With a large new intake of MPs, this is a good moment for reform. It’s not just about reforming expenses, to bring transparency and break out of the habits of being within the letter of the rules but not within the realms of reasonableness. And it’s not just about cracking down on more recent examples of MPs tasking cash they shouldn’t. We should be taking the opportunity to think much more fundamentally about what we want our MPs to be and do.

Criticisms of a growing political class, funded by taxpayer cash and remote from the people who elect them, have been combined with outrage over expenses. Yet there is a risk that reforms made in response to the latter actually make the disconnection between the electorate and the elected worse, if we reach for heavy-handed regulation which pushes MPs further towards being “over-promoted social workers”.

We need to ask what we want our MPs to be – professionals who are reliant on their whips and party machines for favour, or elected representatives with more independence both from the taxpayer and the Executive.  There are plenty of good ideas for improving the functioning of our democracy – elected select committee chairmen, recall ballots, open primaries and the like – but all of these follow from our understanding of what an MP should be.  That’s the debate we should be having, and on which Policy Exchange will shortly be publishing a report authored by Paul Goodman.

Robert McIlveen is a Research Fellow at Policy Exchange.

However, children with severe and complex learning difficulties only made up 2.3% of all children with Special Educational Needs (SEN) in 2009. There are 1.7 million children in England with SEN, 21% of all pupils, and the majority are taught in mainstream settings. Therefore, all teachers are working with SEN children but there is a shocking lack of focus on building the relevant skills and expertise, both at the initial teacher training stage and in ongoing training throughout teachers’ careers.

Despite this, buried within the Government’s 2004 SEN strategy (which probably remains the most comprehensive look the Government has taken at the area in recent years) is an eminently sensible approach to providing teachers with the appropriate expertise. According to this model allteachers would develop the core skills needed to deal with all children with SEN; some teachers, inall schools, would develop advanced skills; and there would be teachers with highly specialist skills, in some schools but available, where appropriate, to all.

Progress in implementing such a vision has been inadequate. Another recent Government report (the Lamb Inquiry) stated the case clearly, there is an urgent need:

“to build a better understanding of SEN and disability into every aspect of training; at every level of the system; in subjects and curriculum development; and for teachers with a range of different responsibilities.”

This should be the focus of any strategy concerning teacher training for SEN, putting its own model into practice, and thereby providing over a fifth of our children with the education they really deserve.

Ralph Hartley is a research fellow in Policy Exchange’s Education Unit

In January this year Policy Exchange published a major report on the future of broadcasting,Changing the Channel, which argued that the BBC had become an organisation obsessed with ratings first and quality second. In many ways this is understandable – though not acceptable. In theory everyone with a television pays the licence fee, so the BBC feels it has to prove that it is delivering something for everyone to justify its existence.

As a result we see the BBC forking out huge wodges of licence fee cash to do things that fall more naturally to its commercial rivals and their audiences, and which those rivals could almost certainly deliver more cheaply. Thus it splashes out on the FA Cup and Formula 1, which attract an under 40 C1C2 audience that doesn’t naturally flick to the BBC, despite the fact that these sports would end up on ITV or Five in much the same form if the Beeb weren’t to bid. Meanwhile it ignores test match cricket – because it has enough professional older men watching already.

And it reportedly spent £5.6 million a year on hiring Jonathan Ross in competition with Channel 4 and ITV, because where Jonathan goes, the younger audiences follow. The problem here is not so much what the BBC paid, or even how loathsome you might find Jonathan Ross as an individual. The problem is the fact that the BBC was bidding in the first place.

So we should be whooping with relief that two months after our much-publicised report, the BBC appears to have taken a long hard look at its own behaviour. Its new strategy focuses on the need for the BBC to be “significantly and demonstrably more distinctive” with services like Radio 2. It will scrap two digital teen services, and allow Channel 4 to take the lead in this area. It will axe half its websites and BBC 6 Music and the Asian Network.

Yet leopards don’t change their spots overnight. The Telegraph reported last week that the Beeb plans to ramp up its spending on Strictly Come Dancing, which it runs head to head on a Saturday night with ITV’s X-Factor. And of course it’s all about ratings, ratings, ratings. The BBC is making some of the right noises in a bid to protect itself if the Government changes. But we need a little more than noise.

Anna Fazackerley is Head of Policy Exchange’s Arts and Culture Unit

I’ve often wondered how much difference all this news makes.  Sit through a focus group, or speak to your least political friends and you will hear one thing time and time again: “they are all the same”.  So much of this bad political news is just reinforcing what people think anyway – it is “already in the share price” as they say in the City.

