Lots of good critical points in this post. However I would want readers to note that:
None of the criticisms in the post really pertain to the core elements of the bill. The theory of change for the bill is: government doesn’t make long term plans > tell government to make long term plans (i.e. set a long term vision and track progress towards it) > then government will make long term plans. This approach has had research and thought put into it.
This draft of the bill makes much more sense when you see it as a campaigning tool, a showcase of ideas. This is a private members bill (PMB). PMBs are primarily campaigning techniques to build support and spark debate. It will not be passed through parliament (in its current form).
INTRODUCTION
Thank you for posting. (And thank you for sharing a draft of your post with me before posting so I could start drafting this reply).
I have been the main person from the EA community working on the bill campaign. I have never been in the driving seat for the bill but I have had some influence over it.
I agree with many of the points raised. At a high level I agree for example that there is no “compelling evidence” that this bill work work as planned. Society has not worked out how to fix short-termism in policy making. I do however think this is an important enough issue that we should try to address it with a Future Generations Bill (similar to this one). I think statements in this post like “if the Bill were passed as currently drafted, it could significantly damage short and long term welfare” are unjustified by the text and overstated given the degree of evidence.
Overall I think there seems to be some confusion in this post about what the bill is doing and trying to achieve (acting as a rallying point) and what it is not doing (being passed in Parliament). So I will briefly run though an explanation of the bill and then respond to specific points made by the post above before drawing a conclusion.
AN EXPLANATION
1. THE GOOD: What is the Future Generations Bill doing?
The theory of change for the bill is:
A: The UK government doesn’t make a long-term plan. Some bits of government have long-term (~10year) plans (NHS, Foreign Policy) but many do not, and certainly there is no single coherent long-term UK strategy document.
B: Long term planning has some key features, in particular: • Setting coherent long term goals • Setting intermediate objectives that if achieved move us towards the long term goal • Working towards those objectives/goals • Tracking progress towards that objectives/goals
C: Some politically neutral oversight / input is extremely helpful to long-term planning in government. This view is based on senior policy experts’ views of cases where long term planning appears to have gone well in the UK, all of which appear to have this feature (the IPA, the CCC, the NCSC, the BoE, etc).
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D: Put in place legislation that requires the government to do long term planning: • The government to set a high level long-term goal (“wellbeing goals”). A advisory public consultation (“national conversation”) would be best policy making practice for this. • Each department to set intermediate goals (“wellbeing objectives”). • Tracking progress towards the goals and objectives. • Some form of non-political oversight.
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E: A government that is better at planning for the long-term
This is the core of the Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill.
I don’t think anyone knows with any certainty how to fix political short termism . Integrating these core ideas into government policy making (maybe with a bill) represents perhaps my best guess at how to get a government to work long term (without radical change). Evidence from the Welsh bill is mixed but there is some evidence that the bill there is having a positive effect on creating a long-term thinking culture among policy makers.
Research into this can be seen in the “Past research” section here, the report here, the forum post here and eventually the upcoming inquiry mentioned here. Note that none of the critiques in this post really seem to be against these core ideas. (So, hopefully we are all roughly on the same page with this bit.)
So then, what is all the other stuff in the bill, why the challenges with this draft?
2. THE BAD: So what about all the other bits of the bill about surveying school children or involving the courts and what about the length or the vagueness of the bill?
The current draft of the bill is a campaign tool. It will not become law. The Bill has been laid in Parliament as a House of Lords Private Members Bill (PMB).
The bill was not written by trained legal drafters. In government, when I worked on drafting a statutory instrument, it took about 6 months and involved multiple lawyers and a range of technical experts. Meanwhile any Parliamentarian can lay legislation in Parliament for debate – but they don’t get the lawyers or technical experts (maybe an hour or two of time from Table Office). The Bill was mostly drafted by the campaign staff of Lord Bird. To get this drafted they took the Welsh Bill as a template and then added and subtracted from that, often by looking at other bills and seeing what could be copied over. (In fact I found at least one typo in the earlier version that was laid in parliament.)
This draft of the bill will not become UK law. Most PMBs go nowhere and are never heard of. As far as I know no house of Lords private members bill passes through the House of Commons to become law except where they can pass completely unopposed without debate (e.g. 2019 on FGM and 2015 on the House of Lords expulsion rules). That seems extremely unlikely for this bill.
This draft of the bill is a shopping list of ideas. This bill is primarily a campaigning tool to spark debate and build support for an idea. And so a strategic decision was made by Lords Bird’s team to, rather than have a nice short bill, INCLUDE ALL THE IDEAS: legal powers, prevention targets, consulting school children, rules on companies (not in the current draft), etc. Now in my view this makes a bill worse, but also more popular. Worse: for example it does (in my view) not need independent oversight from a new Parliamentary Committee AND a new Commissioner AND 2 existing arm’s length bodies AND the public (via the courts)!! More popular: politicians (even those on the right) want to support a bill with their ideas in it, even if it has some other ideas in it, so more ideas → more supporters.
