DAVE PENMAN A NEW BIG BEAST IN THE ALPACAS DEN
of the committee, asks what I assume was an awkward question about giving the PM di cult advice, but rather suspiciously the sound went o . I imagined Hard Rain Man sitting in the No.10 Mission Control room, staring at his bank of enormous Currys own brand tellys. One of these is linked to a big data algorithm designed by Darren, 22, who came fourth place in the school
Grand Theft Auto competition and was brought in under the
WMP (Weirdo and Misfits Programme). Darren’s algorithm has recognised Wragg’s speech tones and predicted a di cult question, and Dom immediately bangs hard on the big red mute button. Unfortunately, as they all high five, Dom lets go of the button and we hear the end of the answer. He needn’t have bothered.
Simon Case may not be a household name and he may have got this gig surprisingly early in his career, as he acknowledged, but he didn’t get here without knowing how to dodge a di cult question. He did, after all, work for the Royals. As the session rolled on, we got the odd bit of Whitehall tittle-tattle. The management of the permanent secretary group is being split between Case, COO and Tom Scholar, the Treasury perm sec – that had my eyebrow doing Roger Moore impressions. Case got into a kerfu e over the civil service code question when it sounded like he was advocating for civil servants to resign like it was stage 3 of a set out process, just after stage 2 (send a memo to your line manager).
There were some di cult areas, like the investigation in to the home secretary’s conduct or the “churn” in perm secs, which is an interesting phrase to use about the chaos of the last six months. He was asked about the status of those who’ve been appointed to key operational roles such as Dido Harding, which would normally have been undertaken by civil servants and gone through a selection process. These were public appointments, at ministerial discretion, over which he has no direct control.
As with a number of these issues, the real fight is with politicians and the sessions can often be just civil servants trying to politely avoid getting drawn into areas that no-one should expect them to comment on.
But the cabinet secretary is of course also head of the civil service and this was the area where Case threw o the East Cheam baggage. He spoke passionately about civil service values and the need to be able to speak truth to power. I sensed a twinkle of emotion when he talked about the heroics he had witnessed over the last few months, as civil servants responded to the pandemic under phenomenal pressure.
It’s been an extraordinary few months and years for the civil service, where the political leadership is not simply absent, but at times hostile.
Civil servants need a leader who can influence privately and inspire publicly. There was just enough of both on show to remain hopeful.
SIMON CASE’S FIRST APPEARANCE BEFORE THE
The Covid-19 pandemic is the most substantial policy challenge the UK has faced since the second world war. In less than a year, the virus has killed around 43,000 people, thrown the economy into recession and turned everyone’s lives upside down. Such is the scale of the challenge, it has forced policymakers and civil servants – in every sector, in every department, in every region – to devise and implement ideas at a pace that would have been unthinkable to generations past.
Throughout the spring and summer the British Academy, the national body for the humanities and social sciences, has been examining the critical role that the SHAPE community (social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy) has played in informing policy to control the spread of the virus, and the part they will play when the crisis ends. Now we have published a report, in the Journal of the British Academy, which collects our thinking and which – we hope – will assist policymakers in shaping a positive post-pandemic future.
The report is the product of a series of 20 workshops with experts from the SHAPE community exploring the impact of the pandemic on topics ranging from inequality and health to elections and protests. From these conversations, five principles for policymaking emerged.
The first is that policymakers should draw from a broad knowledge base, one that integrates SHAPE and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) insights, from the social, historical, cultural, behavioural and economic spheres, as well as the medical, the biological and the physical. Our workshop on plagues, pandemics and crises throughout history demonstrated, through examples from the Black Death and HIV/Aids that pandemics are complex and that policy interventions must be multidisciplinary in response.
Second, policymaking must respond to local and historical contexts, and have people and purpose at its heart. Knowledge should not just derive from different disciplines but from the
DELIVER AN INCLUSIVE, EQUITABLE AND SUSTAINABLE PANDEMIC RECOVERY, SAYS HETAN SHAH OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY