Policy for Campaigns 14: Five policy pitfalls to avoid

Mistakes to avoid in your policy and campaigning

In previous articles, I’ve explored factors in ensuring a campaigning organisation has good policy support, and warned that if they aren’t in place, things could go wrong. But what if something goes wrong with the work of the policy function itself?

This article offers five examples of how a policy function can make a mistake and lead an organisation into error and failure. It doesn’t so much look at ways in which things can go wrong outside a policy function: previous articles on structure and related organisational concerns provide some examples there; Janey Starling’s excoriating article from September provides an even more straightforward example of people simply doing a poor job - in this case, a charity whose trustees and/or staff leaders lacked sufficient courage to speak up.

But for now: what pitfalls should your policy function avoid?

1. Despair

It’s a vague heading, but despair usually points in an obvious direction in policy work: if you conclude there is no hope of making things better through your campaigning, the only thing left to do is to move into protest mode. This enables you to be seen to fight the good fight, may provide a welcome outlet for frustration among your members and supporters, and could even let you point out in a future campaign that you were right all along.

But you will end up going down a path where you give up on attempting to change anything, and therefore give up on making anything better for anyone. You should only ever do this if you are really, really sure you can’t possibly achieve anything positive.

A sort-of example of this is the attacking consultation response I wrote about in my previous article on language. Now, there were organisation-specific considerations here: the Government was proposing a deeply stupid policy in response to losing a deeply ill-conceived court case, where we had funded the winning appeal. In that context, officials and ministers were simply not willing to engage with us: battle lines had long since been drawn. Other organisations were raising much the same objections as us, but it was an engagement process that we were frozen out of. Fortunately we had fair relations with Treasury and HMRC officials overall, and our unusual position in relation to this particular proposal was a bit of a special case. So with our aggressive, attacking consultation response, we could satisfy our extremely angry members without burning any bridges.

That said, I genuinely didn’t expect the Government to back down in the way they ultimately did. The policy would have caused all sorts of harm to thousands and thousands of family-run businesses, but honestly I did not credit the Labour government of the day with enough sense not to go ahead with it. Fortunately I was wrong, and when they eventually realised they couldn’t get it to work, they didn’t actually press ahead regardless. (Shame they didn’t do that with a few more tax measures *cough* IR35 *cough*.) The anger within the membership was strong, and if we actually had felt we had a chance of winning with a more constructive approach, it might have been a struggle to get the go-ahead for this via the necessary governance processes. If that had been the case, and the organisation had actively chosen the path of giving up on change when it was in fact still possible, it would have fallen into the trap of despairing.

I said above that despair can lead an organisation to resort to protest rather than campaigning. But there’s a paradox there: many protestors clearly feel they have a chance of securing a change (often stopping something from going ahead), even though they are deploying tactics that are likely to alienate and cause division rather than persuade anyone to change their mind. So that distinction between campaigning and protesting is not one they’d recognise. Are they wrong, or am I?

2. Getting your entire analysis wrong

This is so obvious it perhaps doesn’t need saying, but ultimately if you have misunderstood what’s happening, you won’t succeed in achieving your objective and you could even be wrong to attempt it.

This might be because you are trying to prevent something that isn’t on the cards anyway, or because you are suggesting a solution that can’t possibly have the effects you claim it will. The various groups campaigning against NHS “privatisation” such as Keep Our NHS Public or Just Treatment are always my go-to example for this: there are plenty of bad things happening in respect of NHS policy, but seeing so much energy expended in taking swings at a phantom threat is depressing.

Symptoms of misplaced analysis of this sort include a lack of detail in written arguments, and the heavy use of broad, plausible-sounding generalisations in its place. Another giveaway sign can be conclusions that don’t actually draw on any evidence that might nonetheless have been set out: the keenness of the “People’s Covid Inquiry” to make invariably positive findings about public sector health organisations and invariably negative ones about private organisations undermined its credibility, and betrayed its broader political agenda. I also remember having an exchange in a previous role with We Own It, whose analysis was that the root cause of problems in the NHS was the use of private providers, but they simply couldn’t draw any analytical line of causation between the problems they rightly identified, and the cause they wrongly imputed.

The lack of impact – indeed, the broad lack of coverage – of the People’s Covid Inquiry report shows the dangers of getting your basic analysis wrong: people will notice, and not take you seriously. Your only hope of avoiding this is to be working in a niche where nobody else is offering in any competing analysis, but that’s certainly not the case in healthcare. And it’s a terrible shame, because many of the specific findings in that report, and much of the evidence it generated, had a lot of value: but the dodgy analytical framework it was presented within undermined the whole thing.

3. Campaigning for something that will cause a problem for someone else

On one level, governing can be understood as managing endless trade-offs between the rights and needs of different groups. Raising more tax to fund the NHS helps to protect people’s rights to life and good health, but interferes with people’s right to the peaceful enjoyment of their property, to give an extremely basic example.

But some policy issues can cause very direct conflict: building a new railway line might bring all sorts of advantages to the places it serves, but will be a nuisance for people whose homes it might pass close to, or even through, and they will be strongly motivated to try to avert it.

So what do you do when the thing you want to campaign for is going to cause a problem for someone else? You might want to consider how they might respond. Will they have enough campaigning muscle to stop you achieving your aim? Do they in fact have a point, and should you reconsider what you’re trying to achieve? On the other hand, is there an ideological dimension to one or both sides of the argument – and if so, does it help or hinder you to point this out?