Given the above I think the drafting of the bill deserves to be given some slack. Personally this is not be the approach I would have taken (I mean I am an EA policy nerd who prefers a short tightly drafted pieces of work I can 100% stand by), but I am not sure that this was the wrong tactic to have taken. It does open up the bill to criticisms on much of the fluff – but at the same time it seems to have worked to build support from a lot of MPs across political parties.
[Edit added for clarity: I don’t think the bill is net bad and yet support it anyway as a campaign device. I think the bill could be better drafted but is still a net good (the benefits outweigh costs)]
3. THE BEAUTIFUL: Is it doing good or not?
Most private members’ bills fade into obscurity this one has not. There have been over 266 media pieces, with a global reach of 92 million. There has been support from 70+ MPs and 40+ Peers. A Conservative MP is taking forward the Bill in the House of Commons.
There has been interest from local authorities and devolved administrations. These places are where innovative policy change ideas should happen and be tested. There have been commitments for a Future Generations policy from the Mayor of Yorkshire and the Scottish Government.
It is unclear how much the bill has been useful for the APPG for Future Generations, but it has helped a bit in growing supporters and the APPG has led to change in ways that people on this Forum would be excited about such as the government committing to improve its approach to managing extreme risks (link).
So definitely not a perfect bill but beautiful in its own way.
RESPONSES TO SPECIFIC POINTS
The bill is not perfect but there was often a strategic reason for the Bill being drafted as it is. I also think John and Larks tend to overstate/exaggerate how bad the problems are without providing supporting evidence. I respond to a few points below.
superficial analysis
Mostly disagree. There has been significant analysis see here, here, and here. More would still be good.
Without any plausible theory of change
Disagree. There is a very clear theory of change described above. I admit this had not been written publicly prior to now. (I offered to write this up for the authors prior to them posting this article.)
Existential risk neglect.
Disagree. This was deliberate. My biggest impact on the draft was to add in this section on risks. At the time of drafting I consulted with staff at CSER who advised the bill should use “global risks” rather than “existential risks”. I believe they felt it was better to avoid the “existential risks” brand in this bill.
[Should push for] CLTR suggestions for three lines of defence
Strongly agree. (Note I might be bias as I am the author of that section of the CLTR paper.)
Vague language …
should write laws to try to guard against future actors’ attempts to creatively interpret them
Weakly disagree. Vague language is a tool that legislators sometimes deliberately use to achieve goals. It has pros and cons. It can increase uncertainty but is used to create legislation that can be adaptive to changing future needs. For example see the GAAR and maybe the ideas here in this white paper.
If this bill is to be an experiment then it needs to be able to be adaptable, to give powers to future Ministers to develop the specifics (And ideally set a date for review and evaluation, which it does not do, which is a genuine problem with it!). Given this context it is not clear that the vagueness of the wording is bad. Also note that a good way to mitigate any negative consequences of vagueness is by requiring a government body to issue further guidance, as is done in this draft bill.
I see no evidence to believe that vagueness will lead to an increased risk of “blocking things that were not intended to be blocked, or requiring things that were not intended to be required” in this context.
For example, consider the ‘sustainable development’ duty the Bill introduces on public bodies:
Neutral. I agree this definition is clearly hard to work with. However for context this definition of “sustainable development” was chosen because it is commonly used (it is the definition introduced by the UN in 1987 and widely used since then) which has the advantage of people already being familiar with it.
problem is that the Bill makes the judiciary the ultimate arbiter of the duties proposed
Agree. I would remove this from the Bill if it was solely up to me.
Hurts infrastructure investment
Weekly agree. As I mention above the current draft of the bill has 5 mechanisms for oversight and I expect this shopping list approach is too much and could lead to vetocracy.
On the other hand this bill could also SUPPORT more new infrastructure. The bill should facilitate long-term thinking, it the core elements of the bill are in part modelled on things that have lead to more infrastructure in the past (the IPA and the NIC). If the government’s stated long-term goals includes environmental protection (and national identity) over infrastructure (as with the Welsh example) then the bill should lead to that and if the government’s stated long-term goals include more infrastructure then the bill should help facilitate that. The bill makes no attempt to comment on what long-term goals should be in place, only to provide a framework to achieving them.
Red tape / makes procurement worse
Neutral. This is a risk but a very small one. Readers of the bill will note that for most red tape policies the drafters also included a line in the bill saying the policy was optional. For example for impact assessments (the only bit that affects procurement) departments can just not do them and say why they are not doing the. Yes this seems odd at first glance (why even include them) but it makes sense if you see the bill as a campaign tool to spark debate on a long list of policy ideas.
Regulatory capture
Disagree. This part of the critique seems tangential to the whole point of the bill. The bill does not exist to stop political pressures on policy or ensure a fully equal society, etc, ect. The bill makes no attempt to comment on what long-term goals should be in place, only to provide a framework to achieving them.
