Evidence Based Policy

The expectation in my local government career was that we should pursue an evidence based approach to policy….. This article tells us:

With its Brexit strategy hurtling off the rails, this could have been a timely moment for the government to reassure parliament about the existence of a well thought-out plan B.

Instead MPs were invited to take a leap of faith on Wednesday when the Brexit select committee asked David Davis to explain what had been done to assess the impact on British business of abruptly leaving the EU.

“I am not a fan of economic models because they have all proven wrong when you have a paradigm change,” said the Brexit secretary. Because the government wanted a comprehensive trade deal, he insisted, “the usefulness of [sectoral] impact assessments would be near zero”.

The committee had called Davis to give evidence because it feared a cover-up. Davis and other ministers had spoken previously of sectoral studies that helped assess the “impact” of leaving, so Labour asked to see these “impact assessments” fearing they contained some scary conclusions.

Davis took the committee on a semantic tour to explain why the 850-pages he has produced do not amount to what MPs thought they were getting. “Just because you use the word impact doesn’t make it an impact assessment,” he said.

But what started out as a fear that the government was hiding the warnings of civil servants, or that dodgy dossiers had been sexed up to say what ministers wanted, has turned out to be something far worse: the absence of any planning, nefarious or otherwise.

Whitehall insiders confirm that Davis is not wrong. One who has seen more than half the studies, says they were sent to the committee in an almost entirely unredacted form. They highlight the vulnerability of many industries by looking at their dependence on European markets or regulation but they do not attempt to forecast what could happen next.

Even more alarmingly, Davis attempted to excuse this black hole at the heart of government because this was all just too difficult to bother. “The real problem of conducting an impact assessment on say, financial services, is the sheer range of potential outcomes,” he said, saying it would divert precious resources.