Andrew Adonis has a unique record of combining radical ideas on public services with a very pragmatic focus on achieving results. Suzannah Brecknell meets the Institute for Government chief to discuss a year of the coalition.

Andrew Adonis likes clarity. He speaks deliberately, ensuring his phrases are clear and well-constructed, as befits a former journalist and politician. The Labour peer, a former education minister and transport secretary, is renowned for being cerebral, and retains something of a ‘policy wonk’ air many years after he stopped being a special adviser to Tony Blair. But his interest in big ideas is limited to those that can produce real results on the ground: Adonis has an impressive implementation record. What’s more, his projects tend to enjoy unusually broad support: the academies programme and High Speed 2 rail link, both of which he championed, are now being pursued by the coalition.

Like his ideas, Adonis himself shows a rare ability to cross political divides: he famously shifted from the Liberal Democrats to Labour in 1995, acting on the advice of Roy Jenkins that where you broadly support the aims of two different parties, “in our political system it is generally wise to support the larger party”. And his approach to public service reform is, he says, “radically pragmatic” rather than ideological. But he is a man of conviction, still arguing the case for academies and high-speed rail at a recent lecture in Birmingham, and writing in the Times recently about the strong sense of duty he feels – as one who benefited from state support during a tough childhood – to ensure that public services function effectively.

Despite his commitment to coalition-friendly reforms, earlier this year Adonis reportedly rebuffed approaches to lead a review of energy policy for the government. Perhaps, for him, some ideological lines are too hard to cross. Besides, Adonis is happily installed as director of the ambitious – and politically independent – think-tank the Institute for Government (IfG), where he says he is proud to be leading a team that is “absolutely passionate about seeking, in a pragmatic way, to improve the working of government”.

Coalition one year on
For its most recent publication, the IfG assembled a collection of political intellectuals to muse on a year of coalition government. The report also included the findings of a Populus poll, which indicated that support for the concept of a coalition government has dropped since May 2010 (after remaining broadly constant for years, it has now returned to historic levels after a short-lived, post-election spike). Respondents said the existence of a coalition has made government weaker, more indecisive, and less responsive to the public – though 52 per cent still said the Liberal Democrats were right to join the Conservatives in coalition.

Yet if, as Disraeli had it, England does not love coalitions, the same cannot be said of the civil service. As Adonis notes in his introduction to the IfG report, civil servants have been “strikingly positive about the functioning of the coalition government, with its return to a more classical form of ‘cabinet government’.”

He also thinks, he tells CSW, that the civil service has “done a spectacularly good job” of supporting the coalition. Virtually all of the coalition’s problems have been political, not administrative, he says; permanent secretaries have “clearly learnt a great deal from the experience in Wales and Scotland”, and adapted well to working for more than one political master.

One “recurring negative theme”, however, has been the level of civil service support provided to Nick Clegg. Adonis suggests the problem is wider, arguing there is a lack of support for Lib Dem ministers across government. A former special adviser himself, Adonis believes the coalition should allow every Lib Dem minister an adviser. However, to date the convention that special advisers work only for the prime minister and secretaries of state, and the “determination of the coalition to cut the number of special advisers”, have made this impossible, he says.

A path to decentralisation
In the Birmingham lecture, in which Adonis extolled the potential of academies and better rail links to transform Britain’s second city, Adonis also made the case for an elected mayor. Over the last few months, keen to ensure that the IfG does not lock itself in an ivory tower but engages practically with all tiers of government, he has visited the 12 large cities which could next year hold referenda on creating elected mayors under provisions set out in the Localism Bill.

Establishing strong and visible leaders in large cities, he believes, would make “serious devolution” much more likely: “You’ll have really serious politicians who are calling for powers to be transferred.” The coalition is not – yet – planning to give any new powers to elected mayors, who will operate within local authority areas under the model introduced by Labour. But Adonis believes that the presence of political heavyweights “with a much stronger public mandate and much stronger political and managerial authority will, in my judgement, greatly enhance the effectiveness of councils in exercising their existing powers”.

Adonis expects to see more politicians follow the example of Sir Peter Soulsby, who stood down as MP for Leicester South to successfully stand as the city’s mayor this year (the council had voted for a mayoral leadership model under existing provisions, short-cutting the coalition’s referenda plans).

