What has gone wrong with public policy-making in Britain? The reluctant conclusion, writes Mark Rowe, is that central government departments are no longer to be trusted to come up with, let alone deliver, prompt or sensible changes to public policy.
It’s not only the Protect Duty, that the Home Office and Home Secretary Priti Patel are insisting on going ahead with, despite a lack of buy-in or even interest from businesses and the public. The Local Government Association, for instance, was lukewarm in its comment on the publishing of the results of last year’s consultation by the Home Office, and the Government’s response to the consultation. The LGA made some pertinent points, such as: where’s the money going to come from? Wouldn’t the Duty bring the risk of over-securing ‘publicly accessible locations’, in effect doing the work of the terrorists for them; and wouldn’t it be better to spend money and effort on stopping potential terrorists getting radicalised in the first place (‘continued investment in prevention programmes that stop people being drawn into terrorism’).
But the Home Office is deaf to such real-world queries; it knows best; it knows what rules to set; although as the scandal over social distancing defying garden parties during lockdown has shown, those in authority, civil servants and politicians, all too easily take the attitude that they know best translates into rules applying to other people.
In fairness the Home Office is not the only central government institution like this. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has similarly gone out to consultataion with its proposed data reform, to make a new data protection regime to replace the EU-era Data Protection Act 2018, that brought into law the European Union-wide GDPR, as it came in before the UK legally left the Union.
The IT trade body the BCS has taken issue with the proposed removal of the right to have a human appeal against an automated decision. The DCMS argues that it’s settling ‘consent fatigue’, that people are tired of clicking consent boxes online. The BCS and others point out the potential outcry if someone is denied a vaccine or a job on the basis of an algorithm. We can think of the outcry during lockdown when teenagers’ exam results were decided on the basis of algorithms which made the difference between some people being able to go to their choice of university, or any university, or not.
This is not to suggest that in the good old days Westminster never made bad public policy or laws that proved unworkable. But some things have changed, to leave those in the Westminster ‘bubble’ freer to come up with bad policy, and ignore challenges.
Professional Security has already mentioned online and in the October 2019 print edition of the magazine, an instance of how Government ministers have shielded themselves from any contact with interest groups. In spring 2019, on the eve as it happened of a Home Office consultation on violence against retail workers, junior Home Office minister Victoria Atkins was invited to speak to a Suzy Lamplugh Trust conference on crime and anti-social behaviour against retail. The event venue was a few hundreds of yards from the Home Office in Marsham Street (pictured); yet the minister chose to give a pre-recorded video message. It was unmistakeable that she preferred to go to some trouble rather than meet people who might have something to say about business crime and (lack of) criminal justice and police response.
More general reasons may have played a part in why public reactions cannot get through to policy-makers; the decline in the traditional media; the necessary protection of public figures against terrorism and other threats, that insulates those protected from the outside world – note the anti-ram bollards outside the Home Office, pictured. However that does not explain why politicians and their civil servants have chosen to draw away from having their ideas tested by the opinion of others. Once, politicians attended trade association and other dinners and other semi-public events; they might not have enjoyed having to listen to industry grumbles, but it was accepted practice. No longer.
Now Government departments act or not on matters of public policy based not on need but whether it fits with their own agenda, and what looks good. Note the contrast between Home Office inaction over violence against retail – happening in every town, regularly – despite evidence-gathering and a report last year by the Home Affairs Select Committee – with the Home Office’s determined and persistent work towards a Protect Duty, in 2022, against a 2017 threat.
More in the March print edition of Professional Security magazine.
