Wendy Alexander MSPPaisley North
CPPR
Monday, 4th October 2004Good morning.
We are meeting this morning in the Kelvin Library – named in memory of Lord Kelvin – or William Thomson as he then was, who along with William Rankine – a little over a century ago turned this institution into Britain’s leading centre for applied science and engineering.
So it is a fitting setting to launch CPPR, which aspires today to make Glasgow and Strathclyde Britain’s leading centre for applied economics, geography and political science for the regions.
Today we simply to stand in the footsteps of those who have gone before.
As I reviewed the illustrious group of academics gathered here today and felt suitably daunted by their decades of experience and collective expertise I decided this was not a day to be an amateur academic – although as a Visiting Professor at Strathclyde Andrew and his colleagues have afforded me that exciting opportunity as a visiting professor – but I decided this morning it would be safer to stick with my day job as a politician and talk about why Scotland’s politicians need CPPR.
I will talk mainly about Scotland – but only because we are getting a reputation of doing things first when it comes to constitutional change in the UK.
The pattern is becoming predictable first Scotland, then Wales and Northern Ireland, next London and next month a referendum on creating a Northern Assembly.
So after having led the constitutional reform process – over 5 yeas ago it is now seems long overdue for Scotland to provide some fresh thinking about what those multifarious devolved institutions might do.
But lest in describing this inexorable and glorious forward march of devolution — I be accused of living in a parallel universe – let me tackle head on the issue of public perception.
I acknowledge that caring about devolution can seem a risky business in Scotland today.
Imagine you are one of the young research fellows about to be appointed under the CPPR and you were taking the 44 bus from Glasgow to Strathclyde – and the person beside you asked what do you do – the young researcher might be forgiven for hesitating.
Admitting to trying to figure out the right policy choices for the Scottish Parliament is to invite a diatribe – the Scottish cringe may have gone but the Scottish whinge is alive and well.
And so our savvy young researcher might be forgiven for muttering about work for the ESRC, a collaborative project with European colleagues, in fact anything other than owning up to trying to help Edinburgh’s politicians to do the right thing!
Just days before we open our new home – is it not time we began to consign the whinge as well as the cringe to history.
And it is to history one of the disciplines I studied here some 2 decades ago – to make sense of that mood of disappointment and anxiety.
Because from history’s perspective policy making for a devolved Scotland – indeed a devolved Britain is still in its infancy.
In three years’ time the next Scottish Parliament election will take place within days of the 300th Anniversary of the Union.
And for the first of those 300 years our domestic affairs were shaped by the Parish, in the second hundred years by vibrant civic government, the town and gown tradition of Lord Kelvin’s day and throughout the 20th century by the Scottish Office,
Reflect for a moment that the Scottish Office was created when Lord Kelvin was teaching here.
Ironically perhaps it was the contemporary answer to the fears of Whitehall centralisation.
But of course economic and political life was increasingly centralised in the twentieth century and as the era of big government began – the reach of one man -it was always a man -the Secretary of State for Scotland also expanded.
But constrained often by only being able to devote Monday to the affairs of government in Edinburgh followed by three days in London and one day in his constituency.
Scotland was more administered than governed.
So the creation of the Scottish Parliament did fundamentally change the character of governance in Scotland.
The need for fresh thinking was the inevitable consequence.
And of course we are part of a worldwide trend to decentralisation – but crucially in Scotland – we are rather John come latelys to federalism to a mindset of shared decision making.
And the downbeat mood – well it is like waking up with a hangover we are not quite sure what has hit us. it is as if we know something has changed but we are not quite sure what CPPR – can be the alka seltzer – making it all clear again.
And it means acknowledging that devolution has wrought three big changes.
Firstly; the constitutional issue is finally in retreat and there is space for the wider social and economic agenda to simply breath.
In truth for most of all our adult lives in Scotland – Scottish politics was dominated by the Constitutional question.
