Public servants' expertise

To appear in Court representing a client, you have to have a qualification. To be allowed to perform open-heart surgery you have to be very well qualified. To be successful in business, especially when running very large organisations, you have to have a high degree of skills.

To become a public policy officer, you have to be able to spell your own name – without help, of course.

Another handy skill to have is being able to suck up to the boss. For very high level public servants, it often helps to be able to play golf. For rank and file policy officers, or people wanting to become one, knowing how to be mute, servile, and obsequious – as well as knowing the appropriate times to nod – are far more important skills.

Of course, this varies from organisation to organisation, and may well vary in different states and with federal government organisations. But it’s still strange how few skills in public policymaking are required to be shunted into most jobs that do this.

Did you know?

In the public sector most policy officers are not trained in policy development skills. This causes them to be incompetent and make errors, like not consulting with communities or businesses affected, and not coordinating with other government policies.

After I finished my undergraduate studies at UQ I continued with postgraduate studies, and tutored in a public policy course for undergraduates. It was during this period that I got to know Dr Tim, a researcher and lecturer in economic policy. He was a cocky, self-confident, sensitive new-age guy, one of the bike-riding crowd, and he drank takeaway coffees a lot. He had more than his fair share of academic theories about why government policies were often unsuccessful.

Unfortunately my time as a postgraduate in politics and public policy was destined to come to an end after about three years. It was then that my focus turned to my job in the public service.

After a few years working in mundane customer service and administration roles, I got lucky and stumbled into a role as a departmental media advisor. Although I look fondly back at my short period as a media advisor (about a year), at the time I ended up hating it. I still wanted to work somewhere that actually made good use of my qualifications.

Here I was, walking in and out of roles with my Honours degree in political science and public policy studies, and it took four years before I actually was able to find a junior position working in a policy team. And I didn’t get the role because of my qualification, I got it because I knew someone. There is no clearer example of the axiom ‘it’s not what you know but who you know’.

I had met Peter about a year earlier, and worked temporarily as his assistant. He remembered not that I had qualifications in public policy, but that I was a good assistant. After I worked for Peter, I kept up the contact with the odd email every few months, and I found excuses to meet up with him on two occasions.

My first role as a public policy officer I got not because of my qualification. And I didn’t submit an application for a vacant position, nor was I required for an interview. Peter’s team had a vacancy, and for some reason my name popped into his head. He searched for me on the government directory and rang me up. He asked me what my current work situation was, and said he ‘may have something for me’. Two weeks later, I was working in his team.

None of Dr Tim’s academic theories consider the reality of this situation. This is a problem that has never crossed his worried little mind. If you put the question to him, he would retort with some nonsense about positions in the public service being granted on the basis of merit.

Peter was an interesting character. A first level manager and career public servant, he could recount the history of past state governments and ministers he had worked under. He could tell you anecdotes about times past in the public service that all us relatively young kids would laugh at. For example, did you know that in the past all public servants were issued with a public service towel, which would be collected at regular intervals and washed for you? He had lots of stories.

He was also quite intelligent. One of his favourite subjects was the history of war, especially the world wars. But I also think, unfortunately, that he was lazy, a condition that was brought on by a sceptical jadedness. Change was slow, and this was a man who accepted — nay, encouraged — its slowness. He avoided and feared work like a dog who tries to escape getting a bath. Only a few years away from retirement, he regarded the whole public service experience as one big game, and he was blunt about it.

Although intelligent, he had never had any actual training in policy development, and never sought any. When I came to work in his team, we were amongst a bigger team of about 15 people. Many were experts or had training in other fields relevant to the team, such as engineering, but I was the only person while I was working there who had any qualifications in policy development. I remained the most junior person working there until I left about two years later.

In recent decades there’s been a lot of research by academics into public policymaking, policy disasters, the policy process, and political science. As an undergraduate and postgraduate student, I studied it and it’s a passion of mine. Somehow, though, my qualifications did not help me get promoted beyond a rank-and-file policy officer.

When applying for promotion to higher positions (just one level above the position I was working in) I was told time and again that ‘qualifications are not a requirement of this position’. This is a cute little statement, which is stated on many position advertisements in the public service. It is intended to mean that qualifications are not mandatory, and if an applicant can demonstrate that they have the skills required then they will secure the position. But it does not mean, and should never mean, that qualifications are irrelevant. Yet, this is a very common interpretation of that statement. Surely it would be common sense for managers who are hiring for the position of policy advisor to give some weighting to applicants that have a directly relevant formal qualification?