Danny Finkelstein made the point nicely in an article last week:

The cynicism about politics is so pervasive that it embraces almost all political activity. Use a statistic? It’s a lie. Cry on television about your dead child? It’s an election gimmick. Attack your opponents’ policy? You would say that, wouldn’t you.   And this cynicism extends to the media and our coverage.  So not only politics, but news about politics, is seen as a fiction inside an untruth wrapped in a piece of spin… Most of politics and most political coverage proceeds as if there was still a reasonable degree of trust. As if the messages were still getting through, still being listened to, still being weighed up.

For the government of the day the clear implication is that what really matters is not their spin but whether they can deliver better results on the ground (a point grasped by Tony Blair some time in his second term).  It is rather more difficult for the opposition to act on this insight.  However, at the start of his time as Conservative leader David Cameron did emphasise that he would always aim to “show, not tell” people that the party had changed.  And there was something of this in Cameron’s initial reaction to the expenses scandal – when he was prepared to take a stand unpopular among some of his MPs.

The big problem for Cameron is that the Government has managed to shift so much the real-world pain the public will feel until after the election by running up huge debts.  So right now the public services are still hiring away. On the ground, things don’t look so bad.  At least, not yet.

We know more or less what the Budget is going to say already.

The Government is thinking not about how to reduce the soaring deficit – but how to spend the receipts from the super-tax in a pre-election giveaway.  We will see mock “surprise” at how much the bonus tax has raised, and condemnation of those who “said it wouldn’t raise any money”.  We will see big figures for savings based around finally officially scrapping the disastrous NHS IT programme and merging a few Primary Care Trusts.  If Liam Byrne has his way (and he probably won’t) the government may even nod to the markets by stressing how “tough” it is planning to be on public sector pay post election (nominal rises less than 1%, meaning small real-terms cuts).  The one thing it won’t do is make any meaningful effort to control the vast deficit.  Instead the Government will try to keep the debate narrowly focused around the timing of cuts – not the content.

Ironically, this is where public cynicism might ride to the rescue of the Conservatives. The idea that politicians will spend now and cut after the election is highly plausible for most world-weary voters. In the 1974 election Willy Whitelaw accused Harold Wilson of going “round and round the country stirring up apathy”.  The Tories won’t need to go round “stirring up” cynicism about the budget.  But they will need to try and be in a position to exploit it.

Neil O’Brien is the Director of Policy Exchange

Mid Staffordshire is a Foundation Trust Hospital.  Foundation Trust Hospitals were created specifically to be independent of the NHS, and of the Secretary of State. The creation of Foundation Trusts was one of the most bitterly contested NHS reforms introduced by Tony Blair. At the time they were opposed by Conservatives and many within the Labour party, now both political parties want to make every hospital a Foundation Trust.  But Foundation Trusts are different; they are accountable to their local communities, not to the Secretary of State.  So while the urge for politicians to interfere in these matters is intense, their powers are necessarily limited.

The policy of creating Foundation Trusts was designed to create a new set of structural relationships within the NHS.  The development of the new structure was, amongst other things, an attempt to create a new culture.  But the old culture of tight central control – the one that NHS managers and civil servants feel safest in – still remains dominant within the Department of Health,and within the minds of Government Ministers as well.

As we pointed out last week, the fundamental failings at Mid Staffordshire were those of the system of hospital oversight and scrutiny, not the policy of Foundation Trusts.  On the whole, Foundation Trust hospitals are much more highly performing than those remaining under tight central control.  So how do we create a culture where the NHS can adopt more of the changes that allowed Foundation Trusts to flourish?   Well, what if the architects of Foundation Trusts were to reveal all in a new Policy Exchange pamphlet later this week…

Henry Featherstone is Head of the Health Unit at Policy Exchange. “Future of Foundations: Towards a new culture in the NHS” will be out this week.

Since the recession started many firms have asked their employees to work fewer hours or take pay cuts. This bargain has been underpinned by employers hoping that demand for their goods and services would pick-up again, and that their staff needed to take the partial and temporary hit of a poorer job in order to avoid the big hit of not having any job.

In the jargon, someone who is working but wants to do more hours is “underemployed”. There will always be people who want to work more, but there has been a big rise in their number recently. In the year to the third quarter of 2009, 605,000 extra people declared that they were underemployed when the Office for National Statistics asked them about their job status. It is this group that is under threat from growth not being good enough to keep them in work.

This is worrying, not least because many of them will have to claim unemployment benefits when they do fall out of work. As a Policy Exchange report out this week will show, they will fall into a welfare-induced poverty trap that can make working look like a bad idea. Some claimants will, when they see how their benefits are withdrawn when they move into work, realise that they are likely to end up working for less than £1 per hour. Would you work for that?

Lawrence Kay is a Research Fellow in the Policy Exchange Economics Unit. “Escaping the Poverty Trap: How to Help People on Benefits in to Work” will be out this week.

