Tag Archives: policy development

Before anything else, I want to make clear what I mean by “good policy.” I specifically am not defining it as policy I agree with, I mean policy that is specific enough to be implementable without a significant amount of further policy development, lacks vagary and stands up to basic intellectual scrutiny. Plenty of policy which I am opposed to passes that test.

So does our party’s policy meet this standard of good policy? As a test case, let’s look at the agenda for our upcoming conference and it’s first policy motion, F5: Backing Youth Work to Build Communities. It begins by setting out quite clearly setting out both the value of youth work, both as a social good and in economic terms and the inadequacy of current provision and reaffirms that we believe that youth work is a good thing.

However, when it reaches the section Conference therefore calls on the government to: the section where specific steps for the government to take are proposed, it quickly loses it’s clarity. Calls are made for “fair, long term funding settlement” with no detail as to what that might be, a strategy for “high quality, targeted and open access youth work” and another “comprehensive Workforce and training strategy” to ensure a “sustainable pipeline of youth practitioners.” No details are available on what either strategy might entail or how it may be implemented. Worst of all is a call for a statutory duty for local authorities to provide sufficient youth services, while refusing to define what “sufficient” means. All in all, it sounds less like the policy of a party that has loads and loads of good policy if only the media would just look, and more like one which generally likes good things. In my opinion, this isn’t “good policy.”

Now you might be thinking, policy motions aren’t meant to be precise, it’s policy papers and the manifesto, where policy papers and motions passed over the last few years are gathered in an overarching plan which has to be precise and “good policy.” I’ve had many people say that to me.