SIMONICITY

Do you feel seen?

Kemi Badenoch, the Tories’ new leader, plans war on the “blob” (The Economist, 2 November 2024).

The piece spurred me to read her pamphlet, Conservatism in Crisis: Rise of the Bureaucratic Class  (30 September 2024). Friends, we are the bureaucratic class and we are directly in its sights. And it’s not a wholly unfair challenge.

From her foreword (my emboldening):

“In nearly every country, a new progressive ideology is on the rise. This ideology is based on the twin pillars of constant intervention on behalf of protecting marginalised, vulnerable groups, including protecting us from ourselves – and the idea that bureaucrats make better decisions than individuals, or even democratic nation states.

This ideology is behind the rise of identity politics, the attacks on the democratic, sovereign nation state, and ever- more government via spending and regulation. It is driving the economic slowdown seen across the West and social polarisation in country after country. A new left, not based primarily on nationalisation and private sector trade unions, but ever increasing social and economic control.

A new class of people, a new and growing bureaucratic class, is driving these changes. More and more jobs are related not to providing goods and services in the marketplace, but are instead focused around administering government rules.

Often these jobs are in private sector bureaucracies, confounding the old split between the public and private sectors.

This pamphlet discusses some of them – and how there is a world of difference, for example, between a lawyer dealing with market contracts and one focused on compliance, human rights or environmental laws. Between the market- focused HR staff fixing pensions and finding the best talent and those dealing with the ever- expanding EDI sector or imposing ever tighter control over employees’ lives, changes driven often by government rules.  The growth of pointless degrees pushed by government so that a middle- class job requires a major millstone of debt, funding a growing university administrative class.”

“We recently saw an excellent paper, Foundations, which built on the strong work by the group Britain Remade, listing the tens of thousands of pages of paperwork required to build infrastructure, holding back our economy. I met with this team as a Secretary of State and explained the challenges I faced were often with fellow Conservatives afraid to challenge the consensus.

Whenever you try to roll back the environmental laws, the diversity and social requirements, to trim the judicial reviews and the fake consultation processes, too many in our party are nowhere to be seen. This is thus not a process problem, but a political problem.

Too many in our party think that the bureaucratic class and their demands should not be confronted, and they are not prepared to make the trade- offs we need in order to get our economy moving again.“

From the executive summary:

“Increasing numbers of middle- class jobs relate more to government rules than goods and services bought and sold in the market. This close relationship with government and regulation creates a different economic, social, cultural and political reality for much of the urban middle class in the UK and wider West.  A lawyer dealing in market contracts between two private sector firms is very different to one dealing in HR, sustainability, compliance etc.”

“Across the West we are moving to a structure of politics that is horizontal – where how you earn your money is as important as how much money you earn. Instead of a vertical political structure, there is now a horizontal political structure.”

“The bureaucratic class benefit from more government, not less government. If you work in a job where you are largely about protecting people in some sense, if your role is derived from the sprawling mass of government regulation, then you will lean toward more government.”

“Expanding regulation is seen in area after area. The legal profession has also grown very sharply as the size of government has grown. From 1971 to the present there has been an over a sevenfold increase in numbers, versus a 200% increase in GDP. Only 10% of the UK’s legal profession’s earnings are related to legal exports. This mirrors the USA, where per head the legal profession largely grew at the rate of the population, but took off toward the end of the 20th century and close to tripled.  New specialisms, such as environmental law, human rights law, human resources and discrimination law, immigration and refugee law are now whole careers in themselves.”

“Here in the UK, statutory instruments, legislation that sits underneath Acts of Parliament, rose from a few thousand in the initial postwar period to well over 10,000 by the late 00s and 2010s. The bureaucratic class has a clear economic cost. But even more importantly, there can be no reform of the public or private sector while the bureaucratic class dominates.

The bureaucratic class cannot fix anything because it always starts from the wrong place.

Bureaucratic class answers are always the same. They always involve more regulation and control over ordinary people – expanding the power and scope of the bureaucratic class – rather than streamlining the public sector and giving more power to public sector users. This drives weak public sector productivity, growing at just 0.2% a year over the past few decades.”

“For example, UK building regulations are now 1,500 pages, despite the misleading and dishonest arguments that the sector is ‘deregulated’. Indeed, the complexity now acts to make the limited genuine requirements (e.g. protecting us from unsafe cladding) obscured in a thicket of wider regulations.

Often the creation of a compliance industry just expands the bureaucratic class. Likewise, the growth of a massive planning bureaucracy has not improved the quality or quantity of what we build, but it has meant bureaucratic class jobs.”

Her conclusions?

