Politics

How to build policies for X-Factor Britain

February 16, 2008
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We now know that Gordon Brown wants a meritocratic Britain modeled upon the X-Factor. Hidden talent should be teased out, supported and celebrated, while the talentless should be publicly humiliated by a millionaire with a perma-tan in a skin-tight black t-shirt. Maybe not the second bit.

Brown will therefore be as alarmed as anyone by last week's research from the Sutton Trust showing that low income students are being put off attending university by fear of debt. Residual bitterness towards Blair may even be stirred up, as the question of how to fund higher education was the cause of one of their earliest high profile policy disputes. It was later claimed that Blair didn't even know if Brownites would support the government policy until the vote itself took place.

This research makes hugely depressing reading for anyone who believed in the New Labour project. If it was a regressive policy that privileged the rich (the sort that Alastair Darling is now tossing out on a regular basis) that would have been only mildly depressing. But it was a policy formed in the early optimistic years of New Labour, and it was designed specifically to be redistributive. The fact that it has entrenched some class divisions is therefore especially worrying.

To re-cap: the argument about university funding came down to a dispute between those arguing for a graduate tax (Brownites) and those arguing for top-up fees, but with fees being waived for a large proportion of low income students (Blairites). As the New Statesman and other leftwing voices consistently argued, the Blairite option was the more progressive one, because it meant that middle class students were now having to pay for the added advantages that their education gave them, whereas low income students were having this advantage paid for by the tax payer. By contrast, the graduate tax would have simply meant that all students were paying equally.

The problem, it now turns out, is that low-income students don't adequately realise that this is how it works. In Brown's language, charging Cathedral choristers for entry to the X-Factor has scared off the nation's hidden singing talent.

The immediate response will be to make greater effort to communicate the workings of the policy (and inform teachers about Oxbridge access at the same time). But will anyone think to ask what this all reveals about our policy-making process? Why is it that when a policy results in the opposite outcome from the desired one, blame is implicitly placed upon the 'users' of the service not the designers? Modern policy-making, built on rational choice psychological assumptions, repeatedly confronts the problem of individuals not behaving as the economic models say they should. This is then followed by the up-hill battle of educating them to the point where they do start to behave in a properly rational fashion. As with the tax credits saga, communication of policy must now be considered one of the biggest headaches of public policy-making.

Does it have to be this way? Policies that are grounded in ideology, as the creation of the NHS or Tory tax-cuts were, do not face this problem. It is distinct to a culture of rational choice, evidence-based policy-making. The question is whether there is a middle ground between the two. Brown may wistfully reflect that the graduate tax was precisely that - a policy that would be carefully designed with individual incentives and fiscal imperatives in mind, but which would also be reflective of a political principle. Top-up fees were empirically more progressive, but lacked a clarity of principle. It is not enough for experts to know that things are fair, in politics they have to seem fair as well. The fault lay with the designers (arguably for being too clever, too expert) not with the public.

At the moment it is only possible to get a hunch for what principle-and-evidence-based policy would look like, and even harder to imagine what expert and bureaucratic structures would be needed to produce it. But it might be something to aim for, if the government wants to stop facing the sorts of disappointments contained in the Sutton Trust report.