Policy for Campaigns 15: Know your history

You're almost certainly not the first policy person to pass this way

In the last article, I offered a list of five potential pitfalls to avoid in your policy work. This time, I want to offer a positive recommendation for a tactic that is pretty much guaranteed to enhance the quality of the policy you’re able to deliver for your organisation.

Whatever policy problem you’re facing, it’s unlikely to have come out of nowhere. Others will have grappled with it before: it may be a re-emergence of an old problem that was previously solved, or a continuation of a long-running one, either because it has never been sorted out, or because progress has been made so that it now manifests in a new form. My strong recommendation is to make sure you know about the history of the issue, and thoroughly investigate how far back it goes: you may be surprised at how often you find your issue has extremely deep roots.

So, find out what has been tried before, what has worked, and what hasn’t. This applies to the policy itself (what solutions have been tried, what has failed, and why?), and to previous campaigning (what have others campaigned for in the past, and what stopped them getting it?). And look further: has this particular problem arisen from a longer-running issue that policy makers have grappled with in different forms over generations? What can you learn from that earlier work about the nature of the challenge you’re now facing?

This isn’t necessarily the same as looking for historical parallels, although this can be a useful approach if done carefully: for instance, if Kwasi Kwarteng had done a web search for “Barber boom” and paid attention to the results, he might still be Chancellor of the Exchequer. It can be possible to find informative parallels for even a seemingly novel problem that emerges from left field, such as the Covid-19 pandemic: we had, after all, faced serious pandemics before such as in 1918-19. That example also shows the need to approach historical parallels with care, however: in the 2000s and 2010s, planners went wrong by assuming that the next pandemic to come along would be a flu one rather than, say, a coronavirus, perhaps in part because it was known to have happened before.

A couple of examples will illustrate how contemporary policy challenges can be problems that have been sitting unsolved for several decades, and can have roots that stretch back considerably further.

Adult social care is a classic example. It was already a running policy sore when I started working in the health and care sector back in 2009, following New Labour’s failure to implement the recommendations in the Wanless Report. It has become a long and dismal saga since then, from the “death tax” row in 2010 to the Dilnot Commission, Osborne’s long-grassing of the very limited implementation proposed for its recommendations, the “dementia tax” row in 2017, and most recently Hunt’s long-grassing of Johnson’s extremely limited proposal.

But social care goes back even deeper as an issue. Its current dimensions are dictated by decisions made at the formation of the NHS not to include social care in the universal, tax-funded offering. But care for older or disabled people can be traced back as an issue even further than that, generally as part of the same long sweep as healthcare: this stretches through the histories of local authorities, the Poor Law and eventually the role of religious foundations (of which some of today’s hospitals and charities are direct descendants) if you go back far enough. That is the history that has, ultimately, given us the social care problem we have today. (As an aside, I once wrote a “grand sweep” type article incorporating the history of the charity I was working for at the time into that same timeline going back into the middle ages, which I felt was well justified… The article was never published.)

A second example would be the independent taxation of spouses, which was at issue in the failed “income shifting” proposals I’ve referenced previously. We only moved to taxing husbands’ and wives’ income separately in 1990: prior to that, they were taxed on a sort-of household basis, albeit one that explicitly deemed the wife’s income to belong to the husband and sent him the tax bill, not her. The roots of this lie in English common law, which treated a married woman as the same person as her husband for legal purposes, and meant that any property she owned at the start of the marriage became his.

The Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 secured women’s rights to own property, and rights to be recognised as legal persons independent of their husbands (so able to sue and be sued, for instance), but it took more than another 100 years to clear up the wrinkle around taxation. In the interim, it had become entangled in the issue of women’s suffrage, with members the Women’s Tax Resistance League withholding tax levied by legislators whom they could not elect. (See this article for an unfortunate example of a campaigning group securing a meeting with a key decision-maker and then blowing it by haranguing them, Lloyd George being on the receiving end in this instance.)

Unsurprisingly, such a major policy change had some unintended consequences, which played out over the course of a couple of decades. I’ve already given the example of how independent taxation opened up the possibility of two spouses who jointly own a business being able to use both their tax allowances on profits distributed from it, saving tax compared to if all the income was taxed as the husband’s. During the passage of the legislation, Treasury ministers affirmed to the Commons that this was not only possible but desirable, and official government business advice services subsequently advised couples to structure their businesses in this way. None of which stopped the Inland Revenue (later HMRC) trying to assert that it was not permitted, eventually losing the key case in the House of Lords.

Waves from other changes have continued to lap against the revised structures of personal taxation. While tax is assessed individually, for instance, welfare benefits are assessed on a household basis. This seemed odd generally, and necessitated a complex policy bodge to make the two systems somehow work together when the decision was taken to remove child benefit from higher rate taxpayers, which sounds fair enough at first blush but can have some wildly unequal effects in terms of the prosperity of some households that continue to receive it and others that lose it.

For further evidence of the relevance of deep current and long-running themes to modern policy-making, look no further than the existence of History and Policy. This small unit does a great service in publishing papers by professional historians on the historical origins, and wider resonances, of today’s policy problems. To take just a couple of examples at random, check out this article on the ebb and flow of the roles of local government, markets and public subsidies in housing policy over the last century, or this one on approaches to providing school meals from 1906 onwards. These ongoing, high profile policy issues can be understood as direct continuations of long running stories, in which successive generations have grappled with fundamentally similar issues.

However, not every policy niche is well documented by professional historians. If the history books in your area haven’t (yet) been written, where else can you find out about how your issues were tackled in the past?

You can start with your own organisation. Does its history stretch back over decades, or longer? How does it curate its institutional memory? It might not be readily accessible in an operational sense, unless you’re very lucky, but maybe it has an archive of some sort, either in its own records or deposited with a library? Or more prosaically: can you find someone to speak to who has worked on the issue for years, or did so in the past? Many policy people rise up the ranks into leadership or other roles, but you may find some dogged campaigners who have been fighting the fight over the long term, and not been tempted up the conventional career ladder. If they are around, in your organisation or an allied one, get to know them and pick their brains.

From our viewpoint in the early 2020s, material going back two decades or slightly more might feasibly still be on the internet. It’s worth having a dig around in the lower end of Google’s search results, though what you find may be more and more fragmentary the further back you go: material tends to get culled when websites get redesigned, organisations close or merge, or other interruptions occur. For material produced before the turn of the millennium, you’ll be very unlikely to find it in electronic form, at least from its original publication (though it may have been digitised since), so you might want to consider some archive research.

Or, even though not every policy area has a well developed historiography, you could find there have been some relevant studies, even if they weren’t framed as historical studies of the exact topic you’re working on. Check out open access journals (or journals generally if you can access a library with the relevant subscriptions), and don’t discount the possibility of something germane sitting in a PhD thesis somewhere, if you can track it down. Or maybe your organisation holds a collection of relevant books, or even a fully library of some sort.

Another possibility is that there may be recollections available from past combatants or grass roots participants, in online forums or on social media; as with any primary source, be careful of how you treat this information, but don’t disregard it entirely.

The key thing is to ask the question and have a look: you may be surprised by what you find, and the extent to which you can enhance your own understanding of the issue you’re working on. The same advice stands for policy-makers in departments and agencies: while it’s welcome that most government departments have a chief scientific advisor, I’d argue they should all have historical units headed by a professional historian as well. Of course, history offers lessons that are both useful and potentially inconvenient: it can sometimes be a sure-fire way to demonstrate the idiocy of a new policy proposal, and this means it is seldom popular with ministers.