An empty promise that explains everything

Robin McAlpine

The Promise is failing. It's progenitor, Nicola Sturgeon, is urging its current custodians to do more and go faster. Why? Because what is being done is measurably not working. And many of us are saying 'well yeah, obviously, we did tell you it wouldn't work'.

Throughout this article I want you to remember one thing; we published what I think is one of our very best reports three and a half years ago which sets out what this whole mess would look like if it had been designed by people who knew what they were talking about. For positive, inspiring hope, read Marion McLeod's Child Care or Caring for Children. To understand why the policy we have is failing, read on.

Because the point I'm making here isn't really about care, it's about failure. It's about why government in Scotland keeps failing over and over again. It's about why government across the Western world keeps failing over and over again. It's about why people are giving up on democracy.

First, the Promise Industry. I name it this because in practice the Promise isn't a policy at all, it's a management ethos. It was a meaningless piece of bubblegum politics which was effectively unimplementable and so its associated funding became a 'freebie' for the operational/management class to use as they saw fit. None of it bore much relationship to the real world.

That is the big trifecta of broken Western democracy – political bubblegum, elite capture, irrelevance to reality. It keeps happening, it keeps failing and the public keeps seeing it but never feeling it. The noise is mostly noise, the solid things people can touch? Totally different than the noise. 'You will be loved' (the promise) is just noise.

Why is the Promise bubblegum politics? It is cute, it makes a pop but it has no nutritional content. What it's not is a policy. I thought I'd go and have a look at some dictionary definitions of policy and I like the optimism and clarity of the Merriam-Webster definition: “a definite course or method of action selected from among alternatives and in light of given conditions to guide and determine present and future decisions”.

The point is that stating the outcome a policy is supposed to achieve isn't a policy. The idea is you're supposed to identify where you are trying to get to, examine the various options for getting there, select the best one and turn it into a coherent programme of action. Which you then announce. None of that applies to the Promise.

All that happened was that the First Minister said she wanted kids in care to be 'loved'. I don't quite know how to put this to you; perhaps you think that makes sense, but perhaps you think it would make sense if I said that the solution to Scotland's underperforming rail network is 'faster wheels'.

You can say it, but you can't do it. If you'd talked to an engineer they'd have been able to explain that if there were faster wheels they'd be using them and that in any case wheels aren't faster or slower, just part of an engineering system which overall goes faster or slower as a result. And then you'd point out 'but the problem isn't that the trains aren't capable of going fast'.

At which point you realise that faster wheels is literally stupid. Well, substitute 'engineer' for 'childcare professional' and ask the same question about 'loving your way' to better care outcomes and you'd end up in the same place. That was 'the promise', that all care kids would be loved. But you can't define love, never mind impose it through policy. And even if there was an identifiable thing called 'love' that you could legislate for, it wouldn't make any difference.

Why? Because care is a profession which, like any profession, has an extensive literature on what works and what doesn't which has been developed both empirically and theoretically over many years at an international scale. And for so, so many reasons, none of it concludes that 'love' is in any way key to good care outcomes. (You can read a more considered explanation of this silliness and why it's not love but consistency and attachment that count here.)

It was never a policy, it was always a soundbite in search of a policy. It's the next bit that is the crucial stage, where all this goes wrong; if you only have an outcome in mind and no delivery mechanism worked out, the normal pattern is to hand the whole lot over to someone else to work out what the thing that you just said actually means.

It's who gets asked that finally sinks government. Frontline staff who understand the system and understand why it isn't working are always seen as the problem, never the solution. Politicians, civil servants, consultants, management boards, working groups – all are made up of the management classes. And generally the management classes assume they're the solution.

Which takes us to the website of the Promise. Go on, have a look (genuinely, it won't take you long). See if you can work out what it means. I should help you out. First, ignore all the various cartoons and graphics and skip all the 'what is the Promise?' stuff because I just told you and all this does is add a lot of adjectives. You'll quickly realise that the heart of the Promise is an Oversight Board. Back to that in a tick.

Then you'll find that the only content is a set of 'Promise design tools'. It'll take you another couple of clicks to find anything, at which point you can take your pick. They have design tools for everything. Now, go and have a look at one. I picked 'empathy map'. It's one side of A4 with about 50 words or something in a diagram, words like 'seeing' and 'saying' and 'hearing'.

OK, what is under these headings? 'What do they see around them?'. Or 'what do they spend their time doing?'. My guess is that a four-year social work degree has already granted the professionals in charge a rather more sophisticated approach. So onwards, or backwards, to the Oversight Board. It has its own website.

What's there? Three reports and a lot of minutes. Go and download one. You'll find about a third of it (at least) is more cartoons. Then again, probably the key passage from the one I downloaded is: “None of what we are highlighting here is new: the issues are known. What we need now is action to address them.”

Right, so the Oversight Board overseeing the Promise says everyone already knew what was wrong but no-one is doing anything about it. So let's pop back to the Promise website. There must be a plan, right? 

There is. It gets its own website too and is called Plan 24 – 30 (loads of cartoons). I don't know what preceded it in the previous seven years, but hey ho, I'm losing my tolerance for more websites. Anyway, the Plan is pretty clear. There's a problem which is preventing delivery. The problem has five elements; money, policy, scrutiny, risk and data. Pretty comprehensive problem then, seven years after announcing the proposal.

It's almost as if... a management class doesn't have a clue what it's doing so it invents more pointless bureaucracy, admin, frameworks, cartoons, reports, working groups... It's almost like, from top to bottom, not a soul on this 'journey' so far has a scoobie what they're doing (which isn't fair, because lots of good people sink in this shit like quicksand). The salaries are great though. I have been scouring this for you and, to date, can't find a mention of care workers or social workers.

The big question on everyone's lips is, how could this bollocks possibly not be working? I mean seriously, how could this approach possibly fail? It has everything – diagrams, boards, statements, websites, design tools, consultants, meetings, minutes, more minutes, lots of adjectives. It's the full package. What is wrong with those damned kids that they just won't let themselves be loved? It's clearly not the policymakers.

So nothing changes and everyone feels resentful. I could do this dozens of times for Scotland given this is a rerun of both the 2017 education reforms and the National Care Service debacle, but I can raise you a Rachel Reeves (clicking the heels of her red shoes, eyes tightly closed; 'there's no place like growth! there's no place like growth!') or an 'anything the German Government has done for the last 20 years', with a large dash of 'what about that Joe Biden, eh?'.

I could explain how to fix this again, but you might as well go and read this where I already explained one of my favourite solutions. But it misses a big point. Here is the big point.

Politicians have forgotten how to govern. They've been trained by the PR industry, so PR is what they do. They don't have an ideology, a consistent or meaningful analysis of why things go wrong, so they can't fix them. Instead they say things and try to sound convincing. 

Which means someone has to backfill the soundbites with something, which is where the capture comes in. It could be senior public bureaucrats, IT consultancies, big business, the NGO sector. In fact it could be anyone (Michelle Mone selling 'protective equipment' during a pandemic). If there is money to be syphoned off, elites are there to help.

The rest of us are not in this picture. The picture is of a dying political culture which is at the end of a 40 year experiment in how to not govern and instead let market forces and elite bureaucracy do that for you. And you can barely see the corpse, because the vultures are picking it bare.