Innovation is in the news this week and Cadence Works are doing more work in this area for the National School of Government. We were interested to hear that "Moving up to the next level, however, from good enough to excellent, will require completely new thinking that will challenge the way Whitehall works" according to Chief Secretary to the Treasury Andy Burnham.
In his Guardian article he also said:
- Innovate and break traditional patterns of local spending where necessary.
- Common sense is always needed.
- Don't wait for ever for an "evidence base".
- Change sometimes doesn't happen because people assume innovation might be blocked by central government, but that won't be the case.
These are all the sort of interesting points we might expect a bright young Minister to make and we welcome the sentiments, but our work in this area suggests:
- Evidence that traditional patterns are changing is sparse, even though Local Area Agreements were supposed to do this.
- Common sense is always needed, but seldom prioritised.
- Evidence based policy has always been a bit of a myth anyway, lack of it being used to legitimise government inaction, but not necessary when a media announcement is needed.
- Saying central government won't 'block' innovation is an optomistic view of current practice, Sir Humphrey's spirit still lives on.
Perhaps this is a little unfair and there are clearly moves in the Civil Service and amongst Senior Ministers to get better at innovation, but embracing innovation will involve accepting mistakes in prevous policy. Governments will need to get better at setting out their goals, but being more open and braver about not controlling the process.
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