For the 30 years following the Hamilton by-election in 1968 the dominating question of Scottish public policy was the constitutional one.
And if you doubt me, ask yourself why the only academics ordinary Scots ever heard were the political scientists, the Bill Millers John Curtice, latterly the James Mitchell’s.
My point is that the constitutional issue developed an urgency that had to be resolved – it has been.
Secondly; the starting point for discussion was the legitimacy of who was speaking not the value of what they were actually saying.
So we got rusty in the twenty years prior to devolution.
Not only was Scotland being administered from the Scottish office – that was bad enough but also it was being done by politicians without a political mandate.
For civil servants and policy makers on it became a deeply uncomfortable experience.
For civil servants working for politicians castigated for a lack of democratic legitimacy it became harder to be open to fresh ideas. Inevitably a bunker mentality set in when inviting outsider expert opinion was to court public challenge.
The third change is in transparency.
Post-parliament we may not always like what we see but unarguably the Scottish parliament has brought a whole new transparency.
Here as the rest of the democratic world had figured out democracy may be bad but it is the best system we have.
So I am afraid we have to count it as an advance in today’s Scotland that if the politicians don’t get you the press surely will.
So post hangover Scotland is slowly waking up to a new world.
The best analogy I have ever found was with the transition of former eastern European communist states to democracy.
Dissidents campaigning for freedom – painted the world in black.
On a smaller scale campaigning for a Scottish parliament was not so different – it was a world of goodies and badies.
But as those same dissidents have found – governing is about choosing between shades of grey.
There is no moral certainty about the choice between investing in schools and hospitals.
CPPR is about helping Scotland govern better in shades of grey – perhaps searching for the silver in the sludge and slurry.
So for all who devote their energies to this endeavour; be excited that this is an exciting time in 300 years of Scottish history to be around.
Lord Kelvin did not make Glasgow the workshop of the world or Rankin create a shipbuilding cluster – but the character of their academic endeavour was surely shaped by their times – and they made a lasting contribution to it.
So today be excited by the challenge of the times in which you live and be sustained by having more chance to shape the nation’s future more than for perhaps a century or more.
And if you think this is merely rhetoric consider for a moment the newly arrived forums for the work of this centre – Parliamentary committees, the executive, a Scottish press no longer obsessed by the constitution, the favourable financial climate for distinctive policy making.
In five years we have moved from a world where the public space in Scotland was dominated by who decides, namely London or Scotland and their democratic legitimacy, to the much more important terrain of what do we do.
No historian would expect that transition to be easy, quick or smooth.
The challenge for civic, educational and academic Scotland is to rise to the challenge and for politicians to have the will to listen.
So let me use the remainder of my time to turn to my tribe the politicians and our willingness to listen to CPPR and others.
There are optimistic and less optimistic trends
One real danger in our newly democratic Scotland is that he shouts loudest has the most clout.
Our Parliamentary Committees in their formative years have too often been vehicles for advocacy more than analysis – the pawns of well organised, well resourced producer groups – less interested in the evidence than defending their particular interest.
The Education committee dominated by the vocabulary of teaching, rather than learning.
A finance committee discussing water and transport issues by interrogating the providers rather than users.
As the song says – somebody does it better?
So if advocacy over analysis in parliamentary committees is a weakness in other ways the policy process in Scotland is diverging favourably from that of the rest of the UK.
To borrow an analogy from economics, Scotland is a thin market when it comes to think-tanks.
But therein I think lies the real opportunity for a university-based centre such as this one.
South of the border public policy space is colonised by think tanks, The Kings Fund, IPPR, the Adam Smith Institute, the Social Market Foundation.
Here it is forward looking Universities that are grasping the mantle.
And it was Paul Krugman who pressed home this advantage when he drew a distinction between the policy wonks who populate think tanks and the professors who inhabit our universities.
The former, the policy wonks are dismissed as peddlers of prejudice whilst the professors are the true guardians of evidence-based policy.
