The State of trust
Sixteen months ago Keir Starmer said the fight for trust would be “the battle that defines our age.” The uphill challenge facing him and everyone working in the public sector was laid bare a year earlier in the 2023 OECD Trust in Government Survey, the most recent in that organisation’s biennial series, which showed that a mere 27% of the UK population trust their national government (significantly below the OECD average of 39%). More than half of Britons actively said they do not share that trust.
That is a worryingly hollow foundation for social cohesion, compliance with the law, political participation, democratic legitimacy and the effective tackling of complex domestic and global problems like climate change, ageing populations and technological disruption. Without trust, it becomes more difficult to advance these already testing agendas.
This fifth edition of the Heywood Quarterly does not deal with trust head on – plenty of other publications and consultancies will provide primers of the topic – but the word appears prominently on our cover because it’s a thread that runs through many of the insights from our distinguished contributors. As such, I hope the articles here will not just provoke new thinking on the importance of trust but sow some practical new ideas on ways to rebuild it.
When I listened to the session on Change NHS during the recent Policy Festival I was struck by the lengths to which those involved had engaged with NHS staff, users and partners to create a 10-year health plan that would inform effective policymaking. Fred Perry’s article on the process of creating the Government’s industrial strategy shows that the Department for Business and Trade and His Majesty’s Treasury followed a similar path, in this case gathering evidence as widely as possible from business. The exhaustive year-long exercise, he reports, influenced a wide range of issues in the final plan, from the nuance of new skills packages to the emphasis on economic security.
Of course, building trust in this way is only one enabler of a successful industrial strategy, necessary but not sufficient. As Stephen Aldridge, Director, Analysis and Data at the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government points out, lack of economic dynamism is what’s been hampering the UK’s pursuit of economic growth. His striking charts illustrate how the shift from lower to higher productivity sectors has slowed since the financial crisis, how job reallocation (churn) rates have now fallen to below pre-2008 levels and how the share of job-to-job moves in 2019 had declined by a quarter compared to 2000 (further denting productivity).
When people think of trust in the political system, they usually have in mind individual politicians or individual policymakers. But Mario Pisani, in his masterly account of the history of money in this country, highlights the importance of faith in institutions. “Trust in money comes from its creditworthiness and transferability,” he writes, but these qualities “stem from the historical links to the institutions of the state” (in the UK’s case the Mint, the Treasury, the Exchequer and the Bank of England).
If trust underpins these and many other institutions of public life, so impartiality arguably underpins trust. In Britain we are used to asserting the political impartiality of civil servants in the advice they offer ministers, but there are many other contexts in which impartiality raises its head. Looking back at her term as Chief Inspector of Schools, Amanda Spielman explains how she went about reviewing frameworks and processes at Ofsted, notably in relation to the 2010 Equality Act. She argues that civil servants sit “downstream of Parliament” and that departments and other public bodies “should not exceed or ‘gold-plate’ what is intended by lawmakers.”
In earlier editions of the Heywood Quarterly we’ve published in depth ‘conversations’ with distinguished and experienced mandarins and ex-mandarins, and I don’t think you’ll be disappointed by the reflections in this issue from Sir Philip Barton, recently retired Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office. Philip talks to Peter McDonald about the changes he has witnessed in his long career, the blurring of domestic and foreign policy, and the importance of “extreme” collaboration with other government departments. There is much in this article about trust in people, still a cornerstone of diplomatic life in an age of instant communications between the centre and far-flung missions. A strong message is that technology may assist diplomacy but it cannot replace the craft.
Reliable data is another prerequisite of trust, and who better to remind us of the visual power of a strong chart than Sir Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer for England and Chief Medical Adviser to the UK Government. In his short commentary Chris not only shows it’s wrong to assume that people who live longer inevitably spend more time in ill health – they don’t – but spells out the clear policy choices that can not only reduce premature mortality but reduce sickness in old age.
Lucy Heywood, meanwhile, returns to the diplomatic front with an account of “A day in the life of” Victoria Harrison, the woman who has been leading Britain’s diplomatic mission in Slovenia for the last year. Victoria is the UK’s first blind ambassador and hers is an uplifting story of overcoming barriers and empowering others with disabilities to do the same. You’ll enjoy the references to her “Ambassadog” Otto, undoubtedly one of the unsung heroes of British diplomacy.
Our final contributor in this issue is Andrew Bailey, Governor of the Bank of England, whose summer reading this year included two provocative books by political scientists in the US and UK (both relevant to the UK). Andrew’s review considers their critiques of public policy, notably the UK’s response to Covid and to broader charges of short-termism (a theme on which the Heywood Quarterly has already opined and to which we will certainly return in our next edition). As for the credibility of public policy, Andrew states, it “has to be built on public trust. When that breaks down, the world is much more difficult and dangerous.”
Finally, I hope you find our new Round-Up section of value. These short items are all culled from secondary sources and highlight news and views you might have missed in the last three months. Please help us if you spot something for this section that we can bring to wider attention – and please keep sending us ideas for future articles.
