Podcast episode 158: How Does Bad Policy Get Made?

Episode 158 of 50 50 Shades of Planning is available now via this link or Apple and Spotify.

Sometimes episode ideas are put to me, sometimes they come to me in the middle of the night, and sometimes I’ll read something and think to myself, ‘Hmm, that’s interesting…’

Back in October last year I came across a blog by Jack Airey, who is now a Director at Public First but was the Head of Planning at Policy Exchange and subsequently spent a few years inside Number 10 as a Special Advisor to the Prime Minister. The opening line of Jack’s blog was ‘How does bad policy get made?’ and he writes about “the war of attrition that is Whitehall policymaking”; backbench pressure; and the “lack of institutional understanding” within government about how the practical impact of policy proposals.

I asked Jack if he would be up for talking about these themes on the pod and, pleasingly, he was, so I thought next about who else it would be interesting to hear from about life inside the Westminster policy-making bubble. How about a civil servant’s perspective? I asked Simon Gallagher, formerly Director of Planning in the Department for Communities and Local Government (as was) and he was keen. How about a political perspective? I asked Rachel Maclean, former Minister of State for Housing & Planning and now Baroness Maclean of Redditch, and she was keen. And how about a planner’s perspective? I asked friend of the podcast Steve Quartermain, former Chief Planner, and he was keen; and so I arranged for the four of them to meet at Soho Radio Studios in the heart of swinging London a few weeks ago to record the conversation that features in this episode.

They talked about how policy is made and Simon shares his three stages of policy formulation. They talked about how things get to Ministers, how Ministers make decisions and who is involved at what stage. And they talked about whether planning is any different to other areas of public policy.

Correction.

I say in the introduction to the episode that Jack was the Head of Planning at Policy Exchange at the time of the 2020 'Planning for the Future' White Paper. In fact Jack was working in Number 10 at the time of the White Paper and helped to write it.

Comments

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