have failed some of the tests which we have been describing. The idea that simply putting a bunch of the great and the good together around a table will get you to the right and legitimate answer no longer works today for quite a few reasons. One is that it is not clear whether they would use the right methods for analysing a problem. Second, it is not clear that the public will see their views as legitimate just because they are great and good and that is why we need much more expansive and inclusive processes than in the classic royal commission. That said, perhaps an updated or modernised variant of the royal commission might be quite a suitable way of dealing with some issues.

Q67 Chairman: You mentioned the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, which is a curious thing. It was set up as a standing royal commission. I am not sure that it has the salience now that it perhaps ought to have. I wonder whether a better model would not be a generic futures commission which would be tasked with the job of looking at a range of issues to do with the next generation, the future, independent from government but funded by government, because government have accepted that it is a thing which ought to go on, but would have the job of stimulating public debate and argument about these things and perhaps wrap up something like the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution into such a body.

Sir Michael Bichard: It is an attractive option, but if it is going to be worthwhile, then it has to be listened to and it has to have some impact and influence on the debate. We talked earlier about maybe a futures select committee. My sense is that that would have a better chance of using its networks and influence to ensure that its discussions were taken seriously and it could actually be supported by something like the kind of thing you have just referred to. My gut reaction is that if you just set it up entirely free-standing it will very quickly become dismissed as being full of blue-sky thinkers who are completely disconnected from reality and no one will listen. One of the problems with royal commissions, and my small contribution may not be right, is that some of them just got carried away and became so complicated that they were producing things that politicians could not use and act upon. The small experience I had with an inquiry a year or so ago was looking at how inquiries operated generally and one of the reasons that an inquiry has not been as effective sometimes as one would want is because they just produced so many recommendations and made it so complicated that it was actually difficult to focus on the small number of really key things which ought to change as a result of their work.

Dr Mulgan: My final point links to the previous comments on politics. Any of these machineries ultimately only works to the extent that they fit with ultimate political authority and decision making and that is why this Government has used a lot of different methods from commissioning one-person reviews like Wanless, to the Turner commission which was four people, to royal commissions, to much more internal processes. Often which mechanism is used depends on political judgments about how open or controlled or what timescale is appropriate. A one-size-fits-all solution simply may not sufficiently fit day-to-day political realities and the client's needs.

Q68 Kelvin Hopkins: Is it not simply that royal commissions tend to come up with answers which Downing Street does not like? The Royal Commission on Long-Term Care recommended free long-term care paid for out of taxation, which would have cost £1 billion a year, one third of a penny on the standard rate of tax or however you wish to pay for it, but Downing Street did not like it and therefore they do not want to set up any more royal commissions because they might come up with similar answers. That had 80 per cent popular support, by the way.

Dr Mulgan: That particular royal commission was divided. There was a minority report by three of its members and in some ways the royal commissions are the alternative to the political processes you were recommending earlier. Putting things to non-political great-and-the-good experts is an alternative to doing things through political argument.

Q69 Mr Prentice: Is it possible to see the future? We have organisations like the Henley Centre for Forecasting and you were talking about horizon scanning and so on. Are there organisations out there which can actually map the future, clearly not in the long term but in the near term, which we can learn from?

Dr Mulgan: I have always been very wary of using words like "forecast" or "predict", anything which gives the appearance of certainty. There are some things which you can have reasonable clarity on like demography, though even demography figures are regularly adjusted looking forward 20, 40, 50 years, or indeed with some of the roll-out of big generic technologies you can have a reasonable picture of 10 or 20 years. Many of the processes we have been talking about are not about trying to predict the future. They are about trying to make sure that decision makers today have a better understanding of the many different possible futures which they will be operating in, and that their decisions are as robust as possible against a range of different futures, rather than the wishful thinking which is often characteristic of governments and parties and human beings, where we want to believe in a particular future which will make our policies work. All these mechanisms are in some ways counter to that pull of human nature to make us face up to realities which otherwise we might want to ignore.

Sir Michael Bichard: That was the last point I wanted to make. Sometimes it is possible to be reasonably certain about what is going to happen, or to think you are at least. Sometimes you can be certain that you cannot be certain, that actually what is going to happen is very uncertain and there is a large number of different possible scenarios. It is perfectly legitimate to come to the conclusion then that your forward planning should be about maintaining some flexibility to deal with a very uncertain environment. That is what public management is sometimes about, it is what any strategic planning is sometimes about: God knows what is going to happen, there is a whole range of alternatives, we just need to be flexible and not close down our options too soon.

Chairman: Do you remember a generation or so ago that we were all taken up with the idea that the impact of technology was going to be unemployment on a scale we had never seen before and what on earth were we going to do with all this leisure time we were going to have and so on and so on? If we had in a sense set up a strategic task force to deal with that we should all look a bit silly now. It is rather like Keith Joseph, do you remember, saying that he was absolutely certain that colour television would never catch on? We have to be rather careful about this. Thank you very much indeed for an interesting session and for informing our thoughts and our inquiry greatly. Thank you again both of you.