10 Downing Street - Dods Monitoring

How is strategy
formed in
government? Badly,
says Bernard Jenkin, who
explains the problem and
sets out the remedy
There seems to be a strategic vacuum at the
centre of Government. This is not unique
to the Coalition, but a recurring problem.
In 2010, PASC (the Public Administration
Select Committee) published a report into
‘Who does UK National Strategy?’. Our
conclusion was that the answer to this question
was ‘no one’. We recently published a second
report on the topic, ‘Strategic thinking in
government: without National Strategy,
can viable government strategy emerge?’.
We found that government policies are
not informed by a clear, coherent strategic
approach, and that poor strategic thinking
also undermines clarity of presentation to the
public. This was evident in the aftermath of
the Budget and in response to the possibility of
industrial action by fuel tanker drivers.
Policy decisions are often made for shortterm
reasons, little reflecting the longer-
term interests of the nation. We put it to the
government during the course of our inquiry
that a number of very major decisions they
have taken in recent months seemed just to
have come out of the blue. They did not seem
to be part of a coherent strategy.
The government did provide our inquiry
with six aims which had been set out in the
Coalition Agreement. We concluded that
these may be well-meaning but are so general
as to be too meaningless to serve any useful
purpose, because they provide no indication
of what policies the government might pursue
as a consequence. They do not define how the
UK’s national character, assets, capabilities,
interests and values are distinctive in any way
whatsoever, or define the particular risks and
challenges we face. Nor do they define what
sort of country we aspire to be beyond the most
general terms.
This has led to mistakes which are
becoming evident in areas like the Strategic
Defence and Security Review (with a u-turn
expected soon on our aircraft carrier policy),
energy and climate change (with confusion
over the promotion of different forms of
power), child poverty targets (which may not
be achieved), deficit reduction targets (which
the government will struggle to achieve) and
economic policy (with economic contraction
rather than growth).
There is no doubt that today’s government
is presented with very severe economic
and political challenges, not least with the
damaging news that UK is now back in
recession. This makes coherent National
MAy 2012 | THE HOUSE MAGAZINE | 41