Missed opportunity for bipartisanship
Slightly agree. The bill does have fairly strong bi-partisan support but I do think more could have been done to engage the libertarian right. I do think this is harder than expected. The bill team engaged with a lot of right wing politicians including getting feedback some very senior ex-politicians. There is still a tendency for people to want to add their ideas rather than take out ideas. Also honestly they don’t say what you might naïvely expect, for example one of the ideas that did not go in following consultation with politicians on the political right was actually an idea Larks and John mention: about having the consultation involve more focus groups to get public opinions on trade-offs. (That the government does not back the bill is expect for a PMB).
Makes EAs looks bad
This is an odd critique. The bill is not EA led so I am not sure it should reflect on the EA community. In fact the idea for the Welsh bill predates the EA community. There has been one tweet critical of EA and linking EA and the bill (and to me that one Tweet did not look like it was made it good faith, it was rude, assumed incompetence, and contained no good arguments against the bill, of which there are plenty. Can add details if wanted).
[Edit added: supporters have exaggerated the size and fervour of support]
[Edit added: I think this would be bad but I know of no-one doing this and don’t know what this refers to.]
Risk of an echo chamber
Disagree. There was broad consultation across UK political and policy groups, including some EA organisations. It is not clear that a post on the EA forum by me would have had much effect or that the drafting team (in Lord Bird’s office) could have been persuaded to post on this forum. Also such engagement might just have increased the chance of the bill being associated with EA by critiques.
Sector-specific approaches may be needed
Agree. I like this bit. In fact it aligns with the current approach to the bill campaign that the secretariat to the APPG for Future Generations is taking, as of August last year. See here.
Ultimately, we think the base rate is that many efforts to improve policy in the last 50 years have ended in failure or worse. [Edited, was misquoted]We think the base rate is that most efforts to improve governance have ended in failure or worse
Disagree. This is an interesting claim I would like to see evidence for. If you think that the UK government today works better than it did 10 or 50 or 100 years ago then it seems false that most attempts to improve things do more harm than good.
OVERALL
I agree with some of the criticisms made in this post, but think many others are overstated. I thank the authors for their interest and feedback. Ultimately we do not know how to fix political short-termism but integrating something along the lines of the core elements of this bill into UK policy making seems like a reasonable thing to try. This specific drafting of this bill is not perfect – but to say it is so bad that it will cause significant harm is an overstatement given the evidence available. Either way this exact draft will not pass parliament but it has already sparked debate and successfully engaged politicians across both sides of the political spectrum. Overall I support this bill.
Many thanks for the thoughtful and constructive response. I agree with many of your comments.
(First, I note that our published text does not include the sentence you quoted:
We think the base rate is that most efforts to improve governance have ended in failure or worse
Instead it says this:
Ultimately, we think the base rate is that many efforts to improve policy in the last 50 years have ended in failure or worse.
We agreed with your comments on that and amended accordingly before publishing. Thank you again for giving them.)
Responding to your two main points in reverse order:
This draft of the bill makes much more sense when you see it as a campaigning tool, a showcase of ideas. This is a private members bill (PMB). PMBs are primarily campaigning techniques to build support and spark debate. It will not be passed through parliament (in its current form).
1. We did not intend to criticize the Bill as a campaigning device. We intended to express doubts that it should be enacted, and it seems there is more consensus on that than we thought. We expressly said that we never meant to criticize anyone’s actions. And we agree with you about the minimal likelihood of this particular Bill being enacted, although that does not prevent it being the basis of a subsequent bill, so it still matters what the Bill contains and whether those provisions should become law.
2. However, even as a campaigning device, it would be helpful to know what elements of the Bill have won support. Has it built more support for workable and beneficial measures, or for a range of populist measures that will be harmful? We do not have the data to judge but given the weight of the latter in the draft, I am concerned.
If the counterfactual to this Bill is no Bill, I think my view (with considerably lower confidence than on the enactment question) is that no Bill may on balance have been better, insofar as it may create or reinforce unhelpful Schelling points for damaging ideas. That relates to my doubts about the substantive theory of change:
None of the criticisms in the post really pertain to the core elements of the bill. The theory of change for the bill is: government doesn’t make long term plans > tell government to make long term plans (i.e. set a long term vision and track progress towards it) > then government will make long term plans. This approach has had research and thought put into it.
Again, let me stress that I highly welcome the ends and I am keen to discuss more about how to achieve them. My sole concern is with this particular theory of change.
1. If we are looking at the Bill as legislation then what the ‘core elements of the bill’ are could have different meanings. In this regard we prefer to look at likely outcomes rather than intentions. There are many other elements of the Bill that we think would likely make the Bill net damaging to welfare if enacted as law.