Mayors will gradually accrete power, he argues; and he cites London, where mayors have grown in influence over time – both informally and formally – thanks to their high visibility and strong political authority. As transport secretary, he says, he “to all intents and purposes devolved all of my London responsibilities to [the London mayors]; all I did was decide the size of the envelope”. Both Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson had “more than enough political authority to make the difficult decisions” concerning Transport for London, he says; and in any case, you’d have to be “quite a bold minister to take on the mayor of London”.

Adonis’s belief that serious leaders can accelerate devolution is supported by the example of Manchester, where strong, visible and effective leadership (in this case from a long-standing and popular council leader) has achieved much for the city. The conurbation is home to the first city-regional authority outside London: the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, created on 1 April this year using legislation passed under Labour. This authority will take a strategic role in economic development for the area, as well as overseeing city-wide issues such as public transport and housing.

This is good news for the city’s strategic development, Adonis believes, but “there aren’t many other cities which [one can] name which are in a similar camp; and indeed, the thing I find very striking is how few people can name the leaders of their councils.” Introducing mayors will, he hopes, both strengthen local leaders and raise their profile. And if city leaderships are strengthened, then ministers will have a clearer path through which to pursue devolution: “You can’t decentralise into a vacuum,” he says.

The missing link
If you can’t decentralise into a vacuum, then local authorities are bound to play a role in enacting the government’s localism agenda; yet some Tory rhetoric has in fact diminished the power and importance of local government. Take free schools: they appear to remove power from local authorities, creating direct links between the centre and the school providers.
Adonis warns, however, that whatever the rhetoric in Westminster, civil servants pursuing localism should be aware that “you can’t have a seriously localising agenda without local authorities.” As regards free schools, he argues, the weakening of local authorities is “more apparent than real. It’s very difficult to establish a free school without the support of the local council.”

“Local authorities are very strong supporters of most of the free schools,” Adonis adds; they know that free schools can provide school places – particularly primary places – in areas of high demand. The reality, he says, is that councils are seizing the opportunity to “provide more local schools where they need the places desperately”; and while free schools may be delivered by independent providers, “local authorities are key players in the schools. The same is true of most of the other [aspects of the] localising agenda.”

Too many nuts
The coalition has also decided to abolish regional development authorities, and made rather chaotic progress on local enterprise partnerships – further reforms which can be seen as impediments to real decentralisation. Adonis acknowledges that in the area of local and regional government, the coalition probably has changed “too much too fast” – though he adds: “I’m not against big reforms; it’s about getting the right reforms.”

In other words, the reforms must be part of a coherent plan with clear objectives. “Always, in these jobs, we’ve got to define: ‘What is your big challenge?’,” says Adonis. During his years working in education, “I was very clear that the big challenge is systematically under-performing comprehensives. Everything I did was built around that.” And in the area of local government, the focus should be on improving city leadership. “Crack that and you transform local government, and you’ve also got yourself a really credible decentralisation agenda.”

Here, Adonis accepts that the number of overlapping coalition policies is creating tensions. Lining up the plans for elected mayors and elected police commissioners is “problematic”, he says, because “one of the biggest new powers you could have given the mayors was responsibility for policing”. He suggests that “the issue with the localism agenda at the moment is that it’s not quite clear what nut they’re trying to crack. There are too many nuts.”

Bold and beautiful?
Adonis repeatedly uses the word ‘bold’ positively, talking of both public service and constitutional reforms – particularly when asked for his thoughts on the coalition’s jam-packed legislative agenda, which some have criticised as leading to implementation errors and poor legislation. “A new government has got to seize the initiative,” he says, “so I certainly don’t criticise [the coalition] for seeking to be bold in terms of their legislative programme. The problem they’ve faced is not one of boldness; it’s one of inadequate preparation before they took office.”

This lack of preparation is partly explained by the fact that when the coalition was formed, a new programme for government had to be drawn up quickly, with policies being merged and adapted. But Adonis also suggests there is a systemic problem: Labour “never did enough detailed policy preparation before elections; and both the Conservatives and the Lib Dems are clearly suffering from the fact that, individually, they also didn’t do enough detailed policy preparation beforehand.”

The challenge of improving “the capacity of the opposition frontbench to form policy” in advance of elections is a “really critical issue facing the political system”, he says – one which the IfG plans to address next year in a report on effective opposition. One way to address the issue, he suggests, could be to second civil servants to the opposition to support policymaking – an approach used in Sweden.