And the need for better evidence-based policy brings me to the issue I wish to touch on before I conclude.
Tempting as it is to attempt to set the research agenda for CPPR this morning – I will leave that to the workshops this afternoon.
Let me instead share with you a couple of the insights emerging from the Allander series.
As many of you will know the Allander series that ran last winter was intended to bring some to the world’s best economists to Scotland to challenge conventional thinking about growth, opportunity and governance.
In a world where labour is increasingly as mobile as capital has become an overriding economic imperative is to make Scotland a more attractive place to live and work.
This has profound implications for planning, transportation and housing policies – not least to take advantage of Scotland’s space and relative lack of congestion.
Ed Glaser’s prescription of “sun skills and sprawl” may not be a mantra to find favour with everyone – but the subsequent evidence of the Barker review in housing implies we have had a cosy consensus on planning policies for too long.
Yet despite the evidence of the extent of development constraints in Scotland we see supporters in all main parties embracing calls for a third party right of appeal – and the academic community keeping its head down!
Nobel Prize winner James Heckman highlighted the critical imperative of investing in the earliest years where the returns to educational investment are highest and most effective.
But the recent spending review in Scotland last week suggests we have still some way for this evidence-based policy to be reflected in executive decision making.
Last week in Brighton – Labour’s British policy makers are getting out in front in taking pre 5 and its potential favourable impact on the birth rate to the next stage.
Likewise focus on class sizes misses the evidence that teacher quality is the decisive factor.
Again are academics willing to speak out against prevailing orthodoxies
Thirdly the question of the relationship between fiscal decentralisation and growth.
Answer – both too little and too much is a bad thing – simultaneously laying down a challenge to both the governing parties and the two opposition parties.
In this area the most insightful official word comes from the treasury’s own review of US federalism in the context of its consideration of the prospects for British participation in European monetary union.
Unlike the Allander series contributors the CPPR’s researchers and fellows will be here to stay – it allows not just the chance to break the mould in terms of defining the challenges but also crucially to develop a dialogue.
And an effective dialogue means a different modus operandi on both sides.
If we politicians should be willing to learn from the evidence, so academics should be willing to listen to politicians about our preoccupations.
Let me conclude by being deliberately provocative about 3 issues that – I leave on the table for brave souls in the new centre willing to slay some sacred cows.
The first is about how to make change happen – as opposed to just taking about it.
I suspect if you talked to any serving minister today they would quickly characterise their greatest challenge not as the absence of policy-making capability but implementational capability.
Switched on academics need to understand that these days — deciding policy is not the last step but the first step.
Anyone here tempted to belittle operational questions – will I guarantee you get short shrift from both today’s politicians and civil servants.
Achieving rapid improvement in operational capability here will involve bringing in those with expertise elsewhere – last week the parliament’s research dept produced data letting me analyse how many secondees there were amongst our 4000 strong civil service cohort – in fairness there were increasing numbers from the public sector, almost none from academia and only 14 from the private sector – one 3 month secondee in finance – one in enterprise.
We are assured much has changed post devolution – but is one private sector secondee in the enterprise dept. we can and we must do better.
Linked to this why in Scotland have we so little used the practice now common in the UK of looking for outside perspectives, love it or loath it the Sutherland report on free personal care, Higgs on corporate governance, Richard Lambert on research and innovation in our universities, Ronald Cohen on social enterprise, Adair Turner on the pensions commission, Fred Goodwin on credit unions, Ian Russell on the voluntary sector – beyond cubie and fraser I find it difficult to think of a Scottish equivalent – again we can and we should do better.
My second controversial area is public services productivity.
Now post FEDS 2 – the framework for economic development for Scotland – the centrepiece of the new strategy.
Well, I remain bemused as to how public sector productivity can be your policy priority and so far – 6 months after the current public sector efficiency drive of 2.5% across the board was announced by the Treasury – but we are aiming only to make a third of the efficiencies that are planned in the rest of the UK.
