Policy for Campaigns 07: Process is your Valentine

Understanding process will point the way in your policy work

I’ve long been fond of the phrase “process is your Valentine”, since I first heard it on the sadly now defunct Bombshell podcast. They even produced some merch displaying the slogan (though it’s no longer available), and if it wasn’t for the international shipping costs I’d have gladly snapped some up. (Indeed, at one point after I’d mentioned it on Twitter, at least one friend assumed Process Is Your Valentine was the name of an obscure indie band and that I’d accidentally been tweeting from the wrong account.)

The phrase is a memorable way of capturing the fact that process matters, often in ways that are taken for granted and overlooked. In the UK, the recent process for selecting our new Prime Minister attracted some attention, but in the “horse race” coverage of the contest it was largely taken for granted. This is fairly remarkable considering how central the Conservative Party’s processes for ejecting and electing its leaders were, both to the initiation of the contest and to its outcome. An obvious comparison illustrates this: if the Labour Party had the same “ejector seat” mechanism for its leader as the Conservatives do, Blair and Brown would at the very least have faced challenges, and Corbyn would have been removed before he had had chance to fight a single general election, as the confidence ballot in which he lost the support of all bar 40 Labour MPs in 2016 would have been binding. How different our politics, and public policy, might have been in those scenarios: would Blair even have tried to take us into Iraq? Would Theresa May have dared call an election in 2017 against a different Labour leader? And so on.

So while process clearly matters, what sorts of process are we interested in, for the purposes of doing policy in a campaigning organisation? There are probably two basic types: processes for developing policy in your organisation, and the processes you will have to contend with in order to secure the policy change you are seeking. They will both merit more in-depth exploration in future articles, but let’s briefly sketch out an overview of them here.

Clear process for developing policy

In some respects, this look at process is a companion to some of the considerations explored in recent posts about evidence and supporter involvement. There isn’t a set formula or cookie-cutter process for policy development, so you might often be facing the question of how regimented or formalised you want your work to be – or, potentially, how regimented or formalised your organisation wants it to be.

As I previously outlined, there are definitely things to be said for having some governance and/or formal supporter involvement in developing policy: constructive challenge is always helpful, as is a measure of cover if you drop a clanger (which you will at some point). It might feel easier to simply do policy as one person at a desk, but it seldom produces the best results.

There are other audiences to think about too: are there internal stakeholders such as other departments or a leadership group whose input or sign-off you need? It may be that this is important for big or strategically important items of work, where there is a need to ensure alignment across the entire organisation. The requirements for chunky work of this sort will vary a bit each time: in these cases, you probably need good judgement and good communication (hopefully in the context of a collaborative internal culture and clear strategic focus across the organisation) more than good processes. But for more day-to-day items like consultation responses, inquiry submissions, write-ups of reports of regular survey work and so on, there may be some useful processes that help to see the work through to conclusion and sign-off.

Even so, it’s been my experience that set processes often tend not to stick unless they go with the grain of the nature of the task being completed. If the process genuinely provides you with useful input and improves what you are able to deliver, you will be incentivised to use it regularly. If it results in engagement that your colleagues find useful, they will be keen to continue it.

However, if it feels like a process for the sake of a process, it will probably slip out of use, and either nobody will notice or nobody will object. Processes can be put in place because there was a general feeling that there should be a process, or perhaps for the sake of making leaders or even non-execs feel better about stuff they don’t really understand. In either case, consider whether you could do something else to support colleagues, either to reassure them that there isn’t really a need for a process (or that a different process is more appropriate), or to help them feel more comfortable about policy work without feeling they need to become part of the process themselves.

Understanding the processes needed to secure your change

Process is also your Valentine when you have to understand the nature of the problem you are trying to solve, and identify ways of solving it.

Taking my (overly crude?) taxonomy of two basic types of policy problem: are you trying to change something “hard” or formal like primary or secondary legislation, or are you trying to change a culture or pattern of behaviour in an institution, or even in the wider population? The answer to this will immediately point to matters of process: for legislation or regulation, there will be well defined formal processes for making changes (so ensure you’re across legislative processes, including details like the difference between affirmative and negative resolution procedures); for behavioural or cultural change, you will need to identify the factors that drive the behaviour or culture, and then figure out how to change them.

Either way, your eventual policy recommendations must be built around the processes involved: remedying bad attitudes among a particular type of regulator or inspector in order to improve the quality of their delivery probably shouldn’t involve pushing for a change to primary legislation, for example, but it might involve getting their training changed. Or your diagnosis might be that better implementation of an existing law would make a positive difference, but re-writing it would ultimately be better: in that case, consider which would be procedurally easier to achieve and what resources you have, and prioritise accordingly, to pursue one option or both.

In turn, your understanding of process should point the way for campaigning actions to secure your policy recommendations. Suppose, for example, that your recommendations involve building some new infrastructure: you will need to know who will provide the funding, who makes the decisions about building it, and what other organisations might have a say in things (including what levels of government you’re dealing with – UK-level, devolved, local or what-have-you); from that, you or your public affairs and campaigns colleagues will be able to develop approaches for influencing each of those decision-makers. But knowing the processes has to be the starting-point for doing that.

I suppose there’s one major caveat to all this: there’s the theoretical chance of being able to adopt a Gordian Knot type solution, by getting a minister (or someone) to wade in and issue a diktat that it all has to be sorted out, and everyone will just have to find a way to make it work. The campaign for Gurkha settlement rights fronted by Joanna Lumley sticks in the mind as a high-profile example of this, with the hapless minister Phil Woolas eventually having to agree to her every demand, watching for her nod at the end of each sentence as he spoke to the assembled media. But be aware that this is extremely high risk: you will have to find some direct route to the key decision-maker, and provide them with a strong reason to act; this may involve a fair degree of agitation of some form, that could put some noses out of joint – noses that may well be attached to people you will have to deal with if your gambit fails and you have to revert to doing it the hard way.

You may also find that short-cutting all those processes might mean that your policy recommendation isn’t tested thoroughly enough and proves not to have been the best option, or that its implementation isn’t properly worked up and ultimately falls short. Accusations of those sorts have certainly been levelled at the Gurkha campaign in the years following its success. But I wouldn’t want to be the one to tell Joanna Lumley that process really would have been her Valentine.