Radical Centrism (Part Two)

Building a better Britain

Continued from Part One.

IV. Crime

Over the past 30 years, violence, burglary and car crime have fallen by almost 90%. Overall crime is falling. Even knife crime appears to be falling. (And these statistics are not generated from police reports - they are based on crime surveys, and hospital admissions).

Yet more and more Brits feel like crime is rising. I’m not surprised. Most months now I see shoplifting: in London, but also in Hampshire and in Essex. I see fare evasion on public transport almost daily. And thousands of pounds worth of my friends’ phones have been snatched in London (fortunately, never mine).

The visibility of petty crime is contributing to a general feeling of lawlessness. For the country to succeed, it has to be a high-trust society where we can, for example, put nice new trains on the tracks and trust they won’t be vandalised, or that people won’t evade their fares. We only achieve that with effective policing.

One of the ways we can make streets safer is with stop and search. The police can currently stop and search people if they have reasonable suspicion a crime has been or will be committed. However broader powers to stop and search would act as even more of a deterrent for public safety.

It is politically toxic and rightly controversial to suggest this, since stop and search historically has disproportionately targeted Black people. But so does crime: Black Brits are four times more likely to die from homicide than anyone else. We have to do something to stop people dying.

Measures like this are only possible with a force that polices with consent, and policing is done with and for the community - not to it. The Met, for example, is rotten to the core and needs gutting from the inside.

For so many public servants like teachers, I see the solution as higher standards, higher expectations and then higher pay: attracting the very best, retaining hard-workers and rooting out wrong’uns. Being a police officer should carry the prestige and standards of being a soldier in the army, not a Basildon nightclub bouncer.

Policing alone isn’t enough: problems continue after someone is arrested.

Last year, I visited Winchester Prison. Almost everyone I spoke to was on remand: awaiting a trial. Each of these guys was technically innocent, and each of them costing the British state thousands and thousands of pounds because they can’t have their day in court.

Perhaps the greatest threat to our criminal justice system is the clogged up courts. It now takes a median of 451 days to go from a charge to a conviction when a defendant pleads not guilty. And that’s a median: so half of cases will take more than 451 days: waiting literal years for justice.

Imagine the huge disincentive for victims to come forward, knowing their perpetrator will be potentially on the streets for years after they accuse them. Imagine the economic hit of innocent people that are stuck in limbo by a court system that leaves them hanging. Imagine how much evidence is lost, how many witnesses go missing or forget key details, and how many cases collapse because of that extraordinary wait.

This area needs urgent reform. One of the routes to reform is diverting minor offences and dealing with them in other ways. Evading the licence fee, carrying small amounts of marijuana, littering, communications offences. These cases should not be clogging the courts, and they shouldn’t be clogging our prisons. Justice would be better served (and reoffending reduced) by simply confiscating their drugs, or their television, or their phone.

Criminal Behaviour Orders could be one route to achieving this: enabling police to issue orders on the balance of probabilities (where a case is cut and dry), that keeps someone out of the criminal justice system while still imposing justice.

Prisons also need urgent reform.

As a country, we need to decide what prison is for. Prison can be for punishment, public protection and/or rehabilitation. But right now, they are doing none of those things. Nearly a third of prisoners will reoffend - so they’re hardly rehabilitated. And the public is hardly safe when prisons keep accidentally letting inmates out.

The simple fact is that we need a combination of more prisons, and fewer people in prison. Part of the solution to that is more creative approaches to punishment. If people have committed crimes over the internet, we should block their use of the internet. We should lean more on house arrest and curfews now that we have the technology. And, of course, if we clear the courts backlog, we’ll make space in prisons by getting out people that are stuck on remand.

And we need to get real. I remember speaking to the guys in Winchester Prison and it was crystal clear, within seconds, who was a manic danger to society and who was a normal guy that’d let himself down but was capable of reform.

Top-down regulation is good at many things, but it creates this system where common sense almost never prevails. We should give probation officers and prison officers more power to let their own common sense prevail. Harry, age 20, might become a contributing member of society if he gets some GCSEs and a good job. Keeping him behind bars for stealing his mum’s car is not serving any of us, and only makes him more likely to graduate to serious crime.

When it comes to prison, let’s empower prison officers and probation officers to decide what’s best for their inmates: even if we can’t codify that. Some people in prison need education, compassion and opportunity. Others need to be under lock and key forever more. We need smart people in prisons making those case-by-case decisions, not top-down implementation.