2. I strongly support long term planning by the Government, so long as it is done with nearly enough epistemic humility. It is not true that the Government doesn’t make long term plans. There are many sectors where the Government does make or has made long term plans. At present, they are often extraordinarily badly designed.
a. For example, since the 1930s the Government has planned in one way or another to try to push against economic gravity (agglomeration effects) to drive jobs away from higher productivity areas of the country, at enormous costs to welfare. I wrote a casual summary of some such attempts here.
b. The planning system in general attempts to forecast ‘need’ and various other metrics in at least the medium term, and in the cases of some infrastructure for the long term. Those forecasts are often circular, not least because the population movements will partly depend upon the amount of housing and other infrastructure that gets built.
c. The negative effects caused by the bad design of the current planning system have, I estimate, probably damaged welfare per head by at least 10%, while increasing pollution and inequality, among many other problems, as my co-authors and I wrote about here.
d. The Government makes long term plans for infrastructure, of which HS2 is one of the largest examples. While I strongly support building infrastructure in general, I have profound concerns about whether HS2 itself is the best use of the many scores of billions of pounds that will be spent on it.
e. The Government makes long term plans for defence. But I have seen private estimates that the UK’s defence capabilities if attacked are vastly less strong than is assumed by the Government.
f. In relation to the specific institutions you name in the excerpt you quote, I agree IPA may have helped (although we need to do better: infrastructure planning in the UK in general is still worse than many other European countries). But the BoE has for decades provided banks with a range of implicit subsidies. As a result, the banks have eye-watering degrees of leverage and are still profoundly unstable, risky and rent-laden. The BoE has not ensured any plausible plans to resolve major banks in the event of a financial crisis to avoid the necessity of yet another bailout to prevent the collapse of the financial system.
Insofar as the institutions you mention have been helpful, it is worth noting that they are sector-specific. I think there is substantial risk that any general, non-sector-specific Government long-term plans may end up having effects as disastrous as those of the Barlow Report.
So in general I think the Government as currently made up seems (a) lacking in epistemic humility, (b) not good at picking tractable areas in which to make long term plans, and (c) frequently incapable of competently executing on them.
Therefore I think that getting the Government as currently formed to select and act on long term plans, unless the subjects of those long term plans are very carefully guided, could be highly damaging to the welfare of future generations, at least if we look at the long term plans that it has previously created and executed upon that have had the most economic impact over the last 50 years.
So I think there is considerable risk that wellbeing goals set through public consultation will be unattainable or even outright damaging. Goals set by UK governments often seem to be pure responses to short-term electoral or populist incentives and frequently are not even as rational as that.
Response to specific points
I agree that the analysis done in advance of the Bill has been thoughtful and I welcome it. However I think we need to go much deeper to get any confidence about likely outcomes. Mushtaq Khan might be a good place to start in analysing what would be workable given existing UK institutions, and I think his papers illustrate the depth of analysis that it would be useful to have. I welcome your interest in sector-specific approaches and I think there is scope for an enormous amount of progress here.
Conclusion
I would welcome trials of this approach, despite many historically disastrous attempts at long term planning by the UK Government, but the proposals for long term planning in this Bill seem to be a proposal for implementation rather than a trial. I would prefer a trial to be conducted on some selective basis so that we can measure the counterfactual. We could try selecting different sectors, or we could try imposing such requirements on a random selection of mayors, for example. We might also do more in depth study of the many disastrous attempts at long-term planning that the UK Government has previously undertaken, and attempt to build in legislative safeguards against as many of those cases as possible before seeking implementation. But, as I said above, I think a sectoral approach to getting more long-term perspectives and actions in government may be much more productive.
Again, I think you for all your work on this and for the constructive feedback, and I am pleased that we agree on many goals. I hope we can continue this discussion and would welcome collaboration.
Hi John, Thank you for the healthy debate. I am finding it very interesting.
I just want to pick up on one point that is perhaps an important crux where I think my views are quite different from yours. You say:
I think that getting the Government as currently formed to select and act on long term plans, unless the subjects of those long term plans are very carefully guided, could be highly damaging
You seem to be saying that the bill would encourage government to do more long-term decision making but government decision making about the future is just so terrible that we should not encourage it to happen (at least any time soon, at least in any general way).
Insofar as there is a problem of political short-termism (which I think there is considerable evidence for) this line of reasoning seems to suggest that we should not fix that problem (at least for now, in any general sense). I don’t buy this. I tend to apply a very high standard of evidence to arguments against fixing a problem and/or in favour of making systems worse in some way. (As a thought experiment if the government regularly made long-term plans and had a clear way to do it, would you want to stop that happening?)
Furthermore, your evidence for this claim is not strong – it appears primarily to rest on a list of anecdotal stories of failures in long-term planning stretching back over 50 years. But this appears one-sided. I can rattle of an equally long list of times when I think long-term planning has gone or is going well (in reducing regulation, in financial stability, in cyber security, in energy, in nuclear decommissioning, in forestry, in climate, in flood defence, in sewers, etc, etc). There is certainly no universal rule that government long-term planning has to go badly. I also think we should recognise that the significant development of government capability in some long term planning tools over recent years in government such as the impressive Futures Toolkit or the cross-Whitehall heads of horizon scanning project (I think these also serve as examples of non-sector specific approaches).
