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.
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.