Magic Wand Syndrome in public policy-making

...the absolute conviction that all we need for something to happen is for politicians to agree that it should happen

There is a problem in current public policy making that I call the Magic Wand Syndrome. In its simplest form this involves the absolute conviction that all we need for something to happen is for politicians to agree that it should happen. Ideally this is done through the magic of the law since that means clever men and women in funny wigs can point at the task saying ‘this must be done’ and obviously it will get done.

The Shadow Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband, has a plan to insulate 19 million homes over a decade. Sounds good doesn’t it but nobody is asking Miliband how he is going to make this programme happen. Or even whether it is needed: 19m homes is over three-quarters of British homes and Miliband reckons he can insulate all of them in a decade. The entire policy is just a sound bite, a magic wand waved by a senior politician so as to get the right level of claps from the media. A media that should be asking more difficult questions such as how will all this be paid for, where is the workforce, and is retrofitting pre-WWI properties the right solution?

This Magic Wand Syndrome is repeated again and again. Another Labour policy is that they will train 15,000 doctors a year “so patients can be seen on time and in-person”. Great politics and something we can all get behind. But again, this is just Magic Wand Syndrome. Right now about 9,000 people per year graduate from medical schools in the UK and this is the end of a seven year process (followed by a training period in hospital and, for the GPs Labour is talking about a further two years). So even if the government accepts the Medical Schools Council’s position and agrees to 5,000 more places in medical schools, it will be at least nine years before any benefits are seen from the proposal. We could do what we’ve done for decades and import the doctors we need (usually from places like India) but Labour isn’t going to say this because talking about new immigration scares the horses. We definitely should be increasing the number of medical school places and it is ridiculous that universities and hospitals need permission from the Department for Health to set up a medical school. But to claim, as Labour claim, that this can be fixed just by ending non-dom status (another Magic Wand Syndrome policy) is just plain wrong.

Let’s not pretend that this Magic Wand Syndrome is just a Labour Party problem. You only need to look at the entire climate action and new zero agenda, endorsed by all the major parties and most of the media, to see just how committed we are to passing laws that say something should happen without asking whether it can happen, how much it will cost and what the downsides might be. Everyone agrees (well nearly everyone) that we need to do something about climate change but what the politicians did wasn’t to set out a careful plan but rather to pass a law stating an arbitrary date when we would achieve the mythic status we call ‘net zero’. As a result we are dismantling close to all of our electricity generation because it uses bad fuels while simultaneously  doubling levels of demand for electricity by banning other things that use bad fuels. With this result:

“According to National Grid, the amount of electricity Britain can hope to generate at any one time (its “de-rated generation capacity”) is around 62GW. Discount the intermittent (i.e., often unavailable) sources like wind and solar, and the figure falls to 57.5GW. This is slightly lower than peak demand, an uncomfortable reality which explains why National Grid is paying households to use less electricity. By 2035, planned nuclear closures, with the phase out of gas, oil and coal (plus the opening of Hinckley C) would reduce the figure to 15.4GW. That leaves us with a supply shortfall of 43.6GW — the equivalent of 17 Hinckley C-style nuclear power stations. At current build rates, it would take over a century to replace that lost generation.”

Yet despite this painful truth the wavers of magic wands still insist on moving to the mythic state of ‘net zero’ by 2050. Indeed some like the aforementioned Ed Miliband want us to get there even faster. Which means decarbonising everything. And this means, at least in the short term, lots more electricity:

“Taken together, then, EVs and heat pumps would increase peak demand to at least 84GW by 2035 (and that’s without accounting for population growth or rising use of air conditioning). This leaves us with a 68.6GW shortfall — the equivalent of 27 Hinckley Cs. Put simply: we cannot build this in 12 years.”

Now even if we see these numbers as a worst case, it is pretty clear that there is a huge energy crisis looming that has nothing to do with Russians. And it is a crisis brought on entirely by politicians - first Ed Miliband, then Ed Davey, then Boris Johnson - deciding they could simply mandate ‘net zero’ and it would happen.