This is perhaps an important crux. It seems to me that in addition to your (often valid) criticisms of the drafting and some of the fluff in the bill you also have a belief that the bill should not be doing what the bill sets out to do – to generally make government more long-term! I am not sure how to resolve this disagreement. Like I said, I apply a high standard of evidence to such claims that we should not fix problems. But keen to hear your views.
I work on government legislation in the civil service and can confirm that private member’s bills wouldn’t have any access to the Office for Parliamentary Counsel (government specialist lawyers) unless government supports the private member’s bill, which is rare. Private member’s bills are primarily used as campaigning tools for demonstrating political support for a particular idea and getting it debated in Parliament.
I can sympathise with both parties here but I think the EA Comms part of this bill could have been better. It seems consistent with both sides to have done some comms saying “this is a first draft, it is a rallying point, it has some EA involvement but is not an EA bill”. I think saying that on Twitter for instance, would have avoided a lot of blowback.
Thanks to weeatquince for their work on the bill and the authors of this article for their response.
TL;DR
Lots of good critical points in this post. However I would want readers to note that:
None of the criticisms in the post really pertain to the core elements of the bill. The theory of change for the bill is: government doesn’t make long term plans > tell government to make long term plans (i.e. set a long term vision and track progress towards it) > then government will make long term plans. This approach has had research and thought put into it.
This draft of the bill makes much more sense when you see it as a campaigning tool, a showcase of ideas. This is a private members bill (PMB). PMBs are primarily campaigning techniques to build support and spark debate. It will not be passed through parliament (in its current form).
INTRODUCTION
Thank you for posting. (And thank you for sharing a draft of your post with me before posting so I could start drafting this reply).
I have been the main person from the EA community working on the bill campaign. I have never been in the driving seat for the bill but I have had some influence over it.
I agree with many of the points raised. At a high level I agree for example that there is no “compelling evidence” that this bill work work as planned. Society has not worked out how to fix short-termism in policy making. I do however think this is an important enough issue that we should try to address it with a Future Generations Bill (similar to this one). I think statements in this post like “if the Bill were passed as currently drafted, it could significantly damage short and long term welfare” are unjustified by the text and overstated given the degree of evidence.
Overall I think there seems to be some confusion in this post about what the bill is doing and trying to achieve (acting as a rallying point) and what it is not doing (being passed in Parliament). So I will briefly run though an explanation of the bill and then respond to specific points made by the post above before drawing a conclusion.
AN EXPLANATION
1. THE GOOD: What is the Future Generations Bill doing?
The theory of change for the bill is:
This is the core of the Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill.
I don’t think anyone knows with any certainty how to fix political short termism . Integrating these core ideas into government policy making (maybe with a bill) represents perhaps my best guess at how to get a government to work long term (without radical change). Evidence from the Welsh bill is mixed but there is some evidence that the bill there is having a positive effect on creating a long-term thinking culture among policy makers.
Research into this can be seen in the “Past research” section here, the report here, the forum post here and eventually the upcoming inquiry mentioned here. Note that none of the critiques in this post really seem to be against these core ideas. (So, hopefully we are all roughly on the same page with this bit.)
So then, what is all the other stuff in the bill, why the challenges with this draft?
2. THE BAD: So what about all the other bits of the bill about surveying school children or involving the courts and what about the length or the vagueness of the bill?
The current draft of the bill is a campaign tool. It will not become law. The Bill has been laid in Parliament as a House of Lords Private Members Bill (PMB).
The bill was not written by trained legal drafters. In government, when I worked on drafting a statutory instrument, it took about 6 months and involved multiple lawyers and a range of technical experts. Meanwhile any Parliamentarian can lay legislation in Parliament for debate – but they don’t get the lawyers or technical experts (maybe an hour or two of time from Table Office). The Bill was mostly drafted by the campaign staff of Lord Bird. To get this drafted they took the Welsh Bill as a template and then added and subtracted from that, often by looking at other bills and seeing what could be copied over. (In fact I found at least one typo in the earlier version that was laid in parliament.)
This draft of the bill will not become UK law. Most PMBs go nowhere and are never heard of. As far as I know no house of Lords private members bill passes through the House of Commons to become law except where they can pass completely unopposed without debate (e.g. 2019 on FGM and 2015 on the House of Lords expulsion rules). That seems extremely unlikely for this bill.
