For the Record

by David Cameron

  Each of these policies was aimed at a particular cause of poverty, but for some families, problems mounted one on top of another.

  Local councils had been telling us for some time about ‘troubled’ families that were unable to function properly and that were often responsible for a vast amount of petty crime and truancy, stacking up court orders, police visits and social services inquiries.

  Christian Guy – a young campaigner on social justice and a real visionary when it came to solving Britain’s deepest, grittiest challenges – used to put it to me like this: there were plenty of people working on the family, but no one was really there working in the family. Working out why the relationships had broken down. Why the children never made it to school. Why the chaos had got so bad.

  And so another flagship policy was the Troubled Families programme. It focused on families with the biggest problems, and attempted to lead them away from the things that fuelled the chaos. Jeremy Heywood helped me find the right person to lead it: the tenacious, no-nonsense Whitehall warrior Louise Casey.

  I ended up in the run-down office of a London council, with Louise and a mum who had been through the programme, hearing about what a profound impact this intervention had. The woman had been in care as a child and trapped with an abusive partner in adulthood. Her three children, significantly neglected, living in a filthy flat, had been on the verge of being taken away until the whole family was taken in hand, with regular visits from a family intervention worker, a police officer and a psychologist. Together, they changed their fate. The pride with which this woman showed me pictures of her now spotless flat and told me of her son’s award for school attendance was profoundly moving.

  Their story was just one of 120,000 families whose lives had been turned around. It proved my point: that we should never accept that certain people are destined for chaotic, impoverished lives, or that they cannot escape them.

  This, I would argue, was real fairness. Not the Labour fairness of giving someone a few extra pounds, or a school that was slightly better than terrible, or a heroin substitute instead of the real thing. This was giving people as good a chance as anyone else, through the means to support themselves, and the hope and self-worth that comes with it.

  The result? Five hundred thousand fewer people in absolute poverty. A hundred thousand fewer children in absolute poverty. We even succeeded on Labour’s measure: 300,000 fewer people in relative poverty.

  This certainly wasn’t the end of the line for poverty. But it was the end of the road for simplistic, flawed thinking on one of the gravest issues of our time. And when I returned to office in 2015, I planned to put the issue front and centre of everything we did.

  Tackling poverty in innovative ways was one aspect of the Big Society. Another was promoting volunteering, which was embodied by our National Citizen Service.

  The other aspect was opening up the delivery of public services. This could be – and was – lazily characterised as ‘privatisation’. The reality was different. It was bringing all the expertise, ambition, competitive spirit, desire to do good, and yes, the imperative to succeed and make a profit, to bear on our biggest causes.

  So we had social entrepreneurs – people who invest in charities – being backed by government. Social Impact Bonds, which pay investors according to results, having the potential to transform areas like children’s services and rehabilitation. Big Society Capital, the world’s first-ever social investment bank, funding scores of causes from dormant bank accounts. Communities taking over local assets through the Right to Bid. Public servants ‘spinning out’ services like leisure centres as ‘mutuals’, a type of cooperative. And, as I’ll describe in the next chapter, public servants being put at the helm of their own services.

  In many cases, our ideas on how to deliver reform and savings went hand in hand.

  Much of the waste reduction and devolution was to take place in an eleven-storey glass office block in Victoria, London. This building itself, the home of Eric Pickles’s new department – Communities and Local Government – was a monument to Labour’s bloated, bureaucratic, big-state reign. Day after day, with the help of his scrupulous spad Sheridan Westlake, Eric unearthed absurd ways that Labour had found to waste taxpayers’ money: £٧٠,٠٠٠ ‘peace pods’; £٤,٠٠٠ designer sofas; even an in-house pub, a leftover from when it was John Prescott’s headquarters.

  They also uncovered what was being done to create new layers of bureaucracy through a regional-level government, tying councils up in red tape and directing them from on high. So Eric’s department led our mission to decentralise power and implement ‘localism’: devolution not to regional bureaucracies, but to local government and, where possible, to communities and people themselves.

  By 2016, councils’ revenues had fallen by 26 per cent (as well as central cuts, we’d given them all the chance to freeze council tax – many had taken it up and kept bills low for five successive years). But at the same time, satisfaction with these local authorities was maintained, demonstrating once again that spending does not equal success.

  In the Cabinet Office Francis Maude played a key role in reducing the costs of central government. He sold off buildings we didn’t need or couldn’t afford to maintain. By the time I left office we had taken £3 billion out of central government costs, abolished or merged 290 quangos and reduced the civil service to its smallest size since the Second World War.

  Behind these actions was a whole new way of running central government – introducing private-sector disciplines, digital technology and a smattering of behavioural science. Indeed, the digital agenda was where the principles of progressive conservatism – competition, transparency, market economics and devolution – would find fulfilment.