Perhaps it’s tempting to call it sour grapes on my part, but I just call it frustration. The money that gets spent by government, money spent on programs developed by public servants, is my tax money. It’s also your tax money. And it made me angry to see it being wasted by policy officers who, basically, didn’t know what they were doing.

I am not saying that university is the only place a person can get skills in public policy, absolutely not. But I think it’s strange that the government would spend so much money subsidising me to complete a degree in political science and public policy studies, and allow me to invest so much of my personal time, yet when it came to working in the workplace this qualification was treated as irrelevant.

It’s often complained that younger people these days want to shoot right to the top of their workplace immediately. They can’t wait, they don’t want to do the hard yards and gradually work their way up the corporate ladder. I agree wholeheartedly, and have seen it often enough myself, but that wasn’t my situation. Money wasn’t a concern for me, I just wanted more challenging and meaningful work. Also, I wanted to work, not just float around like a butterfly.

I always worked hard while I was in my junior policy advisor role. And I was unusually modest about my skills and experience. However, working hard isn’t something I would recommend to other people joining the public service. Skills, qualifications and working hard can make your workmates envious. It is a sad fact about our culture, but it’s true. What made me sad in my case, was that I was always humble about my skills and ability. But humility isn’t enough to be popular, you need to be lazy, too.

You see, there’s a different culture in the public service. I spent my university years working in a ‘fast-paced’ retail job. I also kept a circle of friends who stayed working in a supermarket, Woolworths, after I had left. Whenever I spent time with my Woolworths friends and they talked about work, I felt guilty.

Woolworths, as an employer, is just a terrible organisation. Most long-term employees are paid an average wage and need to work long hours. When employees are promoted to a ‘line manager’ or ‘second-in-charge’ position of one of their departments (eg. Deli), they are put on a salary. They are then expected to work 50 hours a week or more, including at nights and weekends, for as little as $50,000 or $60,000 per year. And the work is hard work, fast with lots to do and lots of customer interaction. In my view, it’s criminal.

In comparison, working in the public service is a holiday. I always felt guilty about it, and I always had the taxpayer’s money in the back of my head when I went to work.

But this was not the way for all. Peter had never worked in the private sector. Ever. When he was 18, he took the public service examination, which has since been abolished as an entrance pathway in favour of a decentralised, scattered, anything-goes style of recruitment process. The down-side of this recruitment method, in contrast to more centralised forms, is that individual managers can hire on a whim, or on the basis of discrimination, or for any reason they like and, realistically, nobody is ever going to challenge the decisions they make. So managers are virtually unaccountable for the recruitment decisions that they make.

Peter worked in the public service his whole life. Whereas I worked at a fast retail or private-sector pace, he was a bit more casual.

Most days I arrived to work at about 8am. To save power I always turned my computer off in the afternoons, as was technically the requirement for everyone; of course, in practice, this was considered optional by many people. But when you turned your computer on in the morning it would take about five minutes to start up before you could get any work done. Knowing this, it was always my habit to turn the computer on immediately, the first thing I did when I arrived to work. This gave me five minutes to make a coffee, or get a glass of water, or go to the toilet. I would often check the fax machine. If there had been any papers or notes left on my desk requiring action, I’d read through them and set about organising my work for the day. When the computer loaded up, I’d check and action any new emails. Then I’d get into whatever project I was working on. I had my rhythm, and I liked my work. I always loved the work I did in the public service; I had a passion for it.

Peter didn’t have a passion for it. At any one time, there would normally be about half a dozen items I had submitted to him that were awaiting approval. Depending on the item it could take days or weeks, and several follow-ups, before things were actioned by him.

Peter’s work day would normally start about 8.30. He would come in and say good morning. Then he would put his bag down and start telling me about something annoying that happened to him on the train, or whatever the story of the day was. To be polite, I humoured him. This mandatory discussion over, he would head over to turn the urn on and wait for it to boil and then make a coffee. In the meantime, he would ease into the day by chatting to whoever happened to be around, usually repeating the story of the day. By 8.50 he might be back at his desk. Then he’d turn his computer on. And then he’d turn his computer on and wait for it to start up.

