We commemorate D-Day this week. Many of us will have parents or grand-parents who took part in those events. My father’s military record says he ‘embarked’ from the UK on 31 May 1944 and ‘disembarked’ in North West Europe on 6 June 1944, meaning he took part in the landings. He was a Signalman and he had been posted to the 50th Division of the Royal Corps of Signals on the 18th of January 1944. He served in France and Germany and at the end of the war became a Wireless Operator. He was not demobilised until March 1946 when he returned to Wales.
D-Day was of course an extraordinary feat of military planning - the largest ever invasion force on land, sea and air. During the first pandemic lockdown I read the diaries of the head of the UK Armed Forces (Chief of the Imperial General Staff or CIGS), Sir Alan Brooke, later Lord Alanbrooke, which go into considerable detail about the planning and logistics required to mount the invasion, and the stages by which it developed in discussion with military leaders and with Churchill and the War Cabinet. This BBC interview from early 1957 is of its time but gives an introduction. The level of detail stands in contrast to the minimal level often undertaken by governments when they launch policies, plans and programmes.
Just over a week ago the House of Commons Liaison Committee published a report on Strategic Thinking in Whitehall. The report says the challenges facing the UK require ‘a profound rethink’ in order ‘to break the cycle of siloed, short-term thinking that has come to dominate successive governments’ ways of working’. Failure to address long-term challenges, says the report, is leading to disillusionment with democracy, particularly among young people. Amongst its many recommendations, which include the establishment of a National School for Government and Public Services (I’m very much in favour of that even if it is re-inventing something that existed before), is the suggestion of a committee on national strategic priorities to be established in the next Parliament, specifically including the interests of future generations (my italics). The Committee for the Future would hold ministers and officials to account for government’s national strategy and ensure the culture changes required across Whitehall are achieved.
The notion of a Committee for the Future reminded me of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel, The Ministry for the Future. His Ministry of the Future is a UN agency actually empowered to address climate change on behalf of future generations. It’s well worth reading.
Amongst those giving evidence to the Liaison Committee were Wales’s first Future Generations Commissioner, my good friend Sophie Howe. You can read her oral evidence here.
The danger of Select Committee Reports appearing after a General Election has been called is that they simply get filed away. It would be good if this report got a wider airing after the election. The report seeks to engage honestly with what strategic thinking looks like, and notes how often what is called ‘strategy’ in government is really a set of tactics or policies. The Welsh Government is not immune from this, by the way. It’s had strategies for pretty much everything since 1999 - and too often these were simply policies dressed up with the ‘S’ word, there was little follow through, alignment of resources, or planned effective coordination with other agencies, in Wales or outside. The Future Generations Act, taken through the Assembly by my friend and colleague, the late Carl Sargeant, was meant to change that. Its success or failure probably requires another post on another occasion. My colleague, Orofessor Calvin Jones, drew an interesting contrast with a similar Basque initiative recently.
One area where there is considerable investment in planning of course is the National Health Service, and in Wales over the last five years we have worked with several cohorts of NHS planners on the Diploma course we developed with the service. I have taught for five years on the Strategic Planning and Innovation module, where amongst other things we stress that it’s not the plan that matters, so much as the planning. It’s interesting, but maybe not surprising, that so much of our thinking about planning and strategy comes from the military. Our NHS planners worked with miltary planners during Covid, of course - they heard a lot about ‘battle rhythm’ then.
The Commons Liaison Committee Report accords in its sentiments with the observations of some of the most experienced former ministers who have worked in Whitehall, as well as a range of Number Ten-based ministerial advisers of different political backgrounds from Sir Geoff Mulgan to Dominic Cummings and Sir John Hoskyns. The incentives in government drive ministers to short- or possibly medium-term approaches. Former Cabinet Office minister Oliver Letwin suggested in his book Apocalypse How that incentives must be changed so that a named individual is made responsible for specific risks. But, he says, using the example of dealing with network failure, no government really does this. When I was researching for my book on Ministerial Leadership (have I said I have a book out?!) I found that one thing which was largely absent from the Institute for Government’s Ministers Reflect interviews is any real sense of how governments prepare for the long-term – anticipating future opportunities or more likely risks. Former Home Secretary Charles Clarke has argued that governments ‘need to develop a long-term culture to deal with long-term problems’. But there is limited evidence of long-term thinking. Electoral and media management priorities drive a focus on the short- or possibly medium-term. In his book, published just before Covid, Oliver Letwin wrote:
It is the military who specialize in thinking about threats that are distant and not very likely to arise, but which are so worrying that we need to be defended against them….whereas the civilian departments often had no adequate plans to deal with things that were very likely to occur.
My research showed that former ministers felt that governments were on the whole effectively organised to address short-term crises such as terrorist incidents: indeed, there was almost an addiction to the drama of crisis. Government also has something of a tendency to default to legislation. As Michael Heseltine said to a Select Committee in 2012:
Every Department has its own agenda and I remember vividly the Burials Bill….This was a piece of legislation in draft that every Secretary of State was presented with on arrival in the Department, “Have to tidy up the graveyards, Secretary of State, and here is the draft Bill and will you make a bid to your colleagues for it?” I do not think anyone ever did; it is probably still there.
However, we have seen how in the case of a rare but predictable event like a pandemic, the depth of systemic planning and the necessary flexibility to shift from assumptions of a flu-style epidemic to something other, was deficient,. The Covid Inquiry is of course going through this in detail (although a lot of ground had already been covered in the 2021 Joint Select Committee Inquiry). Pandemic threats featured on the UK risk register for some years but never rose to top priority aside from moments of apparent crisis such as swine flu (despite evidence from the SARS and MERS outbreaks elsewhere).
There are no simple solutions to getting governments to think more strategically about the future. Nesta proposes a Minister for the Future. There are institutes devoted to future thinking and think tanks too. Some businesses have pioneered scenario planning, generally believed to have commenced at the Rand Corporation in the 1950s. My colleague Professor Bahman Rostami-Tabor leads the Forecasting for Social Good initiative internationally. Geoff Mulgan has written a lot in recent years about the need for greater attention to social imagination. For future strategic planning to work, there needs to be a deeper commitment to thinking beyond the life of a single government, with institutional embedding. That means a greater commitment to the stewardship principle. But the incentives are lined up against that.