But cutting only £650m over the next three years – rather than £1.9b which would be our equivalent share we will spend a Scottish parliament building worth in each of the next 3 years in the old ways whilst equivalent sums will be released into front line services in the rest of the UK
My third area is not to throw the baby out with the bath water.
Parochialism is alive and well.
Post-devolution we need to work doubly hard to stay abreast of what is happening in the rest of the UK and beyond.
Last week in Brighton as I sat in on fringe meeting about the role of choice in delivering innovation and quality and the trade-offs with equity and capacity constraints in health.
I marvelled at the sophistication of the debate.
CPPR should be a bridge to the outside world – to keep us in touch.
Time precludes me taking further about the need for independent evidence based work in heath.
These are the provocative examples but I think they highlight both the challenge and the opportunity.
All of which is to say – we need this centre and its wisdom.
It is a good time to be around.
No doubt at any time in the last 50 years the ESRC was there — but only in the last 5 was devolution here.
Today regional need not mean peripheral — arguably the contestibilty between policy choices in different regions will lead to great clarity and optimisation overall – others more qualified than I can testify to the risks of monopoly capture and lack of competition
Overcoming the shrill advocacy with serious analysis can only come from strengthening the evidence base.
Good evidence makes it much harder for politicians to make bad decisions.
Lord Kelvin lectured here at a time of great advances in public health also championed by medics in this institution and later by brave politicians.
Life changing transformations. in the public health field, such as clean water, supplies, universal vaccination, free milk, family allowances, were all brought about by visionary politicians willing to recognise the evidence.
The process will be no different in the next century than in the last one.
Only the challenges change – mental health, the role of early years, obesity etc
Changing public conscientiousness – the way people see an issue – is a bigger contribution than any time serving politician makes.
Fashionable as it is to characterise academics as either hopelessly unworldly, or self obsessed the truth of course is very different.
Applied research can be a pursuit of high moral purpose.
So in the years to come do not be easily discouraged from that mission of educating the nation – its people, its press, its politicians — history is very much on your side.
Good morning.
We are meeting this morning in the Kelvin Library – named in memory of Lord Kelvin – or William Thomson as he then was, who along with William Rankine – a little over a century ago turned this institution into Britain’s leading centre for applied science and engineering.
So it is a fitting setting to launch CPPR, which aspires today to make Glasgow and Strathclyde Britain’s leading centre for applied economics, geography and political science for the regions.
Today we simply to stand in the footsteps of those who have gone before.
As I reviewed the illustrious group of academics gathered here today and felt suitably daunted by their decades of experience and collective expertise I decided this was not a day to be an amateur academic – although as a Visiting Professor at Strathclyde Andrew and his colleagues have afforded me that exciting opportunity as a visiting professor – but I decided this morning it would be safer to stick with my day job as a politician and talk about why Scotland’s politicians need CPPR.
I will talk mainly about Scotland – but only because we are getting a reputation of doing things first when it comes to constitutional change in the UK.
The pattern is becoming predictable first Scotland, then Wales and Northern Ireland, next London and next month a referendum on creating a Northern Assembly.
So after having led the constitutional reform process – over 5 yeas ago it is now seems long overdue for Scotland to provide some fresh thinking about what those multifarious devolved institutions might do.
But lest in describing this inexorable and glorious forward march of devolution — I be accused of living in a parallel universe – let me tackle head on the issue of public perception.
I acknowledge that caring about devolution can seem a risky business in Scotland today.
Imagine you are one of the young research fellows about to be appointed under the CPPR and you were taking the 44 bus from Glasgow to Strathclyde – and the person beside you asked what do you do – the young researcher might be forgiven for hesitating.
Admitting to trying to figure out the right policy choices for the Scottish Parliament is to invite a diatribe – the Scottish cringe may have gone but the Scottish whinge is alive and well.
And so our savvy young researcher might be forgiven for muttering about work for the ESRC, a collaborative project with European colleagues, in fact anything other than owning up to trying to help Edinburgh’s politicians to do the right thing!