This is not to say that I didn’t like Peter; I did. He had lots of good stories, and I laughed lots when he was around. I secretly hoped that he would bequeath me his public service towel – being of the younger generation, I never had one. He didn’t, though.

The truth is that policymaking in the public service is often amateur hour. I often thought if I had my degree in law, would it take four years for me to get a position in a legal department in the public service? If I did my degree in teaching, would it take four years of working for the education department before they’d actually make me a teacher? If I did my degree in nursing, would the health department employ me as a secretary for four years before I would finally be able to find a position as a nurse?

When I did find myself in a policy role, my qualifications and training courses were of direct relevance to the projects I was working on. It wasn’t that university lecturers like Dr Tim taught me everything I needed to know. I would say Dr Tim had no idea how things actually worked in the public service. But I did understand things much better when I worked in the role. In truth, I learned a lot about how public servants worked when I did my own postgraduate research.

I’ll give you an example of what it’s really like. In the office with Peter, several years before both of us arrived in that particular office, the policy officers were asked how they could improve some aspects of the performance of private businesses in the transport sector. So they made a law, an Act of parliament, which was a set of regulations and requirements that businesses in the sector had to comply with. They would be annually audited to ensure compliance. The regulations allowed us policy officers to rate each business as high-risk, medium-risk, or low-risk, according to various measures, which would then dictate what requirements there was for those businesses.

There was an assessment method and process, which with my background I could see followed what academics call a ‘positivist methodology’ and an objectivist epistemology. These are terms in the philosophy of research practice. Having an understanding of the process on this level gave me tools to analyse flaws in the process. I could look beyond the process, and could think outside of the square to see what other alternative strategies could be used to engage more effectively with the private businesses.

Most importantly, keeping the big picture in mind, I always had in my head what was actually happening in the real world of business, to analyse why the policy wasn’t working effectively to actually address the original problem. Public servants like Peter don’t seem to really grasp the concept that the policy solutions set up by public servants actually have to be practical. They say they understand, but I don’t think they really do.

There’s a lot of knowledge and science about good public policymaking. Ideally, there’s a good process to be followed before looking to set up new regulations or processes that try to ‘solve problems’. As an example, there’s a book called The Australian Policy Handbook, written by Catherine Althaus, Peter Bridgman and Glyn Davis.¹ It is like an introductory textbook on policy analysis, consultation processes, making policy decisions, and implementing and evaluating those decisions. It’s a very practical and accessible book. At the very least, all public servants in policy development roles should have read this book, or something similar. At the least.

Peter never had. I know because I asked him once.

One of the most important aspects of policy development is known as the evaluation stage. In other words, after a policy or a new regulation or process is implemented, someone should check and follow up on it as time goes by to make sure that it is actually working. This seems like common sense, and on one level it is. Most of the time, it doesn’t actually happen.

One of the quickest ways to know whether a policy advisor has any actual idea how to do their job is by checking how much policy evaluation they do. If they do very little, or if they only do it as a token, unimportant process, it shows that they are not very knowledgeable about or skilled in the art and science of policymaking.

If you don’t do evaluation, you don’t know whether a government policy is working. You will be responsible for spending a lot of taxpayers’ money on bureaucratic regulations or approvals processes that are inefficient, and costly to businesses or individuals.

Take a second to think about this. What’s interesting is that most people who work in policy development will obviously defend the government policy that it is their job to implement, or that they have themselves developed. If a senior bureaucrat or politician ever asks for evidence of its effectiveness, the advisor will confidently produce whatever evidence they can. I rarely have seen people doubt or question themselves about whether the existing government policies being implemented are effective. It is just assumed that they are. Try to even ask the question, and you get a wall of defensiveness.

Of course, policies are also often not changed simply because it would be too embarrassing for a policy officer, manager or politician to admit that they were wrong about something, or had failed in some way. What is more likely is that flawed or inadequate projects will continue on at great expense for years, usually well past the point in time when it is obvious that they are not worthwhile.

What is the use of academic research, or of people writing books about public policy lessons from the past, if the people working in these roles are blithely unaware of it? In Australia, around one-third of our whole economy is spent using taxpayers’ money, on schools and hospitals and police, but also on other things such as roads, environmental regulations, or other types of government regulations intended to fix ‘problems’. The remaining two-thirds of the economy is the private sector.

The share of the public sector in the overall economy varies from country to country. In industrialised countries, such as the OECD countries, it varies from about 30 per cent of the economy to more than 50 per cent. That’s a lot of tax money, and it deserves to be spent well, by professionals who know what they’re doing.