The Department for Health did not have a good week last week.  It started with hospitals being accused of putting patients’ lives at risk, for failing to comply with safety alerts issued by the National Patient Safety Agency.  And it has ended with the DH accepting that it must agree a way of measuring and reporting hospital death rates, after Policy Exchange released a series of official documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, which criticised the NHS for a ‘pervasive culture of fear’ and obsession with targets rather than a focus on patient safety

The documents, submitted to the DH by three internationally respected healthcare organisations, detail a litany of failures in oversight mechanism.  The first report said there was a ‘pervasive culture of fear in the NHS and certain elements of the Department for Health’ and regulation was ‘light-handed’.  It highlighted the flaws in the system of allowing hospitals to declare whether they were compliant with national standards – as two thirds of the assessments made by regulators did not agree with the declarations.

The second report found that the health service did not have a clear idea of what good quality health care meant so resorted to the default position that “quality means meeting the targets”.  This report too stated  “The NHS has developed a widespread culture more of fear and compliance, than of learning, innovation and enthusiastic participation in improvement”, and that “Most targets and standards appear to be defined in professional, organisational and political terms, not in terms of patients’ experiences of care”.  The final document criticised the Department of Health for being more interested in costs than clinical quality and that assessments of health care seemed to be motivated by political rather than health concerns.

As we’ve pointed out, it is astounding that there is no system of performance improvement in the NHS.  But suppose there was. If we could, say, spot increased mortality at any hospital on a monthly basis we could prevent temporary problems turning into scandals – and so avoid the tragedies like the ones at Tunbridge Wells, Mid-Staffordshire and Basildon & Thurrock.

And there is already a way to do that.  The Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratio (HSMR) was developed here in the UK.  It accounts for different risk factors so that hospitals undertaking complex operations, or dealing with critical patients, are not painted in a poor light.  It measures the hospital’s actual performance against what is expected – and so can give an early warning to inspectors, regulators, clinicians, and patients.   HSMRs have been around for many years and consequently they have large evidence base which shows that they are reliable and robust.

More and more countries around the world are adopting and publishing HSMRs as part of their hospital performance improvement plan.  Whilst it is welcome that the DH has finally admitted it must do the same, we can’t afford for the Government to drag its feet any longer – the sooner we have a proper means of seeing hospitals’ performance rates, the better.

Natalie Evans is Deputy Director of Policy Exchange.

It was a funny sort of “wobble” anyway, as none of the last 24 polls have shown the Conservatives more than 2 points in either direction from 40%.  Given that the statistical margin of error on these polls is plus or minus 3%, none of the them have shown a statistically meaningful shift.  But little things like that don’t affect the Westminster narrative.

One of the incidents in the “wobble” related to a screw-up by the Tories about a decimal point.  They released an otherwise excellent report on how inequality has grown under Labour.  The document shows how the gap between rich and poor has grown in not just in income, but in health, education, housing – you name it.  However, due to a cock up the document initially claimed that in poorer areas 54% of teenage girls in poor areas got pregnant, rather than the real figure of 5.4%.

This was a bad mistake and caused a big Westminster row.  But hang on a minute.  The real figure should give us serious pause for thought.  More than one in twenty teenagers getting pregnant is really, really high. A larger proportion of teenagers in Britain have children than any other EU county apart from Romania and Bulgaria.  The rate is more than double the European average and five times higher than countries like Denmark, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

And teenage pregnancy is very concentrated in poor areas. For example, in leafy Rutland the teen pregnancy rate is 1.4%, while in less leafy Lambeth it has averaged 8.9% in react years. Given the concentration of the problem in poverty hotspots, and the fact that 92% of teenagers who have children are not married, teen pregnancy often kicks off a cycle of intergenerational poverty which can last for many decades.  In the long term, this costs the state a fortune – quite apart from the mass misery involved.

Part of the problem is about poverty, and part of it is about culture.  Hence Cameron’s continuing criticisms of the premature sexualisation of children.  But the bully pulpit alone won’t solve these difficult problems.  I don’t believe that we have the policy answers to them yet – although they are soluble.  For this reason Policy Exchange’s work in this area will continue to grow.

Meanwhile, we are now seeing all the hoopla of an election campaign: student stunts, bizarre poster spoofs, weird viral web trends (e.g. “Dave Facts”) and – God help us - novelty records (cf.“There’s no-one as Irish as Dave Cameron”).

What we aren’t seeing yet is any discussion of the big issues.  It isn’t just the big missing discussion about deprivation and social breakdown. Britain’s media seems generally unable to grapple with the detail of big policy questions, so instead reports on easy-to-grasp personality clashes and Westminster spats.

With such an information-poor public debate, it is sad that James Purnell has decided to step down at the next election.  He was not only one of Labour’s better potential leaders, but also one of the few people on the left really able to step back and question their policies.  There is far too little thinking in British politics, and there will be even less in the Labour Party without Purnell.

Neil O’Brien is Director of Policy Exchange

Anna Fazackerley is Head of Education at Policy Exchange.