This draft of the bill is a shopping list of ideas. This bill is primarily a campaigning tool to spark debate and build support for an idea. And so a strategic decision was made by Lords Bird’s team to, rather than have a nice short bill, INCLUDE ALL THE IDEAS: legal powers, prevention targets, consulting school children, rules on companies (not in the current draft), etc. Now in my view this makes a bill worse, but also more popular. Worse: for example it does (in my view) not need independent oversight from a new Parliamentary Committee AND a new Commissioner AND 2 existing arm’s length bodies AND the public (via the courts)!! More popular: politicians (even those on the right) want to support a bill with their ideas in it, even if it has some other ideas in it, so more ideas → more supporters.
Given the above I think the drafting of the bill deserves to be given some slack. Personally this is not be the approach I would have taken (I mean I am an EA policy nerd who prefers a short tightly drafted pieces of work I can 100% stand by), but I am not sure that this was the wrong tactic to have taken. It does open up the bill to criticisms on much of the fluff – but at the same time it seems to have worked to build support from a lot of MPs across political parties.
[Edit added for clarity: I don’t think the bill is net bad and yet support it anyway as a campaign device. I think the bill could be better drafted but is still a net good (the benefits outweigh costs)]
3. THE BEAUTIFUL: Is it doing good or not?
Most private members’ bills fade into obscurity this one has not. There have been over 266 media pieces, with a global reach of 92 million. There has been support from 70+ MPs and 40+ Peers. A Conservative MP is taking forward the Bill in the House of Commons.
There has been interest from local authorities and devolved administrations. These places are where innovative policy change ideas should happen and be tested. There have been commitments for a Future Generations policy from the Mayor of Yorkshire and the Scottish Government.
It is unclear how much the bill has been useful for the APPG for Future Generations, but it has helped a bit in growing supporters and the APPG has led to change in ways that people on this Forum would be excited about such as the government committing to improve its approach to managing extreme risks (link).
So definitely not a perfect bill but beautiful in its own way.
RESPONSES TO SPECIFIC POINTS
The bill is not perfect but there was often a strategic reason for the Bill being drafted as it is. I also think John and Larks tend to overstate/exaggerate how bad the problems are without providing supporting evidence. I respond to a few points below.
Mostly disagree. There has been significant analysis see here, here, and here. More would still be good.
Disagree. There is a very clear theory of change described above. I admit this had not been written publicly prior to now. (I offered to write this up for the authors prior to them posting this article.)
Disagree. This was deliberate. My biggest impact on the draft was to add in this section on risks. At the time of drafting I consulted with staff at CSER who advised the bill should use “global risks” rather than “existential risks”. I believe they felt it was better to avoid the “existential risks” brand in this bill.
Strongly agree. (Note I might be bias as I am the author of that section of the CLTR paper.)
Weakly disagree. Vague language is a tool that legislators sometimes deliberately use to achieve goals. It has pros and cons. It can increase uncertainty but is used to create legislation that can be adaptive to changing future needs. For example see the GAAR and maybe the ideas here in this white paper.
If this bill is to be an experiment then it needs to be able to be adaptable, to give powers to future Ministers to develop the specifics (And ideally set a date for review and evaluation, which it does not do, which is a genuine problem with it!). Given this context it is not clear that the vagueness of the wording is bad. Also note that a good way to mitigate any negative consequences of vagueness is by requiring a government body to issue further guidance, as is done in this draft bill.
I see no evidence to believe that vagueness will lead to an increased risk of “blocking things that were not intended to be blocked, or requiring things that were not intended to be required” in this context.
Neutral. I agree this definition is clearly hard to work with. However for context this definition of “sustainable development” was chosen because it is commonly used (it is the definition introduced by the UN in 1987 and widely used since then) which has the advantage of people already being familiar with it.
Agree. I would remove this from the Bill if it was solely up to me.
Weekly agree. As I mention above the current draft of the bill has 5 mechanisms for oversight and I expect this shopping list approach is too much and could lead to vetocracy.
On the other hand this bill could also SUPPORT more new infrastructure. The bill should facilitate long-term thinking, it the core elements of the bill are in part modelled on things that have lead to more infrastructure in the past (the IPA and the NIC). If the government’s stated long-term goals includes environmental protection (and national identity) over infrastructure (as with the Welsh example) then the bill should lead to that and if the government’s stated long-term goals include more infrastructure then the bill should help facilitate that. The bill makes no attempt to comment on what long-term goals should be in place, only to provide a framework to achieving them.
Neutral. This is a risk but a very small one. Readers of the bill will note that for most red tape policies the drafters also included a line in the bill saying the policy was optional. For example for impact assessments (the only bit that affects procurement) departments can just not do them and say why they are not doing the. Yes this seems odd at first glance (why even include them) but it makes sense if you see the bill as a campaign tool to spark debate on a long list of policy ideas.
Disagree. This part of the critique seems tangential to the whole point of the bill. The bill does not exist to stop political pressures on policy or ensure a fully equal society, etc, ect. The bill makes no attempt to comment on what long-term goals should be in place, only to provide a framework to achieving them.