One sort-of example I’ve seen of this – and it’s another healthcare one, sorry! – was a campaign for improved treatment of patients with a particular type of cancer, which argued that although it did need some extra funding, there wasn’t a requirement to find new funding for the NHS as a whole. This might have made it a more appealing pitch to the NHS, but it did make it hard for other patient organisations to support it: the money would have to be found from somewhere, so presumably it would have to come out of funds currently spent on other patients. The charity making that ask wasn’t deliberately engaging in beggar-my-neighbour policy, but they weren’t conscious of the implication until I pointed it out (and to be fair, my framing of it above makes it much more obvious than their campaign materials did!).

Perhaps more interesting are examples where this sort of policy conflict could occur, but mostly doesn’t – presumably because the organisations concerned are alive to the pitfall. For instance, you might expect organisations that campaign on housing, or those that build houses, to press for reform of the green belt laws. But mostly, as far as I can tell, they don’t: this campaign urging such reforms has supporters including the Centre for Cities, various individual politicians, some housing associations and some of the right-wing dark money think tanks. But property developer interests and housing charities are both notable by their absence, and I couldn’t find much indication of them campaigning (publicly) on the issue anywhere else either. Indeed, I found Shelter and the Campaign to Protect Rural England in an interesting alliance campaigning for high quality homes in rural areas. There will be multiple reasons for this, but in part one imagines Shelter will feel this is a more fruitful ask than getting intoa bun-fight over planning, and CPRE may see it as a way to escape or deflect from their potential NIMBY or BANANA* tag.

(* Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone)

4. Crying wolf

What happens if you predict dire consequences that then don’t emerge? Or what if you can’t prove they’ve happened?

You may have enjoyed some strong media coverage with your initial claims, but if you get some way down the line and the consequences you’ve warned of haven’t emerged, can you expect to be taken seriously in the future? In the media the answer is yes, as they still want interesting-sounding stories… but in government departments the outcome is less certain.

Back in February, there were warnings of 1,000 fish and chip shops closing in Yorkshire, or one in three nationwide even. Similar stories were knocking around in August. But I’ve not been able to find any evidence of widespread closures to date: certainly, the National Federation of Fish Fryers has not presented any. This is good news of course, but does seem to make the media reports, which the NFFF and others contributed to, seem a bit silly. The pressures on costs due to various global factors seem plausible enough, but the translation of this into the widespread loss of Britain’s fish and chip shops hasn’t happened… yet, anyway.

And that’s a danger with making apocalyptic policy predictions: even if they’re correct, they might play out over a timescale rather less immediate than your initial warning might have implied. The so-called Project Fear warnings about Brexit have of course largely turned out to be on the money, but the predicted difficulties have arisen over a longer period (six years and counting) than many of the starker messages in 2016 appeared to suggest. Another example is the repeated warnings, usually based on job satisfaction surveys, that a third (or similar) of GPs could quit in the next year: if these warnings about what “could” happen had always come to pass, the NHS’s workforce would be minus 200 per cent of its previous levels by now. Accordingly, unions’ legitimate warnings about staff retention in the NHS risk gaining less and less traction each time, even as the problem becomes gradually more and more acute.

5. Getting co-opted

Government departments and agencies can often seek to bring critical stakeholders on board with their work. This isn’t necessarily as cynical is it might sound: true, it’s better to have people inside the tent than outside, with all that implies, so it’s in these bodies’ interests to bring critics on board and quieten angry voices. But just as a general rule, jaw-jaw is better than war-war, so if it’s possible to strike up a useful discussion with an external critic, that is on one level simply the sensible thing to do. What’s more, wise policy heads will know that bringing outside perspectives in will ultimately improve the quality of the policy, even if it feels uncomfortable.

However, there’s undeniably a risk that a campaigning organisation can get drawn so closely into the policy agenda they are campaigning on that they end up blunting their own attack, and signing up to a compromised outcome that they might not have been happy with earlier on. This might be through taking part in a working group, accepting a place on a committee, or similar: once those processes have been undertaken, your organisation is in the position of supporting the outcome (or being complicit in it) unless it somehow makes a clear break and publicly distances itself from it.

This sort of work is a regular dilemma. I saw many aspects of Universal Credit and Personal Independent Payment greatly improved by rigorous, determined engagement by charities with the Department for Work and Pensions, sometimes making use of the channels DWP set up, and sometimes forcing the creation of new opportunities by determined campaigning. You might observe with some justice that these two benefits remain very flawed, and cause a host of problems for many people: but by the same token, you should consider just how much worse they might have been.

However, other organisations might have taken a different view: they might have concluded that the introduction of the two benefits was an enterprise that they felt was fundamentally malign and against their principles, as well as interests. Accordingly, even sitting down with DWP officials to discuss possible ways of amending the proposals was anathema: if the entire concept is unconscionable, how can one justify taking part in its implementation? Which is understandable, and it’s perhaps as well that the world contains groups of both persuasions, as the one certainty in those situations was that the new benefits were going to be introduced, come what may.

So, if your organisation is opposed in principle to a particular policy development, it needs to weigh the potential cost of not being able to mitigate the worst of its effects against the benefits it feels it will enjoy from not engaging. And those latter benefits could be real: if your organisation represents a particular group, but has been involved in a policy that overall works against that particular group, some in the group may question whether they can support you any more, and understandably so. On the occasions when departments and agencies do operate more cynically, and try to make your organisation complicit in a harmful policy change, clear-sighted recognition of the risks is essential.

So, those are five policy pitfalls. What others are there? Have you fallen into them, or successfully avoided it? Or maybe you’ve had to sound the alarm to prevent your organisation going wrong in one of these ways? Tell all in the comments, or on the LinkedIn group, or find me on Twitter or Mastodon.