  The words ‘government IT’ and ‘passion’ aren’t often put together, but they were a combination I promoted with great fervour. I believed from the beginning that a digital revolution could save money, improve services, generate business opportunities, jobs and tax revenue, and even increase Britain’s standing in the world.

  It was no small task. Labour’s thirteen years in power had coincided with the rise of the internet, yet their approach to this increasingly digital age was pretty analogue. Government websites offered a bewildering array of duplication, contradiction and frustration. In the second decade of the twenty-first century our public sector was still using pagers, fax machines and paper records.

  Our aim was to make government ‘digital by default’. Before long, 1,700 government-related websites were merged into one: gov.uk. Gov.uk made it easier to do everything from paying car tax to applying for lasting power of attorney. Technology came at the right time for this moment of economic belt-tightening: digital transactions cost around 20 pence each compared to £3 for a phone call or £7 for a letter.

  Perhaps the most progressive element to this agenda was borrowed from behavioural science – a theory called ‘nudge’: the idea that you can change people’s behaviour not through rules and regulations but by encouraging and incentivising them to make better choices.

  I was convinced of its merits after reading Richard Thaler’s book on the subject in 2009. We set up a Behavioural Insights Team – or Nudge Unit, as it became known – under the leadership of psychologist and civil servant David Halpern. Simply by changing the way people sign up for organ donation we could increase uptake; by redesigning the Inland Revenue’s letters we ensured more people paid their taxes.

  With the ‘open markets’ part of our mission complete, it was now time for ‘open data’. Francis published a tidal wave of information online – Ordnance Survey maps, obesity data, local crime figures, real-time transport information, and all government spending over £25,000.

  Again, this was true devolution: information is power. Not only did it help make us the most transparent government in the world – according to Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Foundation – it became a vit
al part of our pro-enterprise, pro-work agenda. Almost every new public data set spawned new online businesses, as entrepreneurs used the raw information to create apps. Those like CityMapper, for example, were created out of the real-time public transport information we made available. Challenger banks like Monzo grew out of the reforms that made it easier for people to change their current accounts by forcing banks to share data.

  By 2016 the UN ranked the UK as the most digital government in the world. Australia built its digital services based on our model. Barack Obama was keen for America to do the same, and sent a team over to learn from us in June 2015.

  In an age when new superpowers are taking centre stage, our eminence in this area is crucial. We may not build the biggest bridges or make the most cars, but we build more websites and make more digital products than most countries on earth, leading in everything from fintech to e-commerce, coding in schools, big data and, thanks to our approach, digital public services. That gives us a new sort of soft power – software power, you could say – with which we can wield enormous global influence.

  We led the way on the environment, too. That was not inevitable. With the black skies over our economy, I could quite easily have abandoned the green ambitions I’d set out at the start of my premiership. Instead, during my first visit to the Department for Energy and Climate Change I declared that this would be ‘the greenest government ever’. As I’ve said: politics doesn’t have to be either/or. I truly believed we could cut carbon emissions and cut the deficit – we didn’t have to choose between them. Indeed, we needed the Conservative means of competition, efficiency and innovation to achieve that progressive end. That is how we could make the technology cheap enough to see the sort of mass deployment that would make a difference.

  I was clear: everyone had to play their part.

  Ministers had to play our part. At one of our first meetings I told my cabinet about a campaign which aimed to reduce Whitehall emissions by 10 per cent within 12 months, something Labour had deemed impossible. That 10 per cent cut was achieved, and exceeded, within just one year.

  The finest minds in government had to play their part. Oliver Letwin unsurprisingly was at the heart of this, as was our energy minister Greg Barker.

  Innovators needed to play their part – but they needed our help. The green technologies they were creating weren’t going to be competitive from the start; subsidies were necessary to get them going. Our approach was to spread our bets to include onshore wind, offshore wind, biomass, carbon capture and storage, district heating systems and renewable heating systems. The best schemes rose to the top, and Britain became a global green-tech hub. I even launched the world’s first Green Investment Bank, which encouraged investors to put their money into renewable schemes.

  Indeed, the whole world needed to play its part, since the UK’s carbon reductions were no more than a drop in the ocean. Deciding to use our aid budget to support green climate funds, so developing countries could cut their emissions, would be controversial but essential for making large-scale reductions – and giving us leverage in international agreements later on.

  More and more solar panels began appearing on homes, offices and farms, soaking up the sun and eventually generating 4.9 per cent of Britain’s electricity. I love the statistic that when I left office, 99 per cent of all such panels in Britain had been installed during my time as prime minister. Around a million households now generate their own energy from the sun. And we were able to achieve this because the cost of solar power more than halved.