Just days before we open our new home – is it not time we began to consign the whinge as well as the cringe to history.
And it is to history one of the disciplines I studied here some 2 decades ago – to make sense of that mood of disappointment and anxiety.
Because from history’s perspective policy making for a devolved Scotland – indeed a devolved Britain is still in its infancy.
In three years’ time the next Scottish Parliament election will take place within days of the 300th Anniversary of the Union.
And for the first of those 300 years our domestic affairs were shaped by the Parish, in the second hundred years by vibrant civic government, the town and gown tradition of Lord Kelvin’s day and throughout the 20th century by the Scottish Office,
Reflect for a moment that the Scottish Office was created when Lord Kelvin was teaching here.
Ironically perhaps it was the contemporary answer to the fears of Whitehall centralisation.
But of course economic and political life was increasingly centralised in the twentieth century and as the era of big government began – the reach of one man -it was always a man -the Secretary of State for Scotland also expanded.
But constrained often by only being able to devote Monday to the affairs of government in Edinburgh followed by three days in London and one day in his constituency.
Scotland was more administered than governed.
So the creation of the Scottish Parliament did fundamentally change the character of governance in Scotland.
The need for fresh thinking was the inevitable consequence.
And of course we are part of a worldwide trend to decentralisation – but crucially in Scotland – we are rather John come latelys to federalism to a mindset of shared decision making.
And the downbeat mood – well it is like waking up with a hangover we are not quite sure what has hit us. it is as if we know something has changed but we are not quite sure what CPPR – can be the alka seltzer – making it all clear again.
And it means acknowledging that devolution has wrought three big changes.
Firstly; the constitutional issue is finally in retreat and there is space for the wider social and economic agenda to simply breath.
In truth for most of all our adult lives in Scotland – Scottish politics was dominated by the Constitutional question.
For the 30 years following the Hamilton by-election in 1968 the dominating question of Scottish public policy was the constitutional one.
And if you doubt me, ask yourself why the only academics ordinary Scots ever heard were the political scientists, the Bill Millers John Curtice, latterly the James Mitchell’s.
My point is that the constitutional issue developed an urgency that had to be resolved – it has been.
Secondly; the starting point for discussion was the legitimacy of who was speaking not the value of what they were actually saying.
So we got rusty in the twenty years prior to devolution.
Not only was Scotland being administered from the Scottish office – that was bad enough but also it was being done by politicians without a political mandate.
For civil servants and policy makers on it became a deeply uncomfortable experience.
For civil servants working for politicians castigated for a lack of democratic legitimacy it became harder to be open to fresh ideas. Inevitably a bunker mentality set in when inviting outsider expert opinion was to court public challenge.
The third change is in transparency.
Post-parliament we may not always like what we see but unarguably the Scottish parliament has brought a whole new transparency.
Here as the rest of the democratic world had figured out democracy may be bad but it is the best system we have.
So I am afraid we have to count it as an advance in today’s Scotland that if the politicians don’t get you the press surely will.
So post hangover Scotland is slowly waking up to a new world.
The best analogy I have ever found was with the transition of former eastern European communist states to democracy.
Dissidents campaigning for freedom – painted the world in black.
On a smaller scale campaigning for a Scottish parliament was not so different – it was a world of goodies and badies.
But as those same dissidents have found – governing is about choosing between shades of grey.
There is no moral certainty about the choice between investing in schools and hospitals.
CPPR is about helping Scotland govern better in shades of grey – perhaps searching for the silver in the sludge and slurry.
So for all who devote their energies to this endeavour; be excited that this is an exciting time in 300 years of Scottish history to be around.
Lord Kelvin did not make Glasgow the workshop of the world or Rankin create a shipbuilding cluster – but the character of their academic endeavour was surely shaped by their times – and they made a lasting contribution to it.