After Hurricane Katrina hit the southern US coast in August 2005, there was a lot of public criticism about the poor government response effort. After flooding in Brisbane in 2011, there was also a lot of discussion, and an inquiry, into the causes of the flood and the role of governments in preventing flooding. In disaster times, we look to our governments.

We also look to governments to fix problems. If we find a problem, one of the first questions we ask is ‘what can the government do about it?’ Clearly, having a government and public service consisting of experienced and knowledgeable people is very important to any country.

Academics have also studied what happens when governments get it wrong, when there are major public policy mistakes, where policy ideas don’t turn out quite the way things were hoped.

In a 1998 book edited by Pat Gray and Paul t’Hart titled Public Policy Disasters in Western Europe, there is a discussion about a number of major policy disasters.² These include a confused European Common Fisheries Policy, irrational government responses to ‘Mad Cow Disease’ minor outbreaks, and public controversies such as the ‘Arms to Iraq’ affair. In Queensland recently, deaths in public hospitals have been blamed on allegedly unqualified surgeons and an inadequate public health system.

Governments have also be blamed for their share of fault in a number of economic crashes, such as the monetary crisis in Europe in 1992, or the recent Global Financial Crisis from 2008 onwards. Governments, even when they are blamed for disasters or crises, are often looked to for ways to prevent them in the future.

In the general run of events, governments are always introducing policy responses to try to address social or economic problems. Maybe governments are trying to reduce crime, or alcoholism. Maybe they are trying to reduce unemployment or improve hospital services.

There’s a science, and an art, to good public policy making. Don’t you think we want people in these roles who understand the policy lessons from the past? Don’t we want people who know what they’re doing? Peter was totally ignorant of the science and art, he just made things up as he went along.

I must say that, in my experience, most public policy advisors are completely new to the area. In fact, most never dreamed that it was what they’d be doing as a career — they just sort of fall into it. Like Peter, often they’ll come up through the ranks as clerks and administrators.

I think that’s wrong. We should be looking to hire people in these roles who have a genuine passion for the role. Peter had no passion for it whatsoever. As far as he was concerned, he may as well been working in an administration position, or some other job.

Would we ever conceive of, say, employing people as school teachers who didn’t have a passion for teaching or children? Would we consider it acceptable to hire people for these roles using labour-hire or employment agencies, and then give them a three-day training course when they started (or not even any training)? Yet that’s what happens to most policy advisors. They are thrown in the deep end and it’s just expected that they will know what to do.

People constantly complain that government bureaucrats don’t understand, or don’t consult meaningfully. Now why on Earth do you suppose that might be?

Here’s another story. I was talking to a public servant once and discussing a public consultation process that they were undertaking in relation to building a new road. After a few minutes, I realised that this person and I had very different conceptions of what consultation was. For them, the road was definitely going ahead, and the consultation was merely aimed at asking residents in the area about ways to minimise the inconveniences associated with it during its construction, or when it was finished. I assumed the consultation process was going to be about asking residents and business whether they actually wanted the road, or whether it was needed. These different understandings on the parts of the bureaucrat and me, and the likely assumptions by residents about what the consultation was about, are striking. And we often don’t realise that we each have differing assumptions about what the process is for. It’s interesting to ponder this, don’t you think?

Public policy isn’t considered to be a profession. This seems strange, since so many people constantly complain about bureaucrats, and have done so for what seems like forever. And it’s true: most public servant policy advisors don’t know how to undertake a proper consultation process, or about project implementation problems, or options analysis. Most have very little understanding of the public policy context or the history of government policymaking.

In the area where Peter and I worked the government department had been asked to recommend how it could contribute to making the transport industry safer. The almost-automatic response of the public servants involved was to create a new regulation (legislation) to force certain stakeholders to develop a plan for their businesses. That is, force small businesses to implement something, and put the costs onto them. Up to eight years after the original idea was accepted, after laws were drafted and passed, and the implementation of the law got underway, there seemed to be little or no real tangible outcomes.

It’s a very common approach: if there’s a problem requiring government action, just create a law to magically make it go away. Some countries really are over-regulated, or badly regulated. But skilled public policy advisors know to look for other options, such as direct funding of specific initiatives, or working creatively with business owners.

