Empowering the people
Oliver Letwin, MP for West Dorset and Chairman of the Policy Review and of the Conservative Research Department, talks to the RSA’s Matthew Taylor about why helping people to help themselves is the way to deal with social issues
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.
MT: In terms of the Conservative diagnosis of the broken society, what do you think are the insights you’ve gleaned thus far from the policy processes you’ve been through? How are you going to encourage people to behave in ways which are going to re-cement society, as it were?
OL: We’ve drawn important conclusions from the work we’ve done over the past couple of years. One of them is that people don’t flourish if you try to constrain them. They need more power and opportunity in their lives. There is a pent-up frustration in Britain, and in many other democracies, because people don’t feel they have enough ability to shape their own lives and their own communities.
We’ve been very impressed by how far people’s happiness is related not only to the circumstances that they face or the concrete changes they make, but also to the process – in other words, whether they feel they are in charge of how it all comes out.
We’ve also come to the conclusion that there are all sorts of collective goals. However, it doesn’t follow that establishing some bureaucracy, which will then pull some levers, will achieve these goals.
There really is a role here for something recognisably identified as civil society, which David Cameron repeatedly refers to as the best welfare system of all, and which involves families, neighbourhoods, voluntary bodies, community groups, social enterprises, and so on.
MT: So are you saying that it’s no longer enough to pull back the state and civil society will step in? But that you have to use the state to grow civil society in order that the state can pull back?
OL: That’s exactly right.
MT: When we talk to the people who represent very deprived constituencies and particularly low-density housing estates, the idea that these places can be weaned off a kind of dependency on the state strikes many people as being fantasy. So how do you actually envisage that you can create the capacity in those kinds of communities that is so obviously absent at the moment?
OL: That’s radically false. As you were speaking I was thinking of Balsall Heath (a working class, inner-city community in Birmingham).
MT: That’s quite a funky inner-city area though, isn’t it?
OL: It is now, but it didn’t look like that ten years ago.
When Dick Atkinson (a Birmingham University sociologist, now head of the Balsall Heath Forum, who has been instrumental in fostering a spirit of community involvement in making Balsall Heath a better place to live and work) first went there, there was a general feeling that it couldn’t rescue itself and needed someone from outside to do something. Dick said that’s wrong.
We know it’s wrong now because he’s done it. I think that’s doable everywhere. Human beings are everywhere and where there are human beings, there are families, groups and people who care, and if you can mobilise them they will transform their circumstances.
MT: We’ve all been talking about Dick Atkinson for 15 years. So isn’t the critique of your kind of idealism the fact that you’re relying on the emergence of a thousand Dick Atkinsons, many of them in circumstances even less propitious than in Balsall Heath?
OL: No, my critique is that after 15 years of talking about Dick Atkinson, governments have done nothing serious to make it possible to replicate what he has done.
I accept that we have to abandon the language of ‘scaling up’ and talk about replication. We have to talk about really putting imagination into how government can enable people like that to do that kind of thing.
If what you were saying was true, it would be a counsel of despair and counsels of despair have no place in politics, in the sense they don’t get us anywhere. So let’s just assume I’m right and test it out… let’s have a go.
MT: Finally, is the Conservative leadership thinking about the fact that, if and when you win the election, you have this opportunity to say to the British people:
‘Look, we’re going to have to take risks. The things that we want to do we can’t do on our own; we can only do with you backing us’.
In other words, is it the opportunity for a Prime Minister, David Cameron, to say:
‘Thank you for giving me all this power and now have it back’?
OL: Yes. We cannot expect to achieve what we’re trying to achieve unless all sorts of people in all sorts of ways work with us.
We have to find a whole way of operating which, when it moves in a certain direction, it’s because we’re generating enthusiasm for it rather than because we’re rushing around passing laws.
One of the reasons we’re going through this very solemn process of Green Paper after Green Paper on topic after topic is to try to get to the point where we have a good enough idea how, without pulling levers of power in the traditional sense, we can advance the agenda. The aim is so, at least to begin with, there’s a real chance that we won’t just revert to governmental type by getting absorbed into this sort of civil service machine that has a lever for every answer. That is indeed one of the great challenges.
Oliver Letwin has been an MP since 1997, and Chairman of the Party’s Policy Review and Research Department since 2005
Matthew Taylor became the RSA’s Chief Executive in 2006 and is a media commentator on policy and political issues
Find out what Oliver Letwin has to say about Hazel Blears’ attempt to empower people.