“The Conservatives have to realise the bureaucratic class and the new progressive ideology are their opponents. The idea that as Labour fails, then simply because someone has a comfortable middle- class job they will come back to voting for the right is false.

There will have to be a new type of politics. To take on the bureaucratic class means to ditch radical environmental politics, unpick identity politics, focus on a strong positive national identity, limit migration, reduce the endless HR, compliance and sustainability rules, to streamline planning, to focus on bringing down the cost of the welfare state and much more.”

It has an echo of Project 2025 doesn’t it? Many of you, frustrated by ever more onerous regulation, longer timescales, the need to appoint ever increasing numbers of “experts“, the burden of regulatory compliance procedures, will find this an attractive diagnosis. What is our response?

There is a simple response: how do we streamline planning, for example, whilst not harming the quality or quantity of what we build or the environmental and social protections we expect? If we can, let’s do it. My inner concern is whether this response will continue to be enough.

The dilemmas are all around us, all of the time.

Exhibit 1: The topic I covered in last week’s blog post, Banner Review Into Legal Challenges of NSIPs. We all want to simplify processes surely, but how? Many of the time it’s not the so-called bureaucratic class (i.e. me and my cosy friends – you lot) standing in the way – it’s people: voters; local politicians; volunteers.

Exhibit 2: the House of Lords Built Environment Committee’s current inquiry into Labour’s “grey belt” proposal. I gave evidence to it as the only lawyer or indeed private sector advisor. I had heard much hand wringing from some as to how the proposal is too uncertain in its drafting and is therefore likely to lead to endless litigation, that it is all hopelessly vague, that the release of land from the green belt should be a matter for local planning authorities by way of local plans. How come I, as a card-carrying member of Kemi Badenoch’s supposed bureaucratic class was the one pushing back (see the draft transcript of my evidence): to deliver on the government’s housing and growth objectives it will need to make changes like these; there will not be endless litigation; simple definitions are fine – in fact the dangers lie with complexity. Oh for the days of the 1955 green belt circular – three pages or so, no consultation, no angst as to what “very special circumstances” (for instance) actually might mean. We all surely are in this fix with every intended piece of policy or legislation: do we aim for complex, comprehensively drafted solutions, covering every permutation of outcome or is something simpler, more broadly stated, ever to be preferred if it can have an immediate effect (and avoid the additional risks of ambiguity that come with complexity)?

Exhibit 3: Labour’s planning reforms more generally and my view as to the greatest danger that they face: the risk of being neutralised, as so many reform proposals previously have been: by endless consultation processes; processes to review the outcome of those consultation processes, and consultation processes to drill down to the next detailed stage, by which time the world has moved on and yes the moment has gone again.

Paul Smith of the Strategic Land Group spotted the following references to the government’s planning reforms in the Office of Budget Responsibility’s economic and fiscal outlook paper published  alongside the budget on 30 October 2024. Its assessment of current policy risks includes this:

“The Government has proposed significant changes to the National Planning Policy Framework as part of wider reforms to the planning system. These changes are yet to be finalised, as responses to a recent public consultation are being processed by the Government. As such, there is insufficient certainty to adjust our current forecast for these measures and we will continue to monitor developments, especially around their implementation given past reform attempts, to judge if and when to incorporate them. These reforms may enable greater delivery of new housing and infrastructure projects, which would boost the associated investment flows, as well as increasing productivity over the longer term.”

I would agree with the passage that I have emboldened. Incidentally, it’s interesting to see that the OBR’s overall assessment as to likely net additions for the five years to 2029-2030 is relatively upbeat:

“We forecast property transactions to rise from around 275,000 a quarter in 2024 to around 350,000 a quarter over the forecast. Property transactions rose by around 10 per cent over the first half of 2024, 8 percentage points higher than we had anticipated in March. Compared to our March forecast, property transactions are therefore higher in the short term but marginally lower in the medium term, reflecting our forecast for fewer net additions to the housing stock, which reduces supply. We expect housing starts, a leading indicator of net additions to the housing stock, to gradually pick up from a decade-low of around 100,000 in 2024 to reach around 160,000 in 2029. Cumulatively over the forecast, net additions are around 1.3 million. The Government has proposed significant changes to the National Planning Policy Framework as part of wider reforms to the planning system, which represent an upside risk to our housing supply forecast.”

Will Kemi Badenoch lead a resurgent Conservative party to victory in 2029? I would say that this partly depends upon whether the current government does manage to push on through with its planning reforms and whether house building numbers do start to increase to, if not its target of 1.5m homes within this Parliamentary term, then to at least that OBR projection.

In the meantime Kemi, maybe I’ll retrain as something more useful, like a contracts lawyer. (What??!!).

Simon Ricketts, 3 November 2024

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