Matthew Taylor:
Why do you think this issue of behaviour change has become such a hot topic among the policy makers in the last few years?
Oliver Letwin:
As something nearer to a consensus on economic management emerges, the longer-term concerns of policy makers across the political spectrum have shifted to social issues.
The biggest debate in politics now is probably about social affairs rather than economic affairs in contrast to, say, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago.
There has been a naïve belief in some quarters, which I think the present Prime Minister partly still shares, that if you sit in the middle of Whitehall and pull certain levers, and if they're well-enough designed, certain things will happen that are enough to achieve certain progressive goals, such as social justice or rescuing people from multiple deprivation.
But many people from different perspectives have come to recognise that to achieve any set of social goals, you have to achieve certain citizen reactions rather than simply take certain government actions.
And that leads you to the question: what sort of actions by government, or indeed anybody else, will have what sorts of effects on the behaviour of citizens? And suddenly you become very interested in behaviour change.
MT: What do you think motivates people in terms of how they behave?
OL: People are motivated to behave in certain ways in their ordinary lives by many different things.
It has to do with family, friends, affections, ambitions, culture and social norms. In our ordinary lives we don't have a mechanistic view of these things.
We don't imagine that the only reason somebody does something is because there is a police officer who arrives with some warrant who tells you what to do or otherwise you'll go to jail.
Most of the time we all live in a space that's within the law and yet we behave in very different ways depending on all these other things around us.
In politics we are beginning to think about the things that are blindingly obvious, which we were distracted from by being overly concerned with government and not enough with citizens and how they react.
