The contents of a prime minister's red box gives a good overview of current and growing social evils – or 'challenges' as officials prefer to call them –jostling for attention. In broad terms, four kinds of 'evils' crowd the box, though they sometimes overlap.
First there are public concerns. These are the issues that dominate elections and that governments dare not ignore. In the 1970s and 80s, inflation, the unions, and unemployment, dominated. By the 1997 and 2001 elections, public concerns had shifted onto health and education, before being replaced by fear of other people by 2005 – crime, immigration and terrorism. Most recently, concerns about the economy have crowded out other public concerns, with the partial exception of concern about crime and anti-social behaviour.
Second, there are externally driven, or exogenous, 'evils'. Many of these are extremely serious and may threaten our very existence, yet are not necessarily great public concerns. Global warming is the obvious example. The Stern Report estimated that a failure to act would lead to more than 100 million people displaced by rising sea levels, with similar numbers of refugees from drought and famine, and an economic cost of roughly 20% of global GDP.
Yet the environment has rarely been mentioned by more than 10% of the British public as a concern in standard surveys, and in pan-European surveys – even pre-credit crunch – the environment does not make it into the top three concerns of any nation. Many lifestyle-related issues can also be thought of as exogenously-driven 'evils', such as drug abuse, obesity, or even the aging population (though it hardly feels right to call the latter an evil). All are substantially driven by economic growth.
'Political' or 'moral' projects
Third, there are what we might call 'political' or 'moral' projects – concerns or evils that a government or party has set itself to address, more or less regardless of public opinion. For example, the Labour government has had a fairly sustained drive to reduce child poverty, even if it has failed to reach its own targets. This hasn't been driven by public concerns or external threats, but more by a political and moral project that Joseph Rowntree would have recognised.
Finally, there are 'administrative concerns'. While these may lack the drama of threats such as global warming or terrorism, they can have big impacts on costs, effectiveness and the quality of life – and the current hole in public sector finances may raise their profile further. Such issues include the low productivity of the UK economy, quality and efficiency concerns around the public sector, and accountability gaps.
How do we compare and prioritise such very different challenges? One way is to let the numbers do the talking. A failure to act on global warming, using Stern's figures, suggests a cost of more than £15 trillion a year in today's terms, albeit discounted into the future. Civil wars, in comparison, are estimated to cost the world around £150 billion a year, with two new wars starting every year – costs we share in lost trade, aid and the offering of asylum.
Health and welfare costs
In domestic policy, costs can be apportioned more directly to UK taxpayers, and are smaller but perhaps more salient. The health and welfare costs of obesity in the UK are put at around £10 billion and rising. The costs of 'NEETs' (young people not in education, employment or training) are similar. On child poverty, it's £ billion a year just to stay still and an estimated £32 billion extra a year to meet the government's target. Natural disasters might be said not to count as 'social evils', but many of the costs have a human hand within them. The estimated £2.5 billion of the cost of the 2007 floods owed much to our tendency to build on natural drainage.
Whatever the absolute costs of a problem, policy focus needs to be on the cost effectiveness of the approaches to addressing it. A problem without the prospect of a solution is just a fact of life. It is rational to focus our marginal resources on where they will have most impact, and this will not always be the biggest problem in terms of overall costs. Hence while from an ethical point of view one might decide that Job Centres should spend just as much effort on everyone, from a practical point of view it makes a lot of sense to segment the population and focus on those for whom extra help will make most difference – with less help going to those who would soon get a job anyway or those who are so far from the labour market that huge effort will be required to get them into a job.
Ultimately, judgements over which social evil to prioritise rest not just on technical or financial assessments, but on democratic and public deliberation. Government, both national and local, is where these choices collide. In this sense, weaknesses that afflict government and democracy are a particularly grave concern. Most wouldn't call the deficiencies of government a social evil, but perhaps they should.
As is often noted, most of the great challenges that face us – from obesity to climate change – do not fit within the neat box of a post-war Whitehall department. Cross-national evidence suggests that UK government is not just unusually centralised to Whitehall, but also unusually silo-based within it. Addressing this problem should be high on the list of any social reformer wishing to take on our great social challenges.
Solutions may include having more ministers and local commissioners with cross-cutting objectives and budgets to match; regulatory and performance management systems that cut across silos (such as the new common area assessments for local areas or revised capability reviews for government departments); and building services around citizens and families.
Another concern lies in the distribution of power itself. It is said that 'liberty is power cut into small pieces', but the pieces are by no means evenly distributed in the Britain of today, and on some measures have become even less so. While levels of voting have fallen modestly, levels of alternative political engagement – such as lobbying of MPs, going on protests, or writing to a local newspaper – have risen dramatically.
These activities are strongly skewed to the more affluent and more educated. At the same time, there has been an increase to around one in five of Britons who have absolutely no engagement in political life at all. This minority is dominated by the least affluent and least educated. This subtle and growing social skew raises serious questions about the representativeness of our institutions, and makes the case for democratic innovations that reach far beyond conventional government 'consultation'.
Web of shared assumptions
Yet the world is not only full of social evils, even if our political debate is dominated by them. Societies and economies can only function because of a web of shared assumptions, institutions and moral habits. These provide a rich soil for solutions to our challenges as well as a place for social evils to grow. To take just one example, estimates of the value of the informal economy of caring (for our children, our elderly and our friends) exceeds that of total GDP. If we can nurture and encourage this economy of regard even a little, the gains would be huge. Any fair account of the landscape of social evils – even the PM's box – needs to encompass an account of our social goods too.
David Halpern is Director of Research, – Institute for Government, London. He previously worked as Chief Analyst in the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit (2001-2007).
This piece draws on the recent edited volume Options for a New Britain (2009) and his book The Hidden Wealth of Nations (2009). See www.instituteforgovernment.org for further details around the discussion on government.