How to make Britain safer and bring back justice:

• Root out the rot in policing

• Expand stop and search

• Unclog the courts and free up prison spaces with alternatives to jail time

V. Welfare

The invention of the welfare state is something to be proud of. A country that cares for people who are down on their luck, disadvantaged or struggling - and ensures everyone can live a safe and healthy life with dignity.

But today, the welfare state is too often having the opposite effect: it is pushing people into a life of indignity. It is locking people in their homes, keeping them out of work and depriving them of joy.

The theory of the welfare state is that the majority of us should pay a little to support the most vulnerable: those who are sick, or unemployed or disabled.

But that has collapsed. Now, more than half of Britons extract more from the system than they pay in.

A huge proportion of this is driven by the enormous surge in disability payments. 10% of Brits claim disability benefits. 44% of those claims are for mental health payments.

I want us to live in a compassionate and caring society, and I care more about mental health than most. But all of the evidence suggests we’re failing on all fronts: we’re nurturing a culture of dependence and disincentivising work and wellness.

Part of this is driven by a culture of over-diagnosis. Claims for anxiety, for example, have quadrupled in the last five years. It is completely normal to feel a moderate amount of anxiety and stress, in fact it’s healthy. But a decade plus of mental health campaigns has convinced people that any sensation of anxiety is a symptom of generalised anxiety disorder. This leads people to avoid their stressors, lock themselves in their homes and actually develop real mental illnesses.

If someone is ill - especially mentally ill - the very worst thing they can do is isolate themselves from society. The very best way to get out of the house, find a sense of purpose and build belonging is through meaningful work.

Too often our benefits system is telling people to sit at home and suffer and discouraging them from even trying work: and that’s worsening their mental and physical health.

Work creates dignity, purpose and independence. This rapid expansion of state support is depriving people of all of those things and too often making them sicker, not better.

So, what do we do?

I believe in a radical solution: a jobs guarantee.

Today, unemployment underpins the entire economic system. The government and the Bank of England have to deliberately ensure a proportion of the population is out of work, to put downward pressure on wages and inflation.

But that’s unfair: you are quite literally putting people in horrible circumstances for the sake of economic policy. A jobs guarantee is an alternative. Under a jobs guarantee, the state does not pay unemployment benefits (or, it pays some minimal version of them). Instead, it will offer everyone a suitable job that benefits the community: retaining their dignity and access to income while extracting benefit for the state.

A jobs guarantee could be extended to support people who currently claim disability benefits. A lot of people claiming disability benefits could work, and many want to work, but the current system locks them out. Private enterprises are too often not making the necessary adjustments for them. The state could quite literally invent jobs that work around them, helping craft roles that adapt to their abilities.

The Labour Government recently introduced a watered down version of a jobs guarantee: exclusively for young people, and that kicks in after 18 months of unemployment. This is a good pilot. I would like to see the scheme expanded to the entire population, and permanently.

In terms of cost, it wouldn’t cost much more than the current welfare system: we are already paying out billions to people. This would be a pivot to pay those billions as salaries, rather than as benefits. It’d uplift the community, help people gain the real experience and skills they need to grow their career and ensure everyone retains the dignity and independence that a good job gives.

It’d also support overall wage growth: creating a new wage floor that’s an alternative to the minimum wage: forcing businesses to create better conditions and higher wages to attract and retain staff.

In the long-term, the solution to the welfare state will almost certainly be Universal Basic Income funded by the wealth gains of AI and technology.

Every year, £175bn of social security spending goes to pensioners: that’s half of the welfare bill. That’s despite the fact this age group has a net worth almost 5 times that of 25-34 year olds. We are quite literally taking money from the least well-off age group and funnelling it towards the most well-off age group.

More than 3 million pensioners live in households with a net-worth of over £1 million. Yet those pensioners (including Alan Sugar, Andrew Marr, Judi Dench, Rod Stewart) get thousands of pounds worth of freebies: travel, TV, prescriptions, eye tests.

And of course there are many poor pensioners, but the rate of pensioner poverty is decreasing rapidly. In fact, today a child is twice as likely to be living in poverty than a pensioner is.

There is something we can do to break the intergenerational unfairness: we can scrap the triple lock. The triple lock is an expensive, unsustainable and unfair policy: and its costs have soared beyond what was ever expected.

The state pension already costs more than education, policing and defence combined. And over the next five decades, the triple lock will add another £80 billion to its cost.

