"There often isn't the bandwidth left within political discussion to talk about the more day-to-day policy issues"

‘Northern Slant Hosts’ is our interview series with people in public life on key issues affecting Northern Ireland. In this episode, Roger Greer speaks to Ann Watt, Director of Pivotal.

A key feature in London and the rest of the UK, think tanks have strangely not featured too heavily in Northern Ireland’s political and policymaking discussions. However, with the recent introduction of Belfast-based think tank, Pivotal, we now have an independent, evidence-based research body to offer the Executive creative solutions to policy challenges.

I sat down with Pivotal’s Director, Ann Watt, as part of the Northern Slant Hosts series, and discussed the thinking behind Northern Ireland’s only think tank; the work which it has done to date; and the potential impact which some fresh thinking could have for Northern Ireland’s tricky policy challenges post-covid, and through the New Decade New Approach era.

You can watch our discussion here, or listen on Spotify if you’re on the go. I’ve also shared some highlights from the Q&A below.

Roger Greer: I began by asking about the motivation behind setting up Pivotal.

Ann Watt: There was a gap in Northern Ireland and the Trustees who set up Pivotal and who had the idea and developed it and turned it into the organisation it is now – they really saw the need for an independent policy voice in Northern Ireland. An organisation that would be focussed on evidence and research, and a real remit to get people talking about public policy issues.

Pivotal is moving into that gap, and very much looking to the model of some of the very strong think tanks that you get in London and Dublin and to a lesser extent in Edinburgh and Cardiff, and looking to how they are independent sources of advice and organisations promoting discussion. There is a sense that is definitely needed in Northern Ireland and the reception we’ve had for Pivotal so far is that we are valued here, I think, and we’ve begun to make a strong contribution.

I was thinking about why we haven’t had something like this before, and perhaps it’s a symptom of our policymaking and politics more generally – the Assembly is on the brink of collapse every five minutes. But also our parties at the top are so divided politically on a huge range of issues. The delivery of evidence-based messages – I imagine – must be a challenge. What has been your experience so far, and what impact have you had and do you hope to have?

I think you’re right. It feels to me that there is often not the bandwidth left within political discussion, to talk about the more day-to-day policy issues. Things like health, education, climate change, transport – things that matter to people in their day to day lives. It seems that so much of political discourse is used up talking about the constitutional status of Northern Ireland, or issues to do with culture or identity or the past, that there is not much left to discuss those more day-to-day issues.

Yet at the same time, we have really poor outcomes in some areas of public policy. If you look at health waiting lists, which is the biggest one in the headlines at the minute; but also inequalities in education, low levels of skills and the predominance of low pay, low skill jobs.

All those issues are really big policy problems and challenges, but they are not getting that much attention, and I suppose I would attribute that to all of the, or a lot of the focus and the energy and the bandwidth of the politicians being taken up with just maintaining the institutions and maintaining some kind of government. There doesn’t seem to be the time and the focus left then to look at the policy issues. Again, that’s where we – as a new think tank – come in, in trying to promote a greater focus on those issues, and bring some new analysis and new ideas and new solutions really for some of those quite long-term policy problems.

Yes, and you mention health care. We’ve spoken on this series before about healthcare. We’ve had five reports into the reform of healthcare, and they all say the same thing – that healthcare in its current form is unsustainable. It hasn’t been a lack of evidence. It’s been a political failure. There’s a package of public sector reforms waiting to happen, and needing to happen. How can we push those forward?

I’d agree with what you said very much. There have been a series of reports on public sector reform, especially in health and social care. I’d say that what we don’t need is more reports. What we need is political decision-making, to make change happen.

In health and social care we’ve had the Bengoa report and the others, which lay out what needs to happen. What we haven’t had is the action as a response to that.

What we need is political leadership to make those changes, which will be difficult. There will be tough choices about where and how services are delivered. But if we are going to have public services that are sustainable and affordable into the future, then there needs to be reform.

I think it’s really important to see public sector reform as being about improving public services for people so that there are better outcomes, so that people are not facing the waiting lists that they are facing now.

Public sector reform sometimes gets a bit of a bad press, and there can be a sense that it’s about making cuts or services not being available to people anymore. Actually it’s not about that. It’s about doing better with the funding that we’ve got, and putting ourselves on track for the future. At the minute we are in a situation where 50% of Northern Ireland’s DEL spending is on health and social care, and that is only going to rise as demand increases. That is not a sustainable situation. It is not going to be affordable going forward. We need to start being realistic about that, and looking to the medium and long term and getting ourselves onto a track where we having services delivered in a way that is sustainable.

Which brings me to one of your more recent reports on retaining and regaining talent in Northern Ireland. I’m one of those people who went to uni in GB, although I did come back for a short time, then left again. What did you find in that report? Who were the people leaving in that report and did you find out why they are leaving?

We really wanted to look at this issue, because anecdotally we would know that there is a large number of young people who leave NI to go to university in England, Scotland and Wales, and we also know that many of them don’t come back. Just looking at the numbers, there are 17,500 students from NI studying at universities in the UK.

So NI is losing huge numbers of talented young people. Whether they are going because they want to go, or whether they go because there isn’t a place for them at one of the universities in NI.

Another really important aspect of – not just the large numbers who go and don’t return – also we don’t get an inflow of students in the same way other parts of the UK would do.

If you look at the numbers for England or Scotland, they have inflows and outflows of students, and they get large numbers of students coming in, which we don’t get.

NI is losing large amounts of talent, and not getting other people coming in to replace that talent.