There has been a long and, in impact terms, successful campaign led by Irish rock singer, Fergal Sharkey, to get water companies to ‘clean up their act’. Sharkey started with concerns about how water extraction was destroying the chalk streams that fishermen like him loved so much. And he is right, our demand for water (and the accompanying sewage) has more or less doubled since the water companies were privatised while OfWat, the industry regulator, has exercised a tight control on bills. There has been a lot of talk about how much is paid out in dividends by water companies as well as how much their top management is paid, but this is just noise next to the scale of the challenge needed to meet the objective, loudly proclaimed by a horde of politicians, of eliminating sewage discharges into waterways.

Back in 2021 Water UK told Parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) what fixing ‘combined sewer overflows’ would cost (CSOs are essentially escape valves in the sewer system to prevent it backing up and “flood peoples’ homes, roads and open spaces”):

“In written evidence submitted to the EAC regarding river pollution, Water UK said the sector will invest £1.1 billion in the next five years towards improving CSOs, but estimated the cost for complete elimination would be “somewhere in the region of £100 billion” taking a large package of measures beyond just nature-based solutions.”

Despite Parliament being told why we have CSOs and how much mitigation would cost, the main opposition, egged on by campaigners and the media, still tried to pass a law simply mandating the water industry to stop CSO discharges into waterways or the sea. This is the epitome of Magic Wand Syndrome. A programme of sewer improvements that will cost £100 billion and take 25 years is what is needed but instead politicians simply say ‘ban it’.

There is no part of public policy that is immune from Magic Wand Syndrome. Campaigners know they can get a headline shouting for something to be done and politicians can always promise a law to make it happen (even when it requires a whole lot more than ‘do this thing, do it now’). From Get Brexit Done to Net Zero public administration is plagued by slogans and wild promises turned into law. Fixio Problemo says the politician as he points his wand at football, at housing, at public health. Most often the wand’s spell isn’t Fixio Problemo but Getmi Votesio or Putmi Ontellio. Nobody pushes back. Nobody asks the campaigner or the politician how the problem will be fixed, how it will be paid for and what else won’t happen as a result.

Even in the most benign of development environments (and the UK is a long way from this) things take time and money to build. And if we are using time and money to fix sewage problems there’s less time and money to improve water supply or reduce leakage. If we decide burning coal, oil and gas isn’t a good way to generate electricity because of climate change, we need to replace that generation with something else. Believing that ‘as if by magic’ large scale battery storage and reliable renewable energy will arrive doesn’t fix the problem. Yet we have spent decades being at best half-hearted about nuclear power and more often actively against it. And when the energy supply sector wants to help cope with the problem by importing some electricity the same government ministers who are all for ‘net zero’ collude to stop the necessary development on grounds of ‘energy security’.

Having waved any number of magic wands at the National Health Service, you’d have thought politicians would have it fixed by now. But instead we have a workforce which says it is underpaid, hospitals that are held together with little more than hope, and a primary care system most noted for having GPs who nobody ever gets to see. And all this is done while the system has more money than ever. You want to know why? It is because the magic wands have also told the NHS to prioritise the ‘circular economy’, ‘net zero’, ‘diversity and equalities’ and ‘employee satisfaction’. If you have a health system that has any priority other than ‘improving health outcomes’, you have a system designed to fail.

There is no real way to resolve this problem because the politicians waving the magic wands really believe that they are fixing the problem. Chris Skidmore, the Green Party MP pretending to be a Conservative, is a fine example. Gather together a lot of people who all agree that putting up lots of windmills and solar panels is the answer and then pressure the government into passing new laws and regulations that will make this happen regardless of the cost to businesses and families. Parliament is filled with men and women like this, each falling over the next to get on telly with their proposal to fix housing or pollution or roads or education with this one simple law telling everyone to do something right now (even when that something will, in reality, take years and cost loads).