Slightly agree. The bill does have fairly strong bi-partisan support but I do think more could have been done to engage the libertarian right. I do think this is harder than expected. The bill team engaged with a lot of right wing politicians including getting feedback some very senior ex-politicians. There is still a tendency for people to want to add their ideas rather than take out ideas. Also honestly they don’t say what you might naïvely expect, for example one of the ideas that did not go in following consultation with politicians on the political right was actually an idea Larks and John mention: about having the consultation involve more focus groups to get public opinions on trade-offs. (That the government does not back the bill is expect for a PMB).
This is an odd critique. The bill is not EA led so I am not sure it should reflect on the EA community. In fact the idea for the Welsh bill predates the EA community. There has been one tweet critical of EA and linking EA and the bill (and to me that one Tweet did not look like it was made it good faith, it was rude, assumed incompetence, and contained no good arguments against the bill, of which there are plenty. Can add details if wanted).
[Edit added: I think this would be bad but I know of no-one doing this and don’t know what this refers to.]
Disagree. There was broad consultation across UK political and policy groups, including some EA organisations. It is not clear that a post on the EA forum by me would have had much effect or that the drafting team (in Lord Bird’s office) could have been persuaded to post on this forum. Also such engagement might just have increased the chance of the bill being associated with EA by critiques.
Agree. I like this bit. In fact it aligns with the current approach to the bill campaign that the secretariat to the APPG for Future Generations is taking, as of August last year. See here.
Disagree.
This is an interesting claim I would like to see evidence for.If you think that the UK government today works better than it did 10 or 50 or 100 years ago then it seems false that most attempts to improve things do more harm than good.OVERALL
I agree with some of the criticisms made in this post, but think many others are overstated. I thank the authors for their interest and feedback. Ultimately we do not know how to fix political short-termism but integrating something along the lines of the core elements of this bill into UK policy making seems like a reasonable thing to try. This specific drafting of this bill is not perfect – but to say it is so bad that it will cause significant harm is an overstatement given the evidence available. Either way this exact draft will not pass parliament but it has already sparked debate and successfully engaged politicians across both sides of the political spectrum. Overall I support this bill.
I am open to more feedback discussion and debate.
Many thanks for the thoughtful and constructive response. I agree with many of your comments.
(First, I note that our published text does not include the sentence you quoted:
Instead it says this:
We agreed with your comments on that and amended accordingly before publishing. Thank you again for giving them.)
Responding to your two main points in reverse order:
1. We did not intend to criticize the Bill as a campaigning device. We intended to express doubts that it should be enacted, and it seems there is more consensus on that than we thought. We expressly said that we never meant to criticize anyone’s actions. And we agree with you about the minimal likelihood of this particular Bill being enacted, although that does not prevent it being the basis of a subsequent bill, so it still matters what the Bill contains and whether those provisions should become law.
2. However, even as a campaigning device, it would be helpful to know what elements of the Bill have won support. Has it built more support for workable and beneficial measures, or for a range of populist measures that will be harmful? We do not have the data to judge but given the weight of the latter in the draft, I am concerned.
If the counterfactual to this Bill is no Bill, I think my view (with considerably lower confidence than on the enactment question) is that no Bill may on balance have been better, insofar as it may create or reinforce unhelpful Schelling points for damaging ideas. That relates to my doubts about the substantive theory of change:
Again, let me stress that I highly welcome the ends and I am keen to discuss more about how to achieve them. My sole concern is with this particular theory of change.
1. If we are looking at the Bill as legislation then what the ‘core elements of the bill’ are could have different meanings. In this regard we prefer to look at likely outcomes rather than intentions. There are many other elements of the Bill that we think would likely make the Bill net damaging to welfare if enacted as law.
2. I strongly support long term planning by the Government, so long as it is done with nearly enough epistemic humility. It is not true that the Government doesn’t make long term plans. There are many sectors where the Government does make or has made long term plans. At present, they are often extraordinarily badly designed.
a. For example, since the 1930s the Government has planned in one way or another to try to push against economic gravity (agglomeration effects) to drive jobs away from higher productivity areas of the country, at enormous costs to welfare. I wrote a casual summary of some such attempts here.
b. The planning system in general attempts to forecast ‘need’ and various other metrics in at least the medium term, and in the cases of some infrastructure for the long term. Those forecasts are often circular, not least because the population movements will partly depend upon the amount of housing and other infrastructure that gets built.
c. The negative effects caused by the bad design of the current planning system have, I estimate, probably damaged welfare per head by at least 10%, while increasing pollution and inequality, among many other problems, as my co-authors and I wrote about here.
d. The Government makes long term plans for infrastructure, of which HS2 is one of the largest examples. While I strongly support building infrastructure in general, I have profound concerns about whether HS2 itself is the best use of the many scores of billions of pounds that will be spent on it.
e. The Government makes long term plans for defence. But I have seen private estimates that the UK’s defence capabilities if attacked are vastly less strong than is assumed by the Government.
f. In relation to the specific institutions you name in the excerpt you quote, I agree IPA may have helped (although we need to do better: infrastructure planning in the UK in general is still worse than many other European countries). But the BoE has for decades provided banks with a range of implicit subsidies. As a result, the banks have eye-watering degrees of leverage and are still profoundly unstable, risky and rent-laden. The BoE has not ensured any plausible plans to resolve major banks in the event of a financial crisis to avoid the necessity of yet another bailout to prevent the collapse of the financial system.