In the meantime, should civil servants have been urging ministers to slow down in the face of ill-prepared policies? That’s too simplistic, he replies: “You cannot sit on your hands in your first year in government and say: ‘We’re not doing anything until next year’; that’s just not the real world. You have got to have a serious momentum and a serious agenda. But it would help if it was better prepared than tends to be the case”.

“I don’t make any criticism of the civil service here,” Adonis adds, emphasising that “the problem has been the need to get legislation into Parliament very quickly, with very little policy preparation”. Where he does venture to criticise the civil service is in its handling of talent development – particularly the patchy training of Fast Stream entrants. He also censures a persistent “cult of the generalist” in the service, and a career structure which sees civil servants move frequently between posts. When he was developing the academies programme, he recalls, he worked with five directors in six years.

Independent providers
The academies programme is probably the reform with which Adonis is most associated; and, given his long experience of diversifying provision in that area of public service, I wonder what advice he has on bringing outside providers into other fields of public work. This is, he replies, where a “radical, pragmatic approach” bears fruit. It’s crucial, he says, “to be non-ideological about the engagement of outside providers; where you’ve got credible outside providers who can offer a better service, then it’s right to engage with them; but to privatise as a point of ideological principle is inviting opposition and doesn’t necessarily lead to a better service.”
In Adonis’s opinion, it is not in the interests of service users to “have a default position that the state is always the better provider. Others may be able to run services as well – but the way that you implement that [outsourcing] should be pragmatic and based on the facts of each particular [service].”

That all sounds very similar to the rhetoric we’ve heard from Cameron and the Conservatives, I suggest. Yes, he says, but their arguments are being undermined by the ‘enemies of enterprise’ rhetoric – “a very unfair characterisation”, which risks losing the goodwill of those who must enact Cameron’s programme. It also gives observers the unfortunate “sense that for them it’s private good, public bad, and mutuals somewhere in between the two”.

Far from civil servants being enemies of enterprise, says Adonis, he is confident that they will be able to adapt and deliver change, as long as they have clear direction. On the academies programme, he says: “Once the officials were clear what it was the government wanted, they really went for it and the system adapted extremely well.” And this despite the fact that the “education department had traditionally been hand in glove with the local authorities”, a lot of which “didn’t much like these academies because they saw them as a threat to the traditionally-managed local authority school.” But to reach this stage, he emphasises, “there’s got to be clarity about objectives”.

Adonis suggests that ministers haven’t yet set clear objectives for much of their service reform agenda. In the area of civil service reform, he says, there has been much emphasis on the ‘less’ side of the slogan ‘better for less’, but no clear picture of what better will look like.
Another example, he says, is mutualism. “I haven’t seen a proper description about how a public sector mutual works. What element of profit is there going to be? Are the staff still going to be employed by the public sector? Will they have public sector pensions? There’s a lot of very big issues in the design of the mutuals: it’s no good just saying to the civil service: ‘Go forth and mutualise’, if you don’t actually have a credible, workable model of the mutual.”

“The civil service can help in developing that model,” he says, and “there’s a lot of work going on in this space at the moment”. But ministers must give the civil service the direction and space to produce workable reforms: “It certainly wouldn’t be fair for the politicians to blame the Whitehall machine for not delivering something that hasn’t been defined and isn’t credible. It’s got to be defined and credible before it can be implemented.”

Conservative ministers, I suggest, would argue that they don’t want to set down a defined model, but instead let a thousand innovative flowers bloom at the frontline to create many different models of provision. “I look forward to seeing all these models coming forward,” says Adonis, with a smile. “Some of them will work well; some of them won’t. This is the issue”.

And in his role at the IfG, straddling the world of ideas and implementation while seeking to be a ‘do tank’ and suggest lessons for the future, Adonis will be well-placed to analyse the success or otherwise of those models. From that smile, I imagine that will be something he will very much enjoy.

CV Highlights
1984    Graduates with a BA in Modern History from Keble College, Oxford

1985    Joins Nuffield College, Oxford, as a research student. Later becomes a fellow of politics, and a councillor for Oxford City Council

1991    Becomes a journalist for the Financial Times, moving to the Observer as political columnist in 1996

1998    Appointed to Prime Minister’s Policy Unit

2001    Made a peer, and then parliamentary under-secretary of state in the education department

2008    Moves to Department for Transport as a minister

2009    Becomes secretary of state for Transport

2010    Joins Institute for Government as director

Written by Suzannah Brecknell, CSW