So today be excited by the challenge of the times in which you live and be sustained by having more chance to shape the nation’s future more than for perhaps a century or more.
And if you think this is merely rhetoric consider for a moment the newly arrived forums for the work of this centre – Parliamentary committees, the executive, a Scottish press no longer obsessed by the constitution, the favourable financial climate for distinctive policy making.
In five years we have moved from a world where the public space in Scotland was dominated by who decides, namely London or Scotland and their democratic legitimacy, to the much more important terrain of what do we do.
No historian would expect that transition to be easy, quick or smooth.
The challenge for civic, educational and academic Scotland is to rise to the challenge and for politicians to have the will to listen.
So let me use the remainder of my time to turn to my tribe the politicians and our willingness to listen to CPPR and others.
There are optimistic and less optimistic trends
One real danger in our newly democratic Scotland is that he shouts loudest has the most clout.
Our Parliamentary Committees in their formative years have too often been vehicles for advocacy more than analysis – the pawns of well organised, well resourced producer groups – less interested in the evidence than defending their particular interest.
The Education committee dominated by the vocabulary of teaching, rather than learning.
A finance committee discussing water and transport issues by interrogating the providers rather than users.
As the song says – somebody does it better?
So if advocacy over analysis in parliamentary committees is a weakness in other ways the policy process in Scotland is diverging favourably from that of the rest of the UK.
To borrow an analogy from economics, Scotland is a thin market when it comes to think-tanks.
But therein I think lies the real opportunity for a university-based centre such as this one.
South of the border public policy space is colonised by think tanks, The Kings Fund, IPPR, the Adam Smith Institute, the Social Market Foundation.
Here it is forward looking Universities that are grasping the mantle.
And it was Paul Krugman who pressed home this advantage when he drew a distinction between the policy wonks who populate think tanks and the professors who inhabit our universities.
The former, the policy wonks are dismissed as peddlers of prejudice whilst the professors are the true guardians of evidence-based policy.
And the need for better evidence-based policy brings me to the issue I wish to touch on before I conclude.
Tempting as it is to attempt to set the research agenda for CPPR this morning – I will leave that to the workshops this afternoon.
Let me instead share with you a couple of the insights emerging from the Allander series.
As many of you will know the Allander series that ran last winter was intended to bring some to the world’s best economists to Scotland to challenge conventional thinking about growth, opportunity and governance.
In a world where labour is increasingly as mobile as capital has become an overriding economic imperative is to make Scotland a more attractive place to live and work.
This has profound implications for planning, transportation and housing policies – not least to take advantage of Scotland’s space and relative lack of congestion.
Ed Glaser’s prescription of “sun skills and sprawl” may not be a mantra to find favour with everyone – but the subsequent evidence of the Barker review in housing implies we have had a cosy consensus on planning policies for too long.
Yet despite the evidence of the extent of development constraints in Scotland we see supporters in all main parties embracing calls for a third party right of appeal – and the academic community keeping its head down!
Nobel Prize winner James Heckman highlighted the critical imperative of investing in the earliest years where the returns to educational investment are highest and most effective.
But the recent spending review in Scotland last week suggests we have still some way for this evidence-based policy to be reflected in executive decision making.
Last week in Brighton – Labour’s British policy makers are getting out in front in taking pre 5 and its potential favourable impact on the birth rate to the next stage.
Likewise focus on class sizes misses the evidence that teacher quality is the decisive factor.
Again are academics willing to speak out against prevailing orthodoxies
Thirdly the question of the relationship between fiscal decentralisation and growth.
Answer – both too little and too much is a bad thing – simultaneously laying down a challenge to both the governing parties and the two opposition parties.
In this area the most insightful official word comes from the treasury’s own review of US federalism in the context of its consideration of the prospects for British participation in European monetary union.
Unlike the Allander series contributors the CPPR’s researchers and fellows will be here to stay – it allows not just the chance to break the mould in terms of defining the challenges but also crucially to develop a dialogue.