Unlike some commentators, I don’t think government ‘red tape’ or regulation is always a bad thing. Where would we be as a society without road rules, or without environmental or product safety standards, or without workplace safety laws? But when bureaucrats instinctively make laws as a first option – or their only option – for solving a problem, it shows that they don’t know how to analyse the available options. Sometimes, it might be better to simply promote more competition in an industry, or empower consumers with more information, or provide training for business owners in an industry to give them knowledge and skills in something, for example, environmental impacts of industry.

There are always numerous options. Too often, public servants think making a new law and forcing people to comply with it is the best answer. However, it might not be. Understanding how to undertake a policy analysis, or you could call it an options analysis, is a skill that public servants just don’t always have. Sure, you can point them in the direction of a policy document template that has a section on options analysis, which they will duly conjure up content for, but many will not actually have much knowledge or training in the science or art of this task. The results are amateurish policies.

The policy laws created in Peter’s office were very ineffective. Most of the businesses that were subject to the regulations just wrote up reports to justify their compliance, to fulfil a meaningless bureaucratic requirement. The regulations were particularly ineffective for small businesses, which were often family-run operations without safety experts employed to oversee a complex auditing and compliance process. In fact, the businesses usually just ignored these particular regulations, when they thought they could get away with it — which was most of the time. When they were audited, it was obvious that even the most basic of requirements weren’t complied with, for example the requirement to keep certain records and deliver training to employees. But it wasn’t the fault of those small businesses, many of which were in the position where they were borderline profitable. It was simply bad policymaking. It was Peter’s fault, and the fault of the people who employed him in the role, despite the fact that he had no passion and no actual qualifications or skills for it.

In the past I’ve seen a lot of bad policymaking. And again, I note that policymaking is not typing up documents like workplace health and safety policies, I am referring to policymaking which is about taking a problem, investigating it, asking those affected for their input, and then making a recommendation about how to solve the problem.

I’ve seen unskilled policy officers recommending template solutions that have been tried in the past without success. I’ve seen officers who don’t understand the need to liaise with other public servants in other government departments, or even within other areas of their own. I’ve seen people jumping to the conclusion that a new law has to be created. I’ve seen people form endless working groups and committees that go on and on for years, without any tangible outcome. This happens when people aren’t all that sure what they’re actually doing.

I’ve seen policy officers create strategies and plans to actually prepare for natural disaster situations, and when the natural disaster happens nobody follows the plan anyway, it gets totally ignored. People even seem to not know that it exists. Strangely, no-one ever spends much time evaluating whether the policy is effective.

I’ve seen people giving policy advice without even considering the effect of existing legislation, such as workplace health and safety legislation. I’ve met policy officers who were unaware of the effect of the national constitution. Oh, it might be hard to believe, but I honestly have.

I’ve seen more wheel-inventing than I care to face. And unrealistic pipe dreams of policy programs on a huge scale. I’ve seen consultants charge huge fees for producing documents or reviews that go nowhere. Of course, some go nowhere for a reason, too: they’re crap.

Whenever Peter had a task that seemed too hard, or too much effort, and when there was money in the budget to be spent, it was always a habit of his to seek to engage a consultant. In fairness, he didn’t have many policy skills and so the tasks actually were beyond his area of ability. But engaging a consultant isn’t as easy as you might think. First you have to develop tender documents, and go through a process to appoint a tender. Then you have endless meetings with them to discuss the task and provide input and information. All that happens is they give you a report at the end, and you then have to decide what to do with the report anyway. Sometimes it works, but often it is a big waste of money that is used to make it look like meaningful work is actually getting done. Engaging consultants is, just as often as not, the most inefficient and costly way of getting a project done, yet it is always used by policy advisors to argue that they are developing policy results in a creative or efficient way. It’s ridiculous, and frustrating for people who know better.

Yet somehow we don’t see the need to have people who understand the basics of the policy craft contributing to actually developing good government policy programs. If governments can be inefficient — and they really can be — it’s not necessarily because they are inherently less efficient than the private sector. It’s often just because there are a whole heap of very nice but totally unskilled people making recommendations to government, on the basis of no experience, professional knowledge or skill.

And we pay for it in four ways. Firstly, it costs us a lot of money more than it should. Secondly, we create problems or don’t fix problems that governments and society want fixed. Thirdly, we create huge burdens on industry and individual citizens in the process, which aren’t always necessary. Fourthly, we give evidence to convince people that free market or non-government solutions are a better way of fixing problems or increasing efficiency. Of course, sometimes free-market solutions might be effective, but just as often that approach can create havoc if it isn’t appropriate for the situation.

