Know what's in your policy toolbag

Robin McAlpine

Last week I wrote about Glasgow and what underlying factors are contributing to the sense the city is in disrepair. There was a good discussion in the comments and a couple of people asked 'yes, but how?'. I'd thought about replying there but I think it would be helpful to give it more space – hence what follows.

Actually I'm not going to try and sort the Glasgow-specific issue (though I will give some examples). Instead I want to explain how you might want to approach solving any problem you want to solve with public policy. Because frankly we've become bad at it. Mostly people see a problem and think the solution is only more spending, which in turn means raising more tax.

The problem might need more spending, that might need more tax, but it is a lazy way to look at it. There is lots and lots you can do other than accept things as they are but put more money behind them. Always think of a problem in the whole when you try to solve it, or you're just tweaking the edges.

What I encourage you to do is to look at your toolkit from the get-go. Know what you've got in your bag before you worry about pulling the problem apart too much. It is better to understand what you can and can't do before you start to take a policy issue apart because how you break down a problem will inevitably be shaped by what power you think you have.

If you're making public policy you have much in your bag, devolution or not. You have hard power, the ability to force things to happen. You have what you might call induced or indirect power – you can do one thing you can definitely make happen which is going to push or force someone to do something else. You have soft power, the ability to try and influence behaviour.

You have resource allocation – yes, hard cash, but also staff time or access to other public resources, or permissions or or rights. You have delivery arms which you control, staff who carry out what you tell them. And because of all of this you have access, influence, networks. You can get great minds or experts to advise or do things. All of this is a lot.

So let's take the Glasgow example. I've argued that property prices have to come down to let the city regenerate. What can a government do? What follow is very much not comprehensive. Hard power – if you want to disincentivise the actions which push property values up, don't allow dereliction or land-banking. These enable speculation. Pass 'use it or lose it' laws that force development to happen or owners to sell.

That changes the market and means that active opportunities are realised instead of potential future gain from property speculation. You can use compulsory purchase orders or compulsory sales orders to achieve similar things. You can change planning and zoning regulations. You could create a police taskforce to hunt down whoever keeps burning buildings down. You could prosecute owners for leaving them as fire risks. You can list buildings.

Or use induced power. For example, if you created a Council Tax premium for short lets (as opposed to long lets), you encourage more housing to be available to live in rather than to hire to tourists. Alternatively, make substantial cuts in Council Tax for certain kinds of economic activity in certain places – perhaps for independent hospitality businesses under a certain size.

Soft power options I tend to be more sceptical about, as these fall into the managerial dream-world of 'making things better without actually doing anything'. You could run an advertising campaign that said 'stop burning buildings down'. It might help (except it won't). But you can do it. More usefully, people vandalise and litter less when somewhere is attractively landscaped. Taking zero tolerance approaches to ugly space and investing in some big planters (or whatever) in the hope of changing behaviours is an example of soft power.

Resource allocation is obviously crucial. You can just spend more, but that is obvious, and not the only way to allocate resources more effectively. For example, rather than spending money, what if you lend it? What if you say 'OK, any group that wants to put together a mutual company to buy an office block and turn it into shared flats which all the residents own and manage can get borrowing costs underwritten by the Scottish National Investment Bank' is a version of resource allocation.

If you don't have money, look at investments that pay for themselves like energy or housing. Think about your people resources. Is there any chance that your local authority has an out-of-balance ratio of middle managers to waste collection staff? Perhaps spending could be reprioritised. Or what if you were to give cash directly to communities to help them solve their own problems? What chances they'll use the money more effectively?

God knows Scotland's agencies, quangos, arms-length organisations and the rest are cumbersome and do a good job of absorbing public money. Like all institutions they tend to do today whatever they did yesterday. They seldom believe their delivery is part of the problem. You can always question that and reorganise, or to set them different objectives.

In Glasgow, even as recently as five years ago, there was strong officer resistance to shifting the city's economic strategy away from focussing on retail. So move people on, or bring in new people, or just tell them policy is changing. Delivery is often a real part of the problem.

And can anyone really claim that Glasgow is making the most of its people-resources – after all, don't people make Glasgow? Perhaps, but they don't get to bring their expertise to the recovery of the Glasgow School of Art, do they? That is the preserve of the bureaucrat class. Glasgow isn't exactly short of expertise, but when I talk to high-quality people they are outside of power looking in. It's as much a control-freak, whose-face-fits local authority as it was in the 1950s.

I could easily go on for pages, but I think you get the idea. I'm really worn out with the Scottish Government in particular telling us loudly what it can't do. It just sounds self-pitying to me. I'm tired of a commentator class which flits in and out of writing about various problems without stopping to learn enough to make their contributions worthwhile. They take barriers at face value.

And don't start me on officials and bureaucrats. If asked to find solutions they generally come up with whatever they were already doing. It's infuriating. Let me give you an example. The Scottish Government promised to set up a National Energy Company before it took two minutes to find out what the legal landscape was.

It did its usual; faffing about with a contract for some private sector consultancy or other and then coming up with a reason for doing nothing. In this instance it was that the Scotland Act prohibits energy generation.

Well, does it? Energy generation is reserved, but it is reserved as a policy, not a practice. It's like broadcast; it too is reserved but it only means regulation. If the Scottish Government wanted to start a podcast it wouldn't be prohibited by legislation, just like it puts solar panels on its roofs which are energy generation.

But let's say it was true – why should that stop them? Local authorities definitely have the hard power to build energy generation (which pays for itself and more) and the Scottish Government definitely has the power to fund local authorities so it could be paid for. Nothing is stopping the Scottish Government coordinating generation carried out by local authorities. This is known as public-public partnership and it is an effective workaround for a number of policy issues.

Of take rail nationalisation. We said (many years ago) that all you had to do was stop subsidising failure by private businesses, which would make the business model non-viable, so they walk away and you take it over. We were told that couldn't be done, and yet that is exactly what the UK Government did with Network Rail.

The real power of public policy is greater than it first appears, but you have to be willing to use it. One of the reasons people don't understand this better is that vested interests absolutely do not want you to think in these terms. It's always, always framed as 'you want more, who is paying for it?'.

I mean, look at the current campaign to prevent rent controls in Scotland by Scotland's out-of-control landlord sector (landlords do nothing productive but syphoning money away from renters). They call this 'investment', even though nothing gets better as a result, except their bank balances. They suggest that if it wasn't for them there would be no rental properties.

Well put rent controls in place, reduce their profits, let them walk away if they like – their property prices will fall and someone else could buy them who is willing to give renters fair treatment. That's the regulated free market. Or, you know, housing associations could buy existing properties if landlords are walking away from them. That's simply shifting providers.

Or the Scottish Government or local authorities could always build more rental capacity to replace that which was lost, making rental more affordable and making housing more affordable by reducing profiteering. Yet no-one is saying this – and the big money of the property industry is trying to gaslight you into thinking they are your only solution.

Common Weal has been working on public policy within the constraints of devolution for more than ten years now. We have come up against countless barriers and we have always found work-arounds or different ways to achieve the same thing. Yet all we hear is what Scotland can't do.

I hope I've persuaded you that Scotland can do a helluva lot more than those who administer it tell you. Things might look a mess, but just have a good rummage about your policy tool bag before you walk away in despair.