The really striking thing for me in doing this piece of work is that there isn’t a plan in place from the Executive about this, at all. Higher Education policy is constrained by the funding envelope, so the numbers of places in NI are very tightly constrained by the MaSN Cap: the maximum student number cap.

But there doesn’t seem to be a strategy in place. In NI as a whole, can we afford to lose these talented people, given our overall low levels of skills and given our shortage of people in certain skill levels, and skill sectors, as well as low productivity, innovation and levels of entrepreneurship? Surely we should be doing more to encourage young people to return?

I don’t think I’d necessarily be saying that we should keep all these young people in Northern Ireland. It’s a good thing for young people to go away and get experience somewhere else, study somewhere else; work somewhere else; get skills and experience. What are we doing to get them back again, later on, a few years down the line. I think we should be doing a lot more to actively encourage them to return.

Do you know what type of courses and jobs people are leaving for? Is it science, or is it arts and does that shift over time, and does that give us a sense of who is going and why?

We haven’t looked at that yet. What we are looking at in the next phase of research is a survey of students who have left, where we are asking students who are currently studying elsewhere, why they left. Was it for a particular course? Was it for leaving NI for some maybe personal reason? Was it an economic motivation? We’re trying to get a better understanding of why people leave, and why they do or don’t return.

We have a survey live at the minute where we are trying to reach as many students as possible. One thing you could do for me is to share the link to that survey. Anyone who is watching who is studying somewhere else, it would be great to get a response from you to hear about your motivation and your thinking.

We’re trying to understand better about why people go, because that is going to influence whatever the policy response is. So if we are trying to encourage people to return, we have to know if it is for economic reasons, is it cultural reasons, what is it?

We are doing a second bit of research, about people who have been away and stayed away for a length of time to work, to try to get an understanding about their motivations, and what might persuade them to come back to Northern Ireland. So that’s a second link that you could share for us.

I was looking at a report which you released in January on the New Decade New Approach: One Year On. You mention that it is a first for the Executive that not many people expected, which is fair to say. We’ve probably had as many policy as well as political challenges as an Executive and a Government, particularly over the past few months. How did you measure the Executive’s performance in that report, and what do you outline for priorities coming into this year and next?

That was a report which we did at the start of this year, looking at the first year of the Executive, and particularly looking at that New Decade New Approach deal, and all the commitments in it, and what had actually been delivered.

Anyone who has read New Decade New Approach, which is to be honest, probably not most people. It’s just people like me with a well-thumbed copy of New Decade New Approach.

It is jam-packed full of policy commitments. It’s got, I think, more than 80 separate commitments about changes right across public services, whether that’s reforming health and social care, or about infrastructure spending, or about the new Independent Review into Educational Underachievement, it is chock full of policy commitments. What we wanted to do is look at which of those actually happened.

But 2020 was an incredibly challenging year for many people, and for governments particularly. The Executive had a really difficult year. In some ways it was a really impressive year, if you look at how COVID-19 was addressed, in the reconfiguration of the health service particularly. Setting up things like the GP-led assessment centres for COVID-19; moving a lot of consultations to online or to phone; lots of quick change in the health and social care system which actually – linking back to our earlier conversation – is really interesting because it does show that change can happen really quickly and really effectively in health, and maybe that is a model or example which can be used to try and think about how can the health and social care system be changed for the future to get us in a more sustainable situation.

To go back to the first year of the Executive, it was really difficult. Some real political ups and downs along the way, particularly in the second half of the year; but also some positive signs of the Executive working together with the common purpose of addressing the pandemic from a public health point of view and also from an economic point of view. So there were some positive signs about good, joint working between Executive Ministers.

There was some good progress on some of those NDNA commitments as well, like getting in place an interim Mental Health Champion; some good progress on infrastructure projects; there was earlier in the year the settlement of the nurses pay dispute, which had the strikes at the tail end of 2019; and also the teachers’ pay dispute. There were some good things which happened during that year; but – as I mentioned – there were some political low points as well.

Looking ahead, the big things for the Executive going forward, will be continuing to manage COVID-19. The health and social care system has shone brightly again at the start of this year, managing the cases in January and February, and also the really impressive rollout of the vaccination programme. Again, great example there of rapid, effective change in health.

Going forward there has got to be a focus on reform, so that we have public services which are sustainable and affordable into the future. I think overall, for the Executive, there has got to be a real effort to get it working more with a common purpose overall, rather than having Ministers operating separately. There needs to be much more of a commitment to joint working and compromise needed to make a coalition work. I don’t think the Executive has cracked that at all really.

You have Ministers who are leading their own Departments, but without much collective working or collective responsibility. There needs to be a real change in how the Executive works.

You say in your very first report that “with fresh ideas and commitment to change, we can do better. We can create a thriving society and fulfil Northern Ireland’s potential.” Let’s hope that we can, and I’m looking forward to seeing how Pivotal contributes to that. I’d urge everyone to go look through the work which Pivotal has been doing over the past year or so. It’s impressive output. Really insightful, and really insightful and incredibly accessible as well. Where can we go to find it all?

You can go to our website. All our reports are on there. We’d really welcome people having a look at those, letting us know what they think about them, and getting involved in our work.

We absolutely want to do our research and look at evidence; but we definitely want to involve more people in discussing and talking about the issues that matter to them, so really welcome people’s involvement in that.

We’ll be sure to link to all those reports in our write-up, but in the meantime, Ann, thank you very much for taking the time to speak to us today. We really appreciate it.

Great. Really good to talk to you, Roger. Thank you.

This interview is available as a podcast on Spotify.

“There often isn’t the bandwidth left within political discussion to talk about the more day-to-day policy issues”

More from our ‘Northern Slant Hosts’ series:

Thank you