Prime minister of secrets: The short, closed premiership of Theresa May

Theresa May will be remembered as a prime minister who liked to keep things hidden. What’s less often commented on is how her obssession with secrecy explains why everything went so badly wrong….

Some claimed that Theresa May would be different. As home secretary she opened up police stop and search data, extended FOI to the Police Federation, and championed anti-corruption. Unlike Andrea Leadsom, she even published her own tax returns.

Sceptics told another story. In the Home Office, May was much keener on opening up her enemies than herself. She had a tendency to information control and secrecy and liked to work with a closed circle of trusted advisors, letting nothing out. Cameron’s likening of May to a submarine in the Brexit campaign, disappearing when trouble brewed, could be applied to her whole Home Office career. She sought to hide Border Force cuts from parliament in 2016 and, more famously, deflected blame onto officials in 2011 during a career threatening crisis.

It was these habits she took with her to No.10.

See the rest of the piece here on politics.co. uk

Up, Down or No Change: What Happens When You Publish Salaries?

In a blaze of publicity, the BBC has now published the pay of its top earners (you can see the full 16 page annexe here). Given the government is also committed to opening up corporate pay across the private sector, what actually happens when you publish salaries? Does the force of terrible headlines and an outraged public help reduce out of control pay packets? Or is the result, as the BBC Director General warned, really inflationary, driving up pay?

It is, of course, quite tricky to measure this sort of effect. This study of what happened when academic pay in Canada was made public concluded that publishing had no effect on pay levels (it also said academics weren’t paid enough. I digress). However, other evidence, such as this piece on opening up German executive pay, found a so-called ‘ratchet effect’ with disclosure increasing overall salaries by creating upward pressure from colleagues who demand to be paid better. One detailed study of CEO pay from the 1930s found openness had a generally upward effect:

 …disclosure did not achieve the intended effect of broadly lowering CEO compensation. If anything, and in spite of popular outrage against compensation practices, average CEO compensation increased…The evidence suggests an upward “ratcheting” effect whereby lower paid CEOs…experienced relative gains while well paid CEOs…were not penalized (Mas 2016, 1).

It concluded that only ‘the most salient and visible wages’ were ‘restrained’-so Gary Lineker and Chris Evans could get a wage cut but everyone else could get an increase. So the evidence actually says, at the very best, publishing has no effect on driving pay downwards and could well drive it upwards. The focus on levels of pay also obscures other important issues around performance and exactly how people are paid. Perhaps the bigger story is over the BBC gender pay gap and perhaps publication could help close a pretty scandalous discrepancy (blog on its way on this).

However, this evidence only takes us so far. Pay levels in the entertainment sector may work very differently from academia (insert entertainment related joke) or ‘normal’ CEOs. The BBC is rather a unique institution and any popular judgment could be bound up in views of the BBC itself, which the public appear to love. This could account for the fact a full quarter of those asked think the pay is OK and only 53% think it’s too high. But maybe public opinion about pay is quite nuanced. Even this poll about MPs’ salaries in 2013 found 60% of Britons think Members of Parliament get paid too much but 28% felt MPs were ‘paid about the right amount’ and a full 5% ‘think Members of Parliament are paid too little’.

The difficult of measuring anything is about what to measure it against-what’s the benchmark being used? Compared with the average UK salary of £ 28,200 then the amounts are eye-watering. However, the pay of almost anyone of note in the UK is compared with the Prime Minister, whether it’s Chris Evans, 9,000 public sector workers or 24 employees at Kent and Medway council. The problem for any comparison is that the last two Prime Ministers have, bless them, taken a 5% pay cut and a self-imposed pay freeze since 2010 and so Theresa May has to scrape along with a measly £150,402  instead of the £152, 532 she could have won. For any Prime Minister there is, remember, a free central London house in a very desirable location plus weekend ‘chillin’ pad and £64,000 pension. Luckily for Theresa May, a Prime Minister is entitled to a ‘pension equal to one half of their final salary when the leave that office, regardless of…length of service’.

So, as with many eye-catching transparency reforms, it’s not clear exactly what will happen in the weeks, months and years after publication. Certainly there is a principled reason publishing such data. But the evidence suggests that there’ll be no great BBC pay cut and it could push some pay higher. Ironically, it could be worth a few days of Twitter storm each year for a nice salary boost.

 

Friday lunchtime lecture: Brexit and open government in the UK – 11 months of May

Come along to my talk

Friday 14 July 2017, 1:00pm – 2:00pm

Open Data Institute, 65 Clifton Street, London, EC2A 4JE

https://theodi.org/lunchtime-lectures/friday-lunchtime-lecture-brexit-and-open-government-in-the-uk-11-months-of-may

How has Brexit influenced the UK’s transparency regime and how, in turn, will openness will shape Brexit? There are three ways of looking at Brexit and open government: 1) possible changes to old policies and new ones being pushed, 2) the new Prime Minister either championing transparency or supporting secrecy, and 3) the openness of the Brexit process itself, which has so far struggled between the executive’s secretive prerogative powers and the legislature’s rights to know.

May’s government will be seen as one that prized secrecy but conceded openness, an object (and abject) lesson in how hard it is to keep government closed in the 21st century. The May administration 2016–2017 is likely to be remembered as a secretive one, headed by a Prime Minister that wished to govern through confidentiality and closed networks. There were some high-profile openness policies, but they were inherited and slow.

In this lecture, Ben Worthy will explain how Brexit shows how badly the approach misfired. The government’s plan of no ‘running commentary’ and secrecy was undermined by the Supreme Court, the UK Parliament and the EU Commission – who all forced greater transparency and greatly limited May’s room for manoeuvre and concealment. The three institutions – creating and using ‘institution friction’ to open up government – also exposed the government’s lack of preparation and undermined the UK’s credibility and leverage even before Brexit began.

You can read the paper here