 

But what are we to do about the lack of skills in policymaking within government? I think, in this instance, there is a wide array of fairly obvious and standard solutions that should be used to increase the professionalism of people who are employed as policy officers and required to provide advice to governments about how to fix policy problems or create effective new government programs.

Public policy should be taught more at universities, and increasingly thought of as a profession. If this is considered too big a task, people in policy roles should, as a starting point, be required to undertake regular training courses and be mentored. Surprisingly, not even this usually happens.

The public service should implement measures to ensure that people who do have skills or qualifications in public policy are given a chance to use that knowledge. What a waste it is to spend taxpayers’ money putting someone through a university with these skills, only to see them working as an administrator. Skills in this area should be a major part of the criteria for employing or promoting policy officers, yet in my personal experience it often isn’t. As a society, we have to live up to the consequences of the fact that people are not hired to jobs on the basis of true merit. Inefficient, ineffective government policies are one of those consequences. We all pay for that.

Wasted money makes my friend Jess angry. An example is when she was working in an IT division on what was considered a vital project to change their electronic financial records database. After about two years, the project ran into difficulties and costs were getting out of control. So far several millions of dollars had been spent. But then a new, cost-cutting government minister was put in charge of the department. Quicker than you could blink, the minister decided to cut the project and keep the existing IT system in use. The project turned out to be not all that vital, after all.

If you watch the news often enough, from time to time you will see media stories about wasted expenditure, usually on unnecessary travel or salary perks. It’s not often you’ll hear about the thousands of stories like Jess’s, where projects costing millions are scrapped before they can ever be completed. But these are exactly the more significant wastes of expenditure that should be reported, so that people can be held accountable. Unfortunately, management-type people responsible for failed projects are more likely to actually be promoted.

I’m constantly amazed that so few people in the public service regard this as a problem. I put this down mainly to the fact that nobody ever looks at themselves and thinks ‘I’m unqualified for this role, I really don’t know what I’m doing.’ The truth is that you don’t know what you don’t know. If there is no widespread knowledge that there are lessons from past history in public policy, that there is an established science and study of policymaking, then people think they can do it. ‘It can’t be that hard’, they think.

‘Hey, I’ve never done this before, but I see no reason why I can’t!’ Well, we would never say this about operating on someone with open heart surgery, we would accept that you need skills. Mistakes can cause injury or death. The truth is, although it’s less tangible and obvious than in the case of open heart surgery, bad public policymaking just as often causes death, for example in bad transport or roads policies, or bad processes surrounding policing. It can also be in the area of health policy where funding is allocated inefficiently or to the wrong areas, which has an indirect impact on lives.

Also, poor economic policies create poor results like low business profits and unemployment and inflation. This can be a cause of intergenerational poverty. Poor policymaking in emergency management creates a situation where governments are inadequately prepared for natural disasters. Poor policymaking and advice to politicians is a factor in nearly all things that you would like to blame governments for failing at.

Want good government? Then you need good public policy professionals who have some idea what they are doing. Don’t just rely on Peter – he has his mind on other things.

 

 

 

 

Key points: ·        Appointments to policy jobs in the public service are not truly based on merit. It’s more about who you know than what you know about the profession of public policy. ·        Most public servants have no formal training in policy development, leaving them to guess what the best policies are. They often recommend new laws, red tape or spending that is wasteful and ineffective. ·        There is lots of academic research into the expertise involved in making good public policy, including how to implement policies well and avoid making gross policy mistakes. You can’t fix economic or social problems if you don’t have a professional skill set. That is one of the reasons why governments don’t solve problems like intergenerational poverty. ·        The real reasons why government bureaucracies often don’t work well are not the lofty reasons most academics cite. It’s often merely because some public servants are lazy, have no passion for their jobs, and don’t have the skills required. ·

Possible reforms: ·        Public policy knowledge should be taught widely at universities and in other training courses. This would benefit people working in almost any profession, even for people in professions such as, say, engineering. ·        Ensure public service appointments are genuinely made on the basis of merit, and weighting is given to people who have skills or qualifications in the field, for example by instituting more strict rules about who is on selection panels. Perhaps there should be independent HR advisors on selection panels.