Policy pass but process fail

On Wednesday – finally – we saw a concerted offensive from David Cameron, Nick Clegg, CCHQ and assorted others to explain and promote the tuition fee proposals which have just passed.

I’m not going to discuss the proposals themselves again – we’ve slightly done that to death, and the vote passed anyway. Anyway, I have always enjoyed working on process, presentation, and communication. So let’s walk it through… (and apologies that this is really long: if you get bored, the last section is the interesting one!)

Key dates and events

In September 2009, Nick Clegg warned his party conference that the Lib Dem pledge to abolish tuition fees might have to be put on hold because of the scale of the UK’s debts.  (This, much more recent article, is also an interesting read on that topic…)

In November 2009, Lord Browne (ex of BP) was asked by Labour to produce a report on the future of university funding. When it was announced, it was widely assumed that there would be an increase – of some sort – in tuition fees.

During the general election campaign, Lib Dem PPCs signed personal pledges to vote to abolish tuition fees during the 2010 parliament; the Tories pledged to listen to the Browne review and respond.

On 20 May, we finally got to read the full Coalition Agreement. Clearly someone had been doing some careful reading of the Lib Dem manifesto, and one of only two areas that are specifically mentioned for divergence between Conservative and Lib Dem whips is… tuition fees. And that’s because the drafters of the Agreement knew that that Lib Dem pre-election pledge was totemic for them – above and beyond the manifesto. So in the Agreement is the killer phrase:  “If the response of the Government to Lord Browne’s report is one that Liberal Democrats cannot accept, then arrangements will be made to enable Liberal Democrat MPs to abstain in any vote. “

A flurry of great headlines, boldness, lovely Rose Garden photos and so on over the summer, baby Florence was born… but every so often, someone would ask me, “What will break the Coalition?” Or someone would write a think piece outlining why Browne might be difficult. Or someone would propose something that probably wouldn’t end up in the report.

But everything just bumbled on happily, and Lord Browne published in October as planned. The government was supposed to respond on 20 October, in time for the CSR, but pushed this back to 3 November to give them more time to come to an agreed response – which, to be fair, seems entirely reasonable as it was acknowledged as a difficult issue, and of course the ideal would be to have all Coalition members of parliament voting in favour.

They (rightly) discussed with ministers, backbenchers, practitioners and so on, and came forward with revisions right up until the last minute – which is, frankly, more or less as policy should be made, with discussion, negotiation, weighing up of options, then parliamentary debate, some more adjustments -  and then a decision.

Two points on the Lib Dems’ participation – or not – in the vote

We can set aside, for now, whether or not signing the pledges or having unaffordable promises in your manifesto is a good idea. But what is key is what the Coalition Agreement means. In this case, it meant that if the Cabinet could not come to full agreement on the Government response, then Lib Dem MPs could abstain in any vote.

But the Cabinet did come to agreement. Vince Cable and Nick Clegg have been bravely and rightly making the case for the proposals, and indeed have trumpeted the more progressive nature of the proposals compared to Lord Browne’s ideas.

I’ve argued before that, having negotiated (rightly) to make these proposals the best they can be, Lib Dem ministers really did have a duty to vote for them, and I’m very glad that they saw that governing is about making hard and possibly unpopular choices in the national interest. They and their backbench colleagues who voted yes are going up in my estimation every day.

Terrible, terrible, terrible PR…

But – and here is the main point of my post, if you’re still with me – the way that this has been handled has been dreadful.

From the moment that the possibility of abstention was mooted in the Agreement, the government should have been working to minimise the potential to destabilise that the Browne response could bring. Yes, they altered some of the proposals; yes, they came out fighting on this week with a speech from David Cameron, articles from Nick Clegg and David Willetts, a new website of facts and a blizzard of masochism strategy interviews also from Nick Clegg; and yes, they won the vote eventually.

The problem is that this was very little, very late. They should have been ready with a proper briefing pack on the proposals; they should have been ready to go with websites, Facebook, Twitter, Conservative Future spokesmen; and they should have been able to articulate a case without saying ‘But Labour broke their promises on tuition fees too’.

Even if they had been caught on the hop by the protests at Millbank in November, it still took them nearly a month to produce anything.

I like the Coalition. I like that No 10 is trying so hard to make individual departments responsible and accountable for their policies, that they discuss, that they are radical, that they are able to look beyond tomorrow’s headlines and plan five or ten years into the future. I thank my stars every day that Gordon Brown is no longer Prime Minister. But it is so disappointing when the government gets this badly hammered on something that they seem to have been so unprepared for.

I have no idea who is responsible for not planning this properly – I actually doubt it was one single person; and that is part of the problem. There doesn’t seem to be a coherent narrative-shaper around to problem-spot, trouble-shoot, co-ordinate and generally make sure things are fitting together. And that is not going to make things easier over the coming few years. Hopefully they will learn from this and include someone to do this job in the upcoming adjustments to the policy unit in No 10.

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