It’s abundantly clear that young people today will not benefit from the triple lock. It’s quite possible they will see an extremely watered down state pension altogether. Maintaining the triple lock, knowing this unfairness is coming down the track, is almost unforgivable.

How to create routes to dignity, not dependence:

• End the age of diagnosis

• A jobs guarantee as the underpin of the welfare state

• Unlock the triple lock

VI. Health

Demand on the NHS is driven by three things: chronic pain, mental illness, and diabetes. One in four people are living with chronic pain; 8 million people are now taking antidepressants; 4.4 million people have diabetes. All of those numbers are rising.

And all of those are conditions which the NHS is poorly equipped to handle. You can’t put someone with poor mental health in a surgery bed and treat them. You can’t give someone with chronic pain a two-week run of medicine and send them on their way. You need to drive lifestyle changes, which takes lots of time and lots of contact. And all of these ailments would be better off if they were prevented in the first place, and prevention is something the NHS dedicates almost no time to.

From a patient perspective, it has always felt bizarre to me that there are essentially only two routes to getting care: via your GP, or via A&E. The government is trying to fix that, by giving pharmacists more powers for example, but it is all happening too slowly and too piecemeal. If I have a problem with my teeth, I book an appointment directly with a dentist. Why doesn’t the whole system work like that?

Instead, GPs act as gateways to specialists, and A&Es are the fallback when GPs are too slow. But if GPs were actually freed up to be holistic healthcare professionals we could finally start chipping away at the chronic illness crisis: the solution is healthcare professionals that look at the whole person, not one symptom at a time. That’s what GPs are supposed to do, but they have no time and they have too many patients.

In July, almost half a million referrals were made to mental health specialists. If the average GP appointment is 10 minutes long, that means GPs spent 75,000 hours seeing patients they then referred to a mental health specialist. Why don’t we trust these patients to refer themselves, instead of GPs spending 75,000 hours a month writing referrals for them?

GPs need to see far fewer people, and that means scrapping their role as a gatekeeper to services, so they can focus on their role as the primary community caregiver.

There has been a lot written about the crisis of beds. Too many beds are taken up by people who are fit enough to discharge from hospital, but still unwell enough to require care. They need to move into social care, but the broken system is leaving too many with nowhere to go.

That is an enormous problem that no government has been able to fix. But the government, too often, is also neglecting an important part of the solution: more beds. Hospital bosses have long assumed that demand will just rise to fill capacity: so adding more beds will not solve problems. But we have fewer hospital beds per capita than just about any other developed country. At any given moment, almost all of them are occupied. And there’s a sort of bed-inflation going on. As the population ages, 10 beds 2 decades ago are worth much less today.

A lack of beds is how you end up with the A&E horror stories of children being treated in corridors, on elderly patients hooked up to drips on waiting room chairs. In the medium and long-term, we have to sort out the routes in and out of care. But in the short-term, we should expand the capacity of emergency care with more beds.

There’s another short-term fix: digitisation. We are making good in-roads but not fast enough. The NHS is relying too much on outside developers and not enough on its in-house technologists.

What this creates is a crazy system where patients need multiple apps to do simple things. In order to get a blood test a couple of years ago, I had to use the NHS app to book a GP appointment, then an app called GP At Hand (which was then renamed eMed) to book the blood test, then an app called Patient Knows Best to get the results, and then back to the NHS app to book the follow-up appointment. I’m tech-savvy: how is someone who is not supposed to navigate this absurdity.

The NHS should invest whatever it takes in building a really great NHS app that does everything, rather than giving lots of money to tech companies to build little parts of the system.

This is just one part of the digitisation that needs to happen. Three quarters of NHS trusts still rely on handwritten and paper notes. Half of trusts are using scanners that are more than 10 years old (way past their recommended lifespan).

This is a problem across the government. Dominic Cummings recently revealed that, when writing the lockdown announcement speech, he had to take out his personal laptop - because the government laptops did not have any word processing software that allowed for collaborative editing.

In government, this clunkiness slows things down. In the NHS, it costs people their lives.

There’s low-hanging fruit here: two years ago, thousands of NHS computers were still running Windows XP.

But there’s also a big prize: the NHS should have access to world-class tech that is built in-house. As in much of government, a start-up mentality would help this enormously. Instead of procuring a system, why not acquire the company and all the talent within it?

How to get the NHS working again, and capture the gains of the quick wins:

• Reform GPs

• More beds

• Digitise faster with a start-up mentality

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Next week: Immigration, Rights and International Affairs