And an effective dialogue means a different modus operandi on both sides.
If we politicians should be willing to learn from the evidence, so academics should be willing to listen to politicians about our preoccupations.
Let me conclude by being deliberately provocative about 3 issues that – I leave on the table for brave souls in the new centre willing to slay some sacred cows.
The first is about how to make change happen – as opposed to just taking about it.
I suspect if you talked to any serving minister today they would quickly characterise their greatest challenge not as the absence of policy-making capability but implementational capability.
Switched on academics need to understand that these days — deciding policy is not the last step but the first step.
Anyone here tempted to belittle operational questions – will I guarantee you get short shrift from both today’s politicians and civil servants.
Achieving rapid improvement in operational capability here will involve bringing in those with expertise elsewhere – last week the parliament’s research dept produced data letting me analyse how many secondees there were amongst our 4000 strong civil service cohort – in fairness there were increasing numbers from the public sector, almost none from academia and only 14 from the private sector – one 3 month secondee in finance – one in enterprise.
We are assured much has changed post devolution – but is one private sector secondee in the enterprise dept. we can and we must do better.
Linked to this why in Scotland have we so little used the practice now common in the UK of looking for outside perspectives, love it or loath it the Sutherland report on free personal care, Higgs on corporate governance, Richard Lambert on research and innovation in our universities, Ronald Cohen on social enterprise, Adair Turner on the pensions commission, Fred Goodwin on credit unions, Ian Russell on the voluntary sector – beyond cubie and fraser I find it difficult to think of a Scottish equivalent – again we can and we should do better.
My second controversial area is public services productivity.
Now post FEDS 2 – the framework for economic development for Scotland – the centrepiece of the new strategy.
Well, I remain bemused as to how public sector productivity can be your policy priority and so far – 6 months after the current public sector efficiency drive of 2.5% across the board was announced by the Treasury – but we are aiming only to make a third of the efficiencies that are planned in the rest of the UK.
But cutting only £650m over the next three years – rather than £1.9b which would be our equivalent share we will spend a Scottish parliament building worth in each of the next 3 years in the old ways whilst equivalent sums will be released into front line services in the rest of the UK
My third area is not to throw the baby out with the bath water.
Parochialism is alive and well.
Post-devolution we need to work doubly hard to stay abreast of what is happening in the rest of the UK and beyond.
Last week in Brighton as I sat in on fringe meeting about the role of choice in delivering innovation and quality and the trade-offs with equity and capacity constraints in health.
I marvelled at the sophistication of the debate.
CPPR should be a bridge to the outside world – to keep us in touch.
Time precludes me taking further about the need for independent evidence based work in heath.
These are the provocative examples but I think they highlight both the challenge and the opportunity.
All of which is to say – we need this centre and its wisdom.
It is a good time to be around.
No doubt at any time in the last 50 years the ESRC was there — but only in the last 5 was devolution here.
Today regional need not mean peripheral — arguably the contestibilty between policy choices in different regions will lead to great clarity and optimisation overall – others more qualified than I can testify to the risks of monopoly capture and lack of competition
Overcoming the shrill advocacy with serious analysis can only come from strengthening the evidence base.
Good evidence makes it much harder for politicians to make bad decisions.
Lord Kelvin lectured here at a time of great advances in public health also championed by medics in this institution and later by brave politicians.
Life changing transformations. in the public health field, such as clean water, supplies, universal vaccination, free milk, family allowances, were all brought about by visionary politicians willing to recognise the evidence.
The process will be no different in the next century than in the last one.
Only the challenges change – mental health, the role of early years, obesity etc
Changing public conscientiousness – the way people see an issue – is a bigger contribution than any time serving politician makes.
Fashionable as it is to characterise academics as either hopelessly unworldly, or self obsessed the truth of course is very different.
Applied research can be a pursuit of high moral purpose.
So in the years to come do not be easily discouraged from that mission of educating the nation – its people, its press, its politicians — history is very much on your side.