  The most remarkable transformation came from a resource more fitting to our climate: offshore wind. Critics said it would be ruinously expensive. But the cost of electricity generated by wind turbines at sea fell from around £150 per megawatt hour to £120, and is now pushing £50 – roughly the same as gas, and cheaper than nuclear. London Array, which I opened in 2013, became the largest wind farm in the world, cementing Britain’s place as the largest offshore wind market in the world. By my final year in office, wind farms, solar panels and other renewable sources were generating more electricity than coal plants for the first time ever – 25 per cent of power was being generated by renewables.

  UK carbon emissions have now hit their lowest level since 1894, and are still falling. After being the first major economy to pass a Climate Change Act (under Labour, supported by us in opposition), we met all our climate-change targets. As other countries cling to coal, Britain is decommissioning scores of coal-fired power stations, and has announced that no new ones will be built. We almost halved greenhouse-gas emissions between 1990 and 2018 – something that rapidly accelerated after 2010. In doing so, we smashed another orthodoxy by proving you can grow your economy and cut emissions.

  So how were that historic building No. 10 Downing Street, and a famously reform-resistant civil service, adjusting to a fresh progressive conservative mission?

  The answer is, remarkably well. What united us all – spad and civil servant, Conservative and Lib Dem – was not just the challenge of sorting out the mammoth deficit but attempting these never-done-befores, on public services, on poverty, on the part government played in people’s lives in the twenty-first century. And that reforming spirit was to extend to universities, schools, healthcare and policing – with very differing degrees of success.

  18

  Success and Failure

  Michael Gove was on fire. His denunciation of the people sitting around the cabinet table with us was witty, biting – and fair. The description of a politician as a ‘sophistical rhetorician, inebriated by the exuberance of his own verbosity’ was coined by Disraeli about Gladstone, but on this occasion it could equally have applied to Michael.

  Who were these rogues who needed such a dressing-down? Step forward the head teachers or governors of Britain’s leading private schools, including Eton, Harrow, Rugby and Wellington. The education secretary and I had invited them to Downing Street to discuss how the independent sector could help transform the state sector.

  I told them that they had our support, including backing for the charitable status their institutions enjoyed. But in return we wanted them to do more to take failing schools under their wing or set up great new schools.

  One – the headmaster of Rugby, I recall – seemed rather reluctant, and was explaining why. ‘I’m afraid it’s not really part of our skill set,’ he concluded.

  Michael exploded. ‘Not part of your skill set? The head of one of the country’s greatest schools, immortalised by Tom Brown’s School Days, whose pupils painted half the globe pink, whose inventions and ideas have changed the world, spouting management speak when you should be forming young minds. I am struggling to recall anything as pathetic as the excuse for an argument which you have just offered …’

  The diatribe continued. It was classic Michael: passionate, eloquent, theatrical. And it encapsulated our approach to reform: we wanted to deliver excellence in our public services, and we would do whatever it took to do so.

  Before the economic crisis of 2008, the Blair and Brown governments had increased spending on key public services – and there had been some important advances. Levels of pay had risen, and the quality of some of the infrastructure had improved. Some process targets – for example on waiting times for hospital operations and on class sizes in our schools – had addressed important and legitimate concerns.

  But there was still a sense that quality and excellence were in short supply – and that much of the investment had been wasted. Vast bureaucracies had been built up. The police were wrapped up in dozens of different targets and performance indicators. At one stage there were more people employed in the Department of Education (then the Department of Children, Schools and Families) than there were secondary-school head teachers. In the NHS the number of managers had grown five times faster than the number of nurses.

  It was clear what was required. We needed to improve public services
and make them affordable – not just because of the economic climate, but because if we could afford them we could protect them in the long term.

  The answer wasn’t privatisation, but some disciplines of the private sector were desirable. We wanted, where possible, to give people a choice; to ensure that providers of public services had to compete with each other; to open up the provision of services to new providers; to look at changing the structure of services so that new sources of revenue could be made available. Public services should be publicly funded, but not necessarily publicly delivered. That was our mantra.

  Nowhere did it apply more than in our schools.

  In opposition I had requested the shadow education job because all of those things we needed – a safe, open, opportunity-based society, and a dynamic, strong economy – relied on the schooling we give our children. Education is everything.

  In Michael Gove I found a soulmate in this. The son of an Aberdeenshire fish merchant and a lab technician, he was educated at state school, got a scholarship to a private school and then went to Oxford before working as a local newspaper reporter. He brought a unique perspective to government – and a huge amount of inspiration and fun to my life. We were great friends.

  It was over our lunches and dinners that we would shape the progressive conservative approach to education. We shared outrage at the system’s decline. One in five of all children left primary school unable to read or write properly. Grades were inflated to the point where over a quarter of pupils got As at A-level. Universities began to complain that they were having to put on remedial classes for new students.