Tag: Policy

Building Back Better: the UK Government replaces it’s industrial strategy

On the 3rd March, the UK Government published a policy paper titled Build Back Better: our plan for growth alongside the new budget. This plan replaces the previous 2017 Industrial Strategy with a focus on post-pandemic recovery. The Government aims to use the investment to support a move away from an economy geographically weighted towards London and the South East of England and encourage growth across the UK.

These remarkable vaccines are giving us a realistic way forwards to restart our businesses and our lives. As we do so, we must grasp the historic opportunity before us: to learn the lessons of this awful pandemic and build back better, levelling up across our United Kingdom and fixing the problems that have held back too many people for too long.

Boris Johnson – Prime Minister

The plan covers six core areas for growth:

  1. Infrastructure
  2. SKills
  3. Innovation
  4. Levelling up the whole of the UK
  5. Support the transition to Net Zero
  6. Support our vision for Global Britain

The skills plan includes the Lifetime Skills Guarantee to narrow the skills gap in technical and adult basic skills, including digital fluency, and a continued rollout of apprenticeships. The OECD has suggested that the UK could improve productivity by 5% by reducing its skills mismatch to levels similar to other high performing economies.

There has been a recognition of the technical skills shortages, with only 4% of young people choosing a technical qualification after leaving school compared to 33% selecting to study a degree. Basic skills are a problem for many adults, with over a quarter of workers having low literacy or numeracy skills. The Government aims to invest heavily in the Further Education sector and make technical education a genuine alternative to University.

The best way to improve people’s life chances is to give them the skills to succeed. The UK has a strong foundation of advanced skills, but lags behind international comparators on technical and basic adult skills. The Government is transforming Further Education, encouraging lifelong learning through the Lifetime Skills Guarantee, and building an apprenticeships revolution.

Rishi Sunak – Chancellor of the Exchequer

Apprenticeships play a large part in the skills plan. There is a commitment to expand traineeships and improve the progression rate to apprenticeships, incentives for new apprenticeship hires, steps to improve the quality of provision, and improvements to employers’ apprenticeship system.

Technical education is being expanded by increasing the number of T-levels as an alternative to A-levels and higher technical qualifications as an alternative to university degrees. Institutes of Technology will be rolled out in every region of the country to expand the twelve existing pilot institutions. 

For those already in work, funding is provided to study level 3 qualifications for those that do not yet have one. Skills Bootcamps have been launched to provide flexible and bite-sized introductions to employer-led skills. The Lifelong Loan entitlement is mentioned, but it will not be available until 2025. The loan promises students the ability to study qualifications by module and flexibly received funding to mirror their study choices.  

The policy paper has nothing new around the skills strategy, but it represents recommitments alongside the new budget. The Government’s focus is clearly on matching education and training provision to the economy’s skills needs. Many people will be disappointed that the Industrial Strategy will not be updated, and the university sector is still waiting for details on the Lifelong loan details. It is now the Government’s chance to deliver on the commitments.

The Overton Window

You often hear on the news that an event or series of events has shifted the Overton window. This was spoken about regularly around Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership to explain why his socialist policies were now acceptable and popular with a majority of the public. Policies that fall outside of the window will cause dissatisfaction and lose public approval, so politicians must identify the current window position and keep proposals within this window of acceptability. Activists will attempt to move the window or expand it by persuading the public of a given political idea’s merits or even shutting down beliefs seen as acceptable to shift the widow towards their views.

The Overton Window, or the discourse window, is a term used in political science to explain the range of policies that are seen as acceptable by the public at any given time. If a policy falls outside the Overton window, it’s seen as too extreme for the voting public to accept. The Overton window moves, so a policy idea in one election year might be seen as radical, might then be seen as popular just four years later for the next election.

Joseph Overton created the model to describe the level of government intervention the voters would be prepared to accept on a spectrum with freer on one end and less free on the other. The window can move up and down the range with the public mood. Joshua Trevino later added six degrees of acceptance to the model: from unthinkable, radical, acceptable sensible, popular, and finally policy.

The six degrees work both ways along the spectrum, meaning that there are currently unthinkable policies on both ends of the freedom spectrum and softer versions of these that might be seen as sensible or even popular. The current lockdown in the UK is an excellent example of a dramatic shift of the Overton window; eighteen months ago, it would have been unthinkable for a democratic government to restrict the public from leaving their homes for months at a time. However, we are over two months into the second set of tight restrictions on movement, and according to YouGov, Government disapproval is only at 43%, and approval is 36%. The Prime Minister’s approval rating is at 41%, roughly the same as in January 2020 before the pandemic began.

Many activists with political views currently in the unthinkable areas of the spectrum will attempt to restrict freedom of speech at the other end of the spectrum. These activities use techniques, such as no-platforming. They try to stop venues from allowing a speaker from holding an event, pressuring organisations to enact policies that prevent free expression, or repeatedly questioning a speaker’s reputation.

Throughout history, efforts to move the Overton window towards more freedom have had positive effects, such as abolishing the transatlantic slave trade and universal voting rights. The discourse window can also move towards less freedom, such as the rise of communist and fascist dictatorial regimes.

When you see people trying to move, the spectrum of acceptable opinion tries to assess if they are doing it to reposition the Overton window towards a current radical or unthinkable policy and decide if this is a move towards more or less freedom. Just remember that someone has to be in charge of what is seen as ‘acceptable’ when speech is restricted; you might agree with the current person’s views, but what if the next person in charge is someone that does not agree with you?