Jeremy's Blog 21st April 2023: Making Decisions

This article by Jeremy Moody first appeared in the CAAV e-Briefing of 20th April 2023

So many conversations now revolve on the difficulty, effort and time in getting things done, appearing simply to be a feature of modern life but frustrating progress and achievement. In part, we do not notice what works well but do feel the frustration as a piece of work moves from being glutinous to appearing impossible. More fundamentally, this denies our ability to make our future better.

Some of this is simply about process. IT systems can make the simple easy but fail to accommodate anything non-standard. Ease of communication does not necessarily make for the quality and effectiveness of communication. There is “shadow work”, where activities in a transaction that would once have been done by a company are off-loaded through the internet onto the customer.

Some systems seem barely to function. The shortage of planners combined with the increasing expectations of the planning system see development control grind to a halt in many areas, limiting the economy. Nutrient neutrality adds to the load in some catchments while most have yet to factor in biodiversity and England’s local nature recovery strategies. A member has just made his first application for repayment of a planning fee for non-determination – simple inaction. The larger tragedy is of increasing policy failure in housing our people, with politics reduced to managing symptoms, not causes.

Process goes further. Electronic banking was one of the modern facilities that eased commercial life during lockdowns, moving money effortlessly between people. However, the move to purely electronic systems with problematic helplines without face-to-face contact can make anything else, from opening an account to responding on money laundering let alone anything non-standard, extraordinarily time consuming and difficult.

Greater sensitivity to risk and wariness as to accepting responsibility compound more detailed regulatory requirements to prolong processes, delay decisions and frustrate change and reform – the potential vices of bureaucracy while compromising good administration.

This matters to the country. The UK may not be alone in facing an economy that has gone sideways for 15 years, requiring more taxes for its services, but now needs to use its much greater power to write its own regulations to enable and promote growth.

We see the potential of the life sciences sector that sits so close to farming’s future, yet the new laboratory space needed is cramped by development control. Both veterinary medicines and crop protection product sectors report ossified and “silo-bound” systems of regulatory control interacting with the smaller size of the UK market to make the country internationally unattractive. This is at the time when we both can and need to be more nimble – not compromising standards but making things work well.

This is not just about the economy with its troubles. These issues are critical as we tackle the enormous challenges and tight timescales of mitigating and adapting to climate change and other environmental concerns. Just as one illustration, the rules, regulations and financial frameworks of the electricity and water regulators currently frustrate the level of investment necessary for the national grid, water resilience and sewage disposal. Shorter term politics and limiting charges have created systems unfit for this future yet legislation sets major targets only seven years away.

Grumbling is easy; reforming so pervasive a problem is harder, much wider than action in isolated areas. While Prime Ministers find that power brings few real levers, they can explain and lead, setting out both the challenge and the approach that can then frame and drive the individual reforms. That can help change the national outlook, from tolerating decline in the arms of public and private bureaucracy to seeking competitiveness, growth and the future so easing the systems supporting and enabling this. The Skidmore report on achieving net zero in less than a generation set out the business case and rewards for acting early - we need to free ourselves to do this.