Insofar as the institutions you mention have been helpful, it is worth noting that they are sector-specific. I think there is substantial risk that any general, non-sector-specific Government long-term plans may end up having effects as disastrous as those of the Barlow Report.
So in general I think the Government as currently made up seems (a) lacking in epistemic humility, (b) not good at picking tractable areas in which to make long term plans, and (c) frequently incapable of competently executing on them.
Therefore I think that getting the Government as currently formed to select and act on long term plans, unless the subjects of those long term plans are very carefully guided, could be highly damaging to the welfare of future generations, at least if we look at the long term plans that it has previously created and executed upon that have had the most economic impact over the last 50 years.
So I think there is considerable risk that wellbeing goals set through public consultation will be unattainable or even outright damaging. Goals set by UK governments often seem to be pure responses to short-term electoral or populist incentives and frequently are not even as rational as that.
Response to specific points
I agree that the analysis done in advance of the Bill has been thoughtful and I welcome it. However I think we need to go much deeper to get any confidence about likely outcomes. Mushtaq Khan might be a good place to start in analysing what would be workable given existing UK institutions, and I think his papers illustrate the depth of analysis that it would be useful to have. I welcome your interest in sector-specific approaches and I think there is scope for an enormous amount of progress here.
Conclusion
I would welcome trials of this approach, despite many historically disastrous attempts at long term planning by the UK Government, but the proposals for long term planning in this Bill seem to be a proposal for implementation rather than a trial. I would prefer a trial to be conducted on some selective basis so that we can measure the counterfactual. We could try selecting different sectors, or we could try imposing such requirements on a random selection of mayors, for example. We might also do more in depth study of the many disastrous attempts at long-term planning that the UK Government has previously undertaken, and attempt to build in legislative safeguards against as many of those cases as possible before seeking implementation. But, as I said above, I think a sectoral approach to getting more long-term perspectives and actions in government may be much more productive.
Again, I think you for all your work on this and for the constructive feedback, and I am pleased that we agree on many goals. I hope we can continue this discussion and would welcome collaboration.
Hi John, Thank you for the healthy debate. I am finding it very interesting.
I just want to pick up on one point that is perhaps an important crux where I think my views are quite different from yours. You say:
You seem to be saying that the bill would encourage government to do more long-term decision making but government decision making about the future is just so terrible that we should not encourage it to happen (at least any time soon, at least in any general way).
Insofar as there is a problem of political short-termism (which I think there is considerable evidence for) this line of reasoning seems to suggest that we should not fix that problem (at least for now, in any general sense). I don’t buy this. I tend to apply a very high standard of evidence to arguments against fixing a problem and/or in favour of making systems worse in some way. (As a thought experiment if the government regularly made long-term plans and had a clear way to do it, would you want to stop that happening?)
Furthermore, your evidence for this claim is not strong – it appears primarily to rest on a list of anecdotal stories of failures in long-term planning stretching back over 50 years. But this appears one-sided. I can rattle of an equally long list of times when I think long-term planning has gone or is going well (in reducing regulation, in financial stability, in cyber security, in energy, in nuclear decommissioning, in forestry, in climate, in flood defence, in sewers, etc, etc). There is certainly no universal rule that government long-term planning has to go badly. I also think we should recognise that the significant development of government capability in some long term planning tools over recent years in government such as the impressive Futures Toolkit or the cross-Whitehall heads of horizon scanning project (I think these also serve as examples of non-sector specific approaches).
This is perhaps an important crux. It seems to me that in addition to your (often valid) criticisms of the drafting and some of the fluff in the bill you also have a belief that the bill should not be doing what the bill sets out to do – to generally make government more long-term! I am not sure how to resolve this disagreement. Like I said, I apply a high standard of evidence to such claims that we should not fix problems. But keen to hear your views.
I work on government legislation in the civil service and can confirm that private member’s bills wouldn’t have any access to the Office for Parliamentary Counsel (government specialist lawyers) unless government supports the private member’s bill, which is rare. Private member’s bills are primarily used as campaigning tools for demonstrating political support for a particular idea and getting it debated in Parliament.
Really excellent comment—could be its own post, arguably.
I can sympathise with both parties here but I think the EA Comms part of this bill could have been better. It seems consistent with both sides to have done some comms saying “this is a first draft, it is a rallying point, it has some EA involvement but is not an EA bill”. I think saying that on Twitter for instance, would have avoided a lot of blowback.
Thanks to weeatquince for their work on the